Portland History
Named by a coin toss. Built by a river. Shaped by choices — some visionary, some shameful — that still define the city today.
The Basics
A City Decided by Chance
In 1843, William Overton and Asa Lovejoy staked a land claim on the west bank of the Willamette. Two years later, Lovejoy and a new partner — Francis Pettygrove of Portland, Maine — flipped a coin to name the settlement. Pettygrove won. Portland, Oregon was incorporated on February 8, 1851.
The land had been home to the Multnomah people — a band of Upper Chinook — for centuries before European contact. Their village at Sauvie Island was one of the most populous in the region. The transition from Indigenous land to American city happened fast, and violently.
By the 1870s Portland was a legitimate port city. By the 1880s the Northern Pacific Railroad connected it to the rest of the country. From 1880 to 1910, Portland's Chinatown was the second largest in the US — only behind San Francisco. The infamous Shanghai Tunnels ran beneath the waterfront, used to move goods and, by some accounts, unwilling sailors. The Rose Festival began in 1901. The Lewis & Clark Centennial Exposition in 1905 put Portland on the national map.
The 20th century brought shipyards, wartime housing, catastrophic flood, and decades of decisions about who got to stay in which neighborhoods. That history is Portland's history — and it's still being reckoned with.
Long Reads
The People Before Portland
For 11,000 years before a coin toss named this city, the Chinookan peoples lived, traded, and thrived on this same ground. Here is their story.
Vanport: The City Portland Forgot
The 1948 flood erased Oregon's second-largest city in under ten minutes. 18,500 people homeless by sunset.
Crimps and the Shanghai Trade
In the 1880s and 1890s Portland was the shanghaing capital of the world. Men were drugged, kidnapped, and sold to ship captains. This is how it worked.