Featured Articles
The Kalapuya People
Thousands of years before the first Euro-Americans arrived, the Willamette Valley, under Kalapuya stewardship, was a carefully managed ecosystem designed and controlled by fire and harvesting practices. The valley evolved from a heavily forested regime into small dry meadows opened up by burning. Over time, these meadows grew along travel routes, ridgelines, and up sub-basins. These merged into super-meadows resulting in the large mosaic of grassland oak and forests found by the early Euro-American explorers and settlers.
Logging Memories
A third-generation logger recounts his own and his father’s recollections of life in the woods and details some of the history of this key industry in the development of Washington County.
Tabitha Moffat Brown
In 1846, 66-year-old Tabitha Moffatt Brown joined a wagon train from Missouri to Oregon. Tabitha had made up her mind: She would travel with most of her family to a land that so intrigued her son.
Hillsboro
The evolution of a town – from “Sin City” to “Silicon Forest”.
The Imbrie Family of Washington County, Oregon
The Imbries, one of the first Euro-American families in Washington County, arrived in 1845. Seven generations later, the Imbries continue to shape the culture and history of this area.
Meet Joe Meek - The Northwest’s Davy Crockett
He was bold, adventurous, humorous, a first-class trapper, pioneer, peace officer, and frontier politician. And certainly no other mountain man has left us half so rich and full a record of his brave deeds, witty sayings and winning motives.
The Old Log Jail
Washington County’s first jail, now on permanent exhibit at the Washington County Museum, symbolizes the criminal justice system of the early West.
Charles Richard McKay
Glencoe founder Charles McKay epitomized diversity before the term became popularized.
The Silicon Forest in Washington County
The development of Washington County’s Silicon Forest is unique because it was industry driven.
The Tualatin Plains
From the days of Lewis and Clark, word had filtered east about the Eden-like environment of that corner of Oregon that is now known as central Washington County.
West Tuality (Forest Grove)
On the West Tualatin Plains, a crossroads community—West Tuality (now Forest Grove) —developed around a Congregational church whose pastor was the unsuccessful missionary Harvey Clark.
