Oregon Historic Landmarks: Willamette ValleyDaughters of the American Revolution. Oregon Society
History
Oregon Historic Landmarks: Willamette Valley
Daughters of the American Revolution. Oregon Society
Historic sites -- Oregon
A list of these buildings may be found in the Oregon Historical
Quarterly for June, 1934. Photographs and facsimiles of the blueprints
may be inspected at the Oregon Historical Society Library in Portland or
purchased through the National Archives in Washington, D. C.
Old College Hall
_Irene S. Story_
[Illustration: (uncaptioned)]
According to the caption on the bronze marker placed by the Multnomah
Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution on May 12, 1939,
“College Hall (is) the oldest building in continuous use for Educational
purposes west of the Rocky Mountains. Here were educated men and women
who have won recognition throughout the world in all the learned
profession.”
In this building Tualatin Academy developed into what is now Pacific
University. When the Academy was chartered in 1849, the classes met in
the log cabin erected for the Congregational Church in West Tualatin
Plains, now Forest Grove. But in 1850 the board of trustees authorized
the erection of a two-story frame building. Here are the words of one of
the students, Marcus W. Walker, concerning the “raising”:
“It was in 1850 but in the early summer and never did a brighter sun
shine through, a bluer sky or more brilliant green bedeck forest and
grove and plain than did those in which boys reveled during those days
in which the frame of the old Academy building was placed in position.
“All spring, men and teams had been hewing out and hauling timbers while
other men under the oversight of ‘Squire Tuttle,’ as he was familiarly
called, had been framing them and now they were ready to be put
together. It was yet in the days of log houses and ‘bee-raisings’ and
notices and invitations had been sent out naming the day when everything
would be ready. Men with families came from other neighborhoods in
white-covered ox wagons, camping out for the time, and the affair
greatly resembled the old-fashioned camp meeting. Tables were set in the
old log building, partly school house, partly church, which has passed
into history as the birthplace of Tualatin Academy and Pacific
University, where bountiful dinners were provided by the women for the
men at work. This department being under the energetic oversight of
‘Grandma Brown’ with her somewhat stern face and dignified bearing, but
we knew that behind them lay the kindest heart that ever befriended a
homeless orphan whose name is, if possible, more intimately associated
with the history of this institution than that of Rev. Harvey Clark, its
founder and patron.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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