12 minute read
The Queen of Troutdale
If you have joyfully explored the many wonders of McMenamins Edgefi eld or marveled at the displays in one of Troutdale’s three museums, there is chiefl y one person to thank: Sharon Nesbit, age 82, a former news reporter, columnist, author, and passionate historian. I had the recent pleasure of joining her at the Harlow House Museum to learn more about her life and the fantastic work she has done to preserve the past for generations to come. The house was built in 1900 by Fred Harlow, the son of Troutdale founder Captain John Harlow. It features period furniture, décor, and household items, including a green crushed-velvet settee, cranberry glassware, and old medicine bottles. A visit is a beautifully curated step back in time. As Nesbit and I sat in the cozy living room, she was asked if she would like anything from Grateful
Coff ee. “No, thank you, I’ve already had my coff ee this morning. If I have too much, I start planning to take over the government,” she replied, and we both laughed. Nesbit described her own professional path. “I always knew I was going to write stuff . The fi rst time I saw a toy typewriter, I thought that is a really cool thing. I started writing when I was in fi rst or second grade. I remember we wrote little booklets, and when it was my turn to read in front of the class, my classmate Bobby Mackenturf threw himself back in his seat and said,
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‘Jeez that was good!’ “And that was all it took. I didn’t know what kind until I took my fi rst journalism class in high school, and I realized that was an ideal place to be a writer.”
Nesbit left Madras in central Oregon when she was a sophomore, landing at Sandy High School. “They didn’t have a journalism program that amounted to anything, so I basically ran it. I had a great teacher; he just didn’t know journalism.” At age 15 Nesbit started working for The Sandy
Post newspaper as a Linotype operator. The Linotype was a large typesetting machine that transferred a line of text to a sheet and rapidly printed on
many pages with matrices and hot metal. “You got a lot of hot lead burns, but the fi re department was right down the street, so you could pop over there and get your burns treated. Heck, I may be the last living Linotypist there is.” She and two young men, one of whom was deaf, worked the large, loud machines together (it was common back then for deaf people to be schooled in printing). “We worked all day and then put the sheets on a fl atbed press, and by that time, the boss would come back, but he was pretty drunk by then. Then we’d print it, sort them out for distribution, and at 3 o’clock in the morning, we walked home.” Nesbit scraped up a scholarship and just enough money to study journalism at Pacifi c University in Forest Grove, for one year. “I had an affl iction for nice cars, you see. Maybe if I didn’t have a convertible, I could have done another year.” She got a job off er at the Seaside Signal newspaper, so she moved to the coast, working for nine “ ‘No, thank you, I’ve already had months. There she met her future husmy coff ee this morning. If I have band, Bill, and once too much, I start planning to they got married the two settled in the take over the government,’ she Portland area. replied, and we both laughed.” She published a church newsletter while their children were small. Then the family moved to Troutdale in the early 1960s, a change “unheard of back then.” Their house in Troutdale, with only about 400 residents, was among the fi rst built in decades. “We were a bit of a curiosity when we arrived. The ladies from the church came to visit, like they used to do. I was getting them something to drink in the kitchen, and I heard them say, ‘Hmmm, so that’s the new carpet. It’s nothing like the folks at church said it was.’ ” She began paying attention to the city council meetings. At the time, Glen Otto was on the council, about to become mayor. Troutdale was planning its fi rst subdivision, about 30 houses, a big deal for a small town. “I noticed nothing about this in the paper, and this was something the people of Troutdale needed to know,” she said. She called the
publisher of the nearby Gresham Outlook, “and he said, ‘If you think this story is important, why don’t you write it, and I’ll pay you.’ “That’s how I started writing for the Outlook,” said Nesbit. In the early days, she was paid out of the petty cash drawer. Nesbit worked from home as a hired scribe and kept her typewriter on a roll-away desk stowed in a broom closet. “I would pull it out and put my coff ee on the stovetop, write, and when the kids went to school, I would take my fi nished work to the Outlook. My son loved to come with me to the newsroom, and people would buy him a lollipop from the candy machine. He thought it was just so cool.” For years she hand-delivered her work, then shared a newsroom desk, and then got a desk of her own. “I’m not very tidy, and my desk became a landmine for old fi les and all sorts of crap. It was like a fortress.” In her sixties Nesbit retired from the Outlook, but has edited special sections and still contributes a weekly column. ... Sometime in the early 1960s, Mayor Otto contacted her and they decided that Troutdale needed its own historical society. “We borrowed an industrial-sized coff ee pot and invited people to City Hall, and about 20-30 people came.” The group was created, City Hall serving for years as the only logical meeting space. Otto soon bought a riverfront property that went up for sale for back taxes and turned it into a park – now named for him, near Troutdale Bridge. The property was used as a church camp, and the historical society was able to rent one of the buildings and open its fi rst museum. “It was really exciting – in such a small town, you could make things happen. Sometimes you bit off more than you could chew, but you didn’t know it at the time,” Nesbit said. “The president of the historical society ended up going on to be the mayor several times over the years – Bob Sturgis, Sam Cox. It was a very close relationship with the city.” Even so, the city made a park purchase that triggered a move to the aged Harlow House. “At our fi rst meeting here... we didn’t realize there were no lights, only oil lamps, and it was too dark to see each other, which was hysterical.” Soon walls were refi nished, a new roof added; there were always many people who wanted to help the restoration, the society’s fi rst. Then the group put the house on the National Register. Over time, the group became more organized, cataloging items and keeping inventory. A tax levy later became available, “and we made sure that four small historical societies in Multnomah County were included,” said Nesbit. Funding is now more solid. “We fi nally got someone in here to keep better records than I did. That’s not my job,” she said with a giggle. Nesbit savors her historical society ties, for all the stories shared by people. “Troutdale always laughed at itself. Gresham was always snooty with their businesses, and Fairview was so pure. Wood Village didn’t exist at the time. Troutdale thought everything was hysterically funny. Even if you went barefoot up the hill to school, by God, you were from Troutdale and you could do it. Those are the sorts of stories that I started to pick up, and I started writing them down. “Troutdale could barely keep one church going. Fairview had four churches; they were very religious,” Nesbit explained. The fi rst built was the lovely Smith Memorial Presbyterian Church on 223rd Avenue. The city banned alcohol, had no taverns and, “in many ways, no places to gather and tell stories.” Troutdale had four taverns, clustered around the rowdy main drag. Many people traveling by
train would stop to let their hair down on their way to Portland. “One of the founders of the historical society told me when she was young, in the early 1900s, her father said under no circumstances was she allowed to ride her pony through downtown Troutdale. It was just not safe for kids. But you come up into the rest of the town near the church where the women and children were, and it was a respectable community. (Someone) would write about what went on at the PTA meetings and send it to the Outlook, and they would always publish it because they needed the news.” The city’s fi rst female mayor triumphed because state law had just changed, and her competitor was a tavern owner who had served alcohol to the son of an important Portland citizen. “They arrested him and threw him in the pokey. The election was coming up, and Clara Latourell won by fi ve votes. They said it was ‘a splendid majority,’ ” Nesbit said, chuckling. “Her husband also owned a saloon in town. Things were always so contradictory.” Nesbit has pored through numerous historical newspapers published by the Outlook, dating back to 1911. She soon will start a project with the University of Oregon to photocopy and catalog all of them. “The thing about these little-town newspapers is they told you everything: who was having a baby, who got a job. You couldn’t get that kind of news in the (Portland) Oregonian.” She herself kept close track of events in Gresham, Troutdale, Fairview, and Corbett over the years. “It was really quite fun. I guess you could call it social studies,” she said. She revived an old-style news column that featured news from 10 years before. It ran for 30 years, until the COVID pandemic hit. “We were probably the last newspaper to do that type of column,” said Nesbit, lamenting the struggle of news outlets in the digital age. The
Outlook has hustled to stay alive, she said. “I still like to go in and listen to the press room. It smells so good.” ... Nesbit would take a key role in saving the former Multnomah County Poor Farm – now McMenamins Edgefi eld – from the wrecking ball in the 1980s. The county decided it couldn’t aff ord to keep the old main building, built in 1910 to house the poor and disabled and plagued by costly upkeep. It planned to raze it and build an industrial complex in its place. “We were always interested in old buildings here in Troutdale” and the poor farm was one of them, said Nesbit. “I covered it for the Outlook; I interviewed a 100-year-old lady who was gasping on her pillow.” In the 1970s, “It was really exciting – in such Oregon land-use law reforms allowed more a small town, you could make historical sites to be things happen. Sometimes you saved. “I realized that bit off more than you could the county had deliberately left Edgechew, but you didn’t know it at fi eld off the list. The the time.” records of the people who lived at the poor farm are fascinating. Tearing it down and not talking about it seemed wrong to me.” Nesbit spent a whole summer nominating the site to the National Register, a mission fi nally fulfi lled in 1990. She then convinced Troutdale leaders to name it a historic site and try to market it to buyers. “A few people took a shot at it, but the McMenamin brothers (Portland entrepreneurs Mike and Brian) showed up with the crazy notion of turning it into a hotel. They got such a deal,” she said, laughing. “It was a joy to watch them renovate it. Their philosophy was, it had to be fun.” She visited, walking into what is now a tiny bar near the Loading Dock Grill that was originally the fumigation shed where new arrivals “were sprayed with obnoxious
chemicals” to rid them of lice. “They were painting it all these crazy colors, and I thought, wow, who does that? “I got to know all 12 artists working there because I gave them some stories that inspired the art. It was so cold, they had to bring their own little heaters.” In tribute, the McMenamin brothers dubbed Nesbit “The Queen of Troutdale” and created a hotel room in her name on Edgefi eld’s fi rst fl oor. She also is the featured face of their 2008 Poor Farm Pinot Gris.
As our conversation wound down, Nesbit was asked to name her favorite thing about digging up Troutdale’s past. She paused, hand on chin. “As I got closer to the families here, I learned some of their darker secrets. Every family has them. “Lou Harlow, who lived in this house, had an alcoholism problem. He was well-respected, so many people would look past it. Laura Harlow, the former mayor, was sort of a miser: She had one son and two granddaughters, but they didn’t get any help from her monetarily. Lee Evans, the last person to live here, was a stone-cold alcoholic, and we found every one of his liquor bottles out there in the fi shponds. “Dick Knarr had a bent fi nger from throwing people out of the Troutdale dances; he wasn’t opposed to hitting you with his fi sts. “When they told stories, the guys would reference who slept around, sexual side ventures, and such; the women did not. They (oldtimers) never talked about people being gay and referred to them as bachelor farmers or old maid teachers, so you had to read through the coded language. “The deeper details, I fi nd very fascinating.” It was wonderful to see the glint of joy in Nesbit’s eyes and smell the light musk of the old house, wooden fl oorboards overhead creaking ever so often as society volunteers worked upstairs. If this article leaves you wanting to know more about her, or the rich history of the area, contact the Troutdale Historical Society, stop by one of its museums, or check out her books “It Could Have Been Carpdale” and “Vintage Edgefi eld - A History of the Multnomah County Poor Farm.” A true adventure awaits you.
A mural painted inside the Edgefi eld Manor honors Nesbit.
The Advocate / Venture Mt. Hood Community College 26000 SE Stark Street Gresham, Oregon 97030
