Junius Rochester

The Grand Opera House on Cherry Street offered performances almost nightly. Henry and Mrs. B rarely missed a show, and he grew into an arts patron and a lifetime sponsor of musical groups and artists.

The Olympic Tennis Club near Seattle’s Madison and Boren streets (atop First Hill, then a fashionable neighborhood) was founded in 1890, with courts scattered around and  early club dances held in a “large riding stable.” It was later named the Seattle Tennis Club and moved to Lake Washington.

One historian, Murray Morgan, helped establish the term "Skid Road," correcting the misnomer of Skid Row. Morgan left a rich trove of historial anecdotes.

The fur trade helped build the Northwest. Less well known is the connection with Hawaii, which has surprisingly many links to our region. 

James Stevens scanned the natural wonders of the Pacific Northwest and saw every dramatic contour against the sky through the eyes of a mythical giant lumberman named Paul Bunyan.  

Historian Samuel Eliot Morison rhapsodized: “Astoria might well be called the Plymouth Rock of the West -- for the opening up of the Oregon country is a close parallel, almost a reproduction of the process by which the Thirteen Colonies were founded by England.”   

Commercial activity picked up, boosted by new electric trolleys rolling along tracks on Broadway, later removed to accommodate more maneuverable electric trolley buses and cars. Starting in 1909, Broadway became “Automobile Row.”

We embarked on what we envisioned as a lark; an exotic adventure. It turned out to be far more.

Cable cars rode up James and Madison Streets to Broadway, then headed east, as Paul Dorpat writes (2001), “through a patchwork of forests and stump fields – the latter surmounted by real estate signs promoting convenience of cleared lots placed close to the tracks. A fourth electric line ran north and south along Broadway connecting the three hills north to south, Capitol, First, and Beacon – topographically three sisters in the same ice-age ridge.”

Hood River Blackie had this tribute: “No group in American history ever roamed as far across this great land as did the hobos, so let’s salute them just once as they follow the steam locomotive into history. Let’s remember them as they truly were the last pioneers; for when they are all gone – as soon they must be – this world will not see their like again.”