Francis Pettygrove - Oregon

Oregon

In 1843, Pettygrove paid $50 for 320-acre (1.3 km2) of land owned by William Overton. The tract was along the Willamette River in a place known as The Clearing, 12 miles (19 km) downstream of Oregon City. Pettygrove and Asa Lovejoy, who owned adjoining land, decided to create a town on part of the site. Strongly encouraged by John Couch, a sea captain who considered The Clearing a good site for a river port, they hired Thomas A. Brown in 1845 to plat the town. Brown and his assistant, James Terwilliger, a blacksmith, laid the town out more compactly than usual on a grid of 16 square blocks, 200 feet (61 m) to a side. They allowed 80-foot (24 m) public rights-of-way for north–south streets, 60-foot (18 m) rights-of-way for east–west streets, and no alleys. The short blocks and small rights-of-way created more corner lots than usual and reduced the amount of stump removal needed to create streets. A proliferation of stumps on unbuilt lots prompted a derisive nickname for the place, Little Stump Town.

Lovejoy and Pettygrove, who could not agree on a name for the town, held a best-two-of-three coin toss won by Pettygrove, who named the town after Portland, Maine. Had Lovejoy won, he would have named it after Boston, Massachusetts. The two men cleared trees and debris from the site. Pettygrove built a small log store near the river, hired a married couple to run it, and commissioned the building of a wharf. He also acquired a granary and boat landing at Champoeg, site of the Oregon Country's first provisional government.

In late 1845, Lovejoy sold his half-interest in the townsite (and his half-interest in a cattle herd he owned jointly with Pettygrove) to Benjamin Stark, who was the agent in charge of merchandise being shipped from Benson & Company, Pettygrove's supplier in New York, to Pettygrove's warehouse in Portland. Stark, the supercargo (cargo supervisor), arrived in Portland on Captain Nathaniel Crosby's Toulon. The three men then arranged to have Stark act as Pettygrove's supercargo on the Toulon, trading lumber, wheat, salted fish, and other goods between San Francisco, Honolulu, and Portland. Adding a second ship, the Mariposa, for a short time they controlled much of the trade in and out of Oregon.

The two men engaged in projects by land as well as sea. Among these were construction of a wagon road on the east side of the Willamette between Portland and Oregon City and a wagon track along an 11.5-mile (18.5 km) route, surveyed by Brown, between Portland and the farmlands of the Tualatin Plains to the west. To increase profits from cattle, Pettygrove built a slaughterhouse along the river and sold hides to Daniel H. Lownsdale, who had opened the first tannery on the Pacific Coast on a tract just west of the town site. Fiercely competitive, Pettygrove and Stark drove others, including Couch, who had his own store in Oregon City, out of business by monopolizing trade between Portland and Hawaii, charging high rates to import goods for others and raising the price of imported salt to gain control of the salmon trade.

In 1847, after the United States and the United Kingdom had negotiated a boundary treaty dividing the Oregon Country between them, thousands of pioneers entered the Oregon Territory, the part of the Oregon Country ceded to the U.S., most of them settling in the Willamette Valley. Meanwhile, after an apparent disagreement with Pettygrove, Stark returned temporarily to New England, and Pettygrove took control of the entire town site. By 1848, Pettygrove "was one of the wealthiest residents of the territory". During that year, the California Gold Rush attracted so many men from Oregon that it caused an Oregon labor shortage. Seeing little hope of further short-term growth in Portland, Pettygrove began selling his assets. While Stark was out of town, Pettygrove sold the entire 640-acre (260 ha) townsite, including Stark's share, to Daniel H. Lownsdale for $5,000 worth of leather. This netted Pettygrove a one-hundredfold profit for his original $50 investment.