Editor’s Note: This is the first of a two-part labor of love by Tim, who has a penchant for exploratory history.
Our neighborhood has distinctive historical features, and parents can engage their children in learning about some of them. Here are a few fun Beaumont-Wilshire facts, with follow-up questions for explorations by young historians!
Starting in the early 1900s in many Portland neighborhoods, concrete sidewalks and curbs began to be poured, and often metal rings for tying up horses would be embedded in the curbs. Even though gasoline-powered vehicles rapidly began to replace horses from the 1920s on, deliveries of milk, ice, wood, and other goods by horse-drawn wagon still existed well into the 1930s. Can you find any horse rings on your street or nearby streets? What year was your sidewalk poured? (You can usually find the company and date stamped into the sidewalk at corners. Sometimes new curbs have the new pour-date alongside the old one.) A few of the oldest curbs in the neighborhood have a curved metal edging along the top of them. Can you find any of those?
Beaumont Middle School was built in 1926 for $225,000, a little more than a third of what the median home value is in our neighborhood today. For most of its history it was a K-8 school. In its earliest years, the principal would ring a large handbell to summon students to class from the playground. Is your house older or newer than Beaumont Middle School? By how many years? (Here’s one way to find out what year your house was built: go to the city of Portland website www.portlandmaps.com, and type your address in the box up at the top right to get your answer! To get an estimate of the value of your home today, check Zillow, Trulia, Redfin, or other similar real estate sites.)
The “new” cafeteria/gym wing running along Fremont Street was added to Beaumont in 1989, and an artist designed the metal fence between the two buildings to include images of essential student tools, most of which are obsolete today. Can you find them? (A pencil, a compass, and a floppy disk)
Beaumont has at least two famous alumni. Suzanne Burch, who graduated in 1943, took on the stage name Jane Powell and became an A-list movie star in the 1950s. And Gordon Fullerton, who graduated in 1949, was a NASA pilot. He didn’t walk on the moon or do any space walks, but he did fly the space shuttle launch airplane. Can you find any more information about those two famous Beaumont School graduates—or photos of them? Do you have any family members or neighbors who went to Beaumont when it was a K-8 school? Interview them about what they remember!
A streetcar line used to come up the long 42nd/41st hill from Sandy Boulevard and let riders off a block-and-a-half south of the school—its last stop before heading back downhill. In its early years the fare was a nickel. Here’s a math problem: How much more expensive is a bus fare today? (To see what Tri-Met Youth and Adult fares are now, check out Tri-Met’s fare site at trimet.org/fares/).