In its early days, Beaumont-Wilshire nestled up against “wild woods,” not far from the current Beaumont Middle School. That era was recalled by early resident Elvin Tarlow in an interview taped for Philip Mulkey Hunt’s 1998 neighborhood history, “The Beaumont Profiles.”
According to Tarlow, the area featured a large gravel pit near where NE 41st Avenue meets NE Fremont Street. (Others recall a gravel pit at NE 33rd and Fremont; Tarlow may have been a little foggy on this detail.)
Tarlow, who attended Fernwood, Beaumont, Rose City Park, and Alameda schools from 1917 to 1925, recalled deep woods very near what is now Beaumont Village — along with streets lined with maple and other trees whose leaves filled the gutters “almost knee deep for a kid.”
The “Alameda bluff” was wild with woods and a gravel pit near the top of the hill. Tarlow remembered seeing “wagons drawn by horses and men … shoveling the gravel directly from the bank into the wagons.”
Neighborhood children used to race up and down the gravel banks, and — being kids — “got our clothes filthy, and of course mother raised hell because she had to wash the clothes.”
The whole bank along Wisteria Drive up the ridge “to the Alameda bluff, where the houses were,” Tarlow recalled, was wild, too, full of trilliums and wild strawberries.
A veritable “Garden of Eden,” as he put it elsewhere in his recollections.