As you travel Wistaria Drive that winds through our neighborhood, have you ever wondered if some early city mapmaker was orthographically challenged? Isn’t the correct spelling of that climbing vine with purple flowers w-i-s-t-e-r-i-a with an “e” in the middle rather than an “a”?
Also, have you ever wondered why Wistaria suddenly changes for no apparent reason into Morris Street at its intersection with NE 37th?
Well, wonder no more. Thanks to an alert from Elise Schumock, who grew up on Wistaria and is today owner of Rose City Book Pub on NE Fremont, these mysteries have been untangled. The story is as unique as the street.
The showy vine is indeed correctly spelled wisteria, but Wistaria Drive is also correctly spelled. And the sudden switch of street name is purposeful.
These anomalies can both be accounted for by the Reverend Benjamin Wistar Morris, an important early Oregon citizen. Born in 1819, this scion of a prominent Pennsylvania family graduated from seminary and became an Episcopal priest. In his early years he served multiple parishes in Pennsylvania, helped organize a relief effort for wounded troops at Gettysburg, and earned advanced degrees in theology.
At age 49, Reverend Morris was appointed Missionary Bishop of Oregon and Washington. To get here from the East Coast in 1868 took him six months. His journey included taking a ship down the Atlantic Coast, walking across the Isthmus of Panama, then catching a ship back up the Pacific Coast and another upriver to Stumptown. For the next 37 years, he was Episcopal Bishop here. As the population of Oregon exploded during those years from some 90,000 to half a million residents, the accomplished bishop presided over the growth of nearly 20 church parishes, founded a school for girls that later morphed into Oregon Episcopal School, and built Good Samaritan Hospital in 1875 for the staggering sum of $10,000.
The bishop died at his family home in 1906 and is buried in Lone Fir Cemetery along with other prominent early citizens that have Portland streets named after them, such as Thomas Cully and James Hawthorne. But none of those noteworthy folks had two sections of a street named for them as did the influential Wistar Morris. His middle name is commemorated in its east stretch, his surname along the west end. Hence Wistaria-Morris. Two mysteries solved!
The bishop was buried in Lone Fir Cemetery’s Section 8 Lot 59 if you want to visit him.
BWNA board member Tim Gillespie was a public school teacher in the Portland area for almost four decades. A poet and essayist, he has lived with his family in Beaumont-Wilshire since 1979.