Historic Hood River
Hood River Business District, Circa 1900
12-18-2013
Notes
By the early 1900’s Hood River’s downtown was starting to develop a dense business district. The electric and telephone wires were quickly multiplying. Looking up the north side of Oak Street you can see a real estate office, the People’s Store, Frank Cram’s Up-to-Date Store, and the Brosius Drug Store. You can also see a few of the oak trees that gave the street its name.
Charlott
Doesn’t the hill in the upper center look much steeper than it is today. It probably was graded down over the years. Where are all the horses and rigs?
Rawhyde
How did they keep these streets smooth like this? I would assume that rain, wagons and horses would turn the streets into quite a quagmire in winter.
l.e.
Looks like two real estate offices. One on each side of the street. Land sales must have been booming.
I hope someday we see a photo of what the road winding up onto the Heights looked like.
Arthur
Yes, l.e., this was a period of real estate boom as budding orchardists arrived looking for "fruitlands" in the valley. They were encouraged by the new packing houses and cold storage by the railroad tracks.
Buzz
If these roads had a decent gravel base, with their natural slope for drainage these roads would have been easier to maintain than flat roads in most towns. Looks like they just finished grading it. Maybe that is why there isn’t any any traffic yet and why this photo was taken.
Longshot2
The tracks in the road look like they may have been made by bicycles, wheelbarrows, or other single track conveyances. There does appear to be a bicycle in front of the one store.
Arthur
Yep, that’s a bicycle leaned up against the barber pole. I’ve counted 3 stores selling bikes in town in this era. Remember a bike requires much less upkeep than a horse!
Arthur
I see what Charlott means about the street grade. I’ve checked the hi-res view, and the street seems to fork at the oak tree, with a significant difference in grade between the two forks. I’m sure there was much regrading to reach the current levels.
Buzz
Have built and maintained 100’s of miles of gravel road. When you use pitrun or riverrun rock of different sizes, the bigger rocks work their way up to the top of the road. When you grade it, some of the bigger rocks get pushed along and make little furrows in the road and since the grader blade is running at an angle some of the bigger rocks get rolled off to the side of the road. That is what I see here.
Norma Jubitz Simpson
Wonder what a grader from that era looked like.
Buzz
Saw an old rusty one laying in a field when I was a kid. Looked like it had been there for decades. Blade was similar to what you see today, but smaller. And you had to raise and lower it and change the angle by hand. You put big rocks in the bed for weight. Hook it up to a team of horses and full bore ahead. There were probably different styles of homemade ones.
Bill P.
Again, the venerable Oak Tree still in the middle of the street.
Bill P.