Historic Hood River

Notes

Museum artifact #74.004.001 bears the label “George Thompson Family Scrapbook” and is jam packed full of wonderful local images.  There are so many of them I want to share with you, but the first task was to figure out which “George Thompson family” we’re looking at.  Unfortunately there isn’t a single caption in the album, so it required a bit of detective work and some guess work to identify the family and family members.  This image was one of a couple providing key clues.

One page in the album included this image as well as a couple which seemed to show the old armory building on Cascade in the background.  This same building housed a roller skating rink at 9th and Cascade in the 1909 Sanborn map, the same armory we know burned in 1915 while housing manufacturing for Cutler Fruit Graders.  In 1900 it may have been the largest building in Hood River.  903 Cascade was built diagonally across from the armory building.

903 Cascade appears in Oregon’s Inventory of Historic Properties as the George Thompson house, and Sally Donovan’s research makes the key connection that this was indeed the home of George and Dora Belle Thompson.  George was one of the partners in the Paris Fair.  The family name is alternately spelled “Thompson” and “Thomson” both in the Historic Properties inventory form and in the pages of The Hood River Glacier which adds an extra degree of difficulty to researching a somewhat common name.

I believe that is George holding the dog and cat.  The same man appears a bit in the album, though by far the focus is on the younger generation.  There are very few images of the woman I believe is Dora Belle.  My suspicion is she behind the camera much of the time, or perhaps she was just camera shy.  I’ll show an image of George and Dora Belle tomorrow.

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