Historic Hood River

Notes

A long, long time ago someone thought it would be a good idea to glue labels to many images in the museum’s collection.  They also liked to glue the images to matte board, hiding any information on the reverse.  Our modern conservation techniques start with the concept you don’t do anything you can’t reverse.  While I’m pretty sure these glues are water soluble, we don’t have the technology or expertise to attempt to remove these labels, so we’ll have to just live with these labels for now.

This is a nice view of the little town of Hood River on a snowy day in the 1890s or perhaps early 1900s.  The Mt. Hood Hotel doesn’t have it’s cupola, so it’s pre-1904.  You can see Oak Street on the far left of the image, with the backside of the false front of the old post office at the corner of 1st and Oak reasonably easy to pick out.

It’s interesting to compare this image with this 1883 Carleton Watkins view from a very similar vantage point.  The bridge has been updated, though it’s not the current one, and there’s been quite a bit of development downtown.

I’m not sure if the piers upstream from the bridge are to deflect logs or if they are part of the 1901-1903 work to straighten the railroad alignment.

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