A Street-Address Map Of Silverton, Oregon

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This is a major signpost in a process that's been developing all my life, really. I don't say this just to be dramatic although I do like to write as though I'm saying things to be dramatic.

City street maps have always been my jam, and, in a life full of plans that went nowhere, I'd say #1 of those was to become a mapmaker. No matter how you get those skills, and I'm self-taught there, there isn't exactly a place that accepts applications to be a mapmaker, and I am beyond shabby in my skills at making connections and networking.

I remember one time, many years ago, applying for a job with surveyors with the City o'Portland. I knew enough of surveying and mapmaking to get an interview, but I must have seemed like the most egregious poser because an interview is as far as it got. C'est la guerre, mon frere. But, during all those years, but not so much latterly (which the Brown Eyed Girl will tell you is one of my biggest problems) I dashed off a prodigious number of make-believe city maps, played with street grids, and all that.

The results are lost to time except in my memory, and I am incredible for map memory (as the Brown Eyed Girl will also tell you).

Early in life, I was born. This was a great relief to my mother who may now point out that if we did things according to my schedule, I'd have waited until I was, at a minimum, twelve. And that occurred in the Willamette Valley backcountry metropolis of Silverton. This was a peculiar place for someone obsessed with street layouts and address grids to be; McEachern's Silverton: the Morphology of an Oregon town hints at the amazing textual variety contained within Silverton's snowflake-like street plan - nothing regular about it,  a combination of little bits and parts that don't really mesh with each other.

The street grid of Silverton can be inscrutable even to the native-born. This is a point I plan on exploring going forward. It's been a curious trip. Anyway, my exploring this has resulted in the map you see embedded here: the first map I think anyone's ever made that sets out, nearly block-by-block the street addresses you can expect to find in Silverton, Oregon.

It's about a 2.3 Mb PNG and here it is:

To make it I hacked apart a PDF copy of the Oregon Dept of Transportation map of Silverton, which I was able to load into the Inkscape application and editing all the street names into a mixed-case font I liked more than was provided, then, with the aid the public GIS at the City of Silverton's website, figured out where the blocks should go, and plopped an obliqued set of red digits there (this was a common them in the maps of California cities that the AAA's California branch produced and I've always rather liked it).

This is a product which is useful even though it's not a finished thing, there's some detail there outside of town I want to add in and I can do it on a 2nd pass.

It also got me of thinking of ways to renumber and quadrant the town so as to make the address layout a little less inscrutable. But Silverton's street address plan is, as it is, quirky and interesting without being too confusing (that's the beauty of smaller-area towns like Silverton). And this too is something I'll be exploring as a thought experiment roping in a few insights from planning documents I've traipsed across in my intellectual travels.

But for now, here, a most unique map. I enjoy this. And even though I was never able to become a professional map maker, I can at least now say I've put something out there. 

Silverton, Oregon, Within Her Borders Of 1922

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Today has been productive when it comes to serendipitously finding things I've been looking for. There are so many things on the 'web, and so many ways to find them, that sometimes it takes years to put just the right terms together. So it is thus.

On thing I've always been curious about is the annexation history of Silverton, my birthplace. Silverton's geography and street layout have always been one of the most intriguing things to me, and one of my insatiable curiosities has been 'why', or if not that, at least, 'how'. Under the aegis of the esteemable Gus Frederick, I have acquired the knowledge of Silverton history that I always should have had but nobody bothered to ever present to me. He also connected me with McEachern's Silverton: The Morphology Of An Oregon Town which answered a great deal of questions about how My Little Town grew, and if it didn't give me any clues of the town's annexation history, I did get a certain idea of what Silverton's boundary looked like at incorporation confirmed, to a degree.

I'm considering a little thought experiment that'll require a map of Silverton to play on. I know where to go at the ODOT website to get one, but I did a bit of Googling just to see what I could find. And boy, did I stumble on something pleasantly unexpected. It would seem that the Library Of Congress would have something that would enlighten, namely, 17 scans of the 1922 Sanborn Fire Insurance map of Silverton.

What I include hence is the sheet showing the entire town. This is a city map containing all the streets in town at the time, and the city limits as of 1922. They are identical to the city limits at incorporation McEachern detailed in one of his excellent diagrams. 

When I was a kid in Silverton and got familiar with the map, I did find that I enjoyed the shape that the city limits in that time enclosed: a big ol' wing sweeping back from the north side of town; a leg reaching down Silver Creek ending at Ike Mooney Road; but what really intrigued was the visual suggestion that all these additions attached to an original town that was shaped rather as a square. McEachern's diagram confirmed that but gave the footprint a small tail on the southeastern corner of that square, as does this Sanborn map.

Something that really jumped out was the geographical dominance of Silverton's two lumber mills. Before I was alive Silverton was a big timber town, and in the north part of town the yellow area marked 17 and the blue area marked 13 were all lumber mill. As Homsar might say, I'm not gonna lie to ya, that's a healthy piece of real estate.

I note also that most of the streets in Silverton have always been called what they were called when I was a kid and what they're called today. There are very notable exceptions, perforce, in no particular order:

1. What we call today East Main St going east from the center of town ("Danger Hill") was noted as Broadway.
2. Maple Street, which is a short street connecting the ends of Grand and Sherman Streets just south of North Water and just north of a meander in Silver Creek, was called N. Front St. 
3. The section of B Street east of Mill Street and West of Hill Street was then called Madison Alley, which is a whole lot cooler of a name than "B Street" but then, they didn't hire me to figure out street names for 'em
4. On the western edge of town there's a street called Lower. Today's Silverton has that as Westfield Street. 
5. In the north, in the area today called "Milltown" the north-south streets are labelled with what must be the names the original developers gave it: 1st, 2nd, 3rd. Today those streets are known, respectively as North 2nd, Elm, and Fir Streets. 
6. In the northeast part of town, between Church Street and Norway Avenue and north of Chadwick Street there's a connecting street called Plamateer Avenue. Today that's known as Bartlett Street; the short T street capping that at the east end of Bartlett, on our Sanborn map known as Wolford, is today known as Wall Street. And, north of that, a short street comes off the north end of Norway and is called Solum; today's more prosaic name is Liberty Street. One can't help but wonder about the reasons behind those changes.
7. The east side of town has also seen intriguing changes. The street known as Rook Street is, comparing modern maps, Rock Street; what was then marked as W. Park Street is now called Ames Street; the next street to the west is not marked nor does it exist on the ground however E. Park Street does (it didn't when I lived off Steelhammer Road, back in the day). 
8. And, speaking of Steelhammer Road; it's that street that is marked as simply East. Practically named, anyway.
9. There is now, as there was then, a W. Center Street, coming off West Main about halfway up West Hill. What is now S. Center Street (coming off W. Main going south from that intersection) was known then as E. Center St, presumably to differentiate it from that street coming off S. Water known then as S. Center St and today called Central Street. 
10. And, last but not least (for now), what we today call Cowing Street was known then as S. Mill St, to draw the difference between it and the Mill Street serving the two lumber mills on the north side of town. This mill street was named for an altogether different mill, the old Fisher Flouring Mill, which was along Silver Creek just north of there. 
11. Also, in the south part of town, between South Water and Silver Creek and running parallel to both there is a street that is modernly called Madison Street. In the Silverton of 1922 it was called W. Water Street.
    

Those, to me, are some fiercely interesting changes, just as interesting as the 1922 city boundary, and the seal in the upper right hand corner which duly reports that in 1922, Silverton's population was 2,251, and the prevailing wind was from the southwest.

The entire run of the 17 sheets can be found at the Library of Congress at https://www.loc.gov/maps/?all=true&fa=segmentof:g4294sm.g4294sm_g074631922/&sb=shelf-id&st=gallery

The 1994 Map Of Silverton, Oregon

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I've been on a deep dive through more than 20 years of collected paper ... maps, many of which I've collected, a great deal of which I've drawn myself, because city maps were always a passion for me.

I'm proud to call myself a Portlander, but my birthplace, along with several greats and other near-greats, was (and still is) a place called Silverton.

When I was a kid, life was not always kind. I was the bullied one, that one in every class, the one that kids let new kids know about so they have a head start on it.

That was then. I lived. One of the things I did to make me feel good was to deep dive into maps. I soon discovered I was transfixed by the patterns of streets, the way they ordered themselves amongst each other, the shapes and patterns of blocks, the shapes created by the city limits and the way the pattern of streets lived withing them. And, perhaps in what I should have seen as a presage of blunted ambitions, just as I got to the grade in Mark Twain Junior High (as it was then) and was in the middle of a class on how to draw a map of Silverton ... that's when we moved to Salem.

It's okay. It is what it is, or what it was. I wanted out into the wider world anyway; Silverton, as it was, was a small, stifling place. Had I been born there and grew up in the Sliverton that exists today, I may well have stayed. It's certainly not the same place.

But as you can take the boy out of Silverton, you cannot fully take Silverton out of the boy, and there is a corner of my mind that remains posessed of the place, the rearview seasoned to a large degree by the sepia tones of nostalgia. The parts of my childhood in Silverton that were kind? They were quite nice. We lived in a house on the edge of town a road that still has an awesome name (Steelhammer) and I had a bedroom that had a dormer window that looked east across the fields north and east of town. My mom worked her tail off; we never felt poor. On clear days, Mount Hood/Wy'east  could be easily seen, starting a visual love affair that continues unabated to the present day.

In 1994, still nurturing dreams of becoming a drafter or somehow working my way into drawing city maps for a living, I took an ODOT map of Silverton dated 1986 and created my own. Here's what it looks like:

This is Silverton very close to the way it was when I was in elementary school. Things changed very slowly in Silverton, if and when they changed at all: comparing this map to a modern map shows the city boundary flung out considerably in just about every direction, encompassing a couple of wholly new neighborhoods on the east and south edges of town; especially on the south and west to rope in the Oregon Garden (if you had told me as a kid that Silverton would eventually become a tourist destination, I'd have thought you un-sane). Silverton as I knew it scarcely had more 4,500 people; now there are more than 10,000, and it has become a hub of art and culture.

You know how you feel when your ex goes off and finishes themselves and become magnificent and your still struggling to get your stuff together? I know what that's like, only it's with my old hometown. Anyhow.

Here's a detail of the city center:

Starting from a primly-gridded downtown and city center, Silverton just grew any old way it pleased. The leg-shaped extension of the city going south was constrained by the narrowing valley that Silver Creek flowed out of. The grid tried to right itself on the east, but just kind of straggled up the hill on the west; the northwest corner of the city seemed to have its own ideas. North Water street became an east-west street. And up near a mill on the north edge of town which had become a manufactured-home plant by the time I existed, a tidy 3-by-4 block grid became its own neighborhood: Milltown (which, as it happens, was what Silverton was called before it was called Silverton).

And this is a detail of my side of town:

If you follow East Main Street to where it ends there at Steelhammer Road, and follow it south past where Reserve Street ends, there's a segment between Reserve and the bend where it becomes Evans Valley Road which is where my childhood home was, about dead center in that segment. The house I was a child in still exists, but there is what looks like an upscale cabinet maker there now. in the area south of Reserve and between the city limits then and Steelhammer/East View Lane that was an absolute blank and as I knew it then was a bramble-filled gully is now a capacious subdivision full of what I can only assume are fairly-expensive homes, all of which have been annexed into the city ...

... except for my old home. The city limits dance around it. Still just outside of town. I find this too cosmically funny to put into any effective words. Never mind the glandular subdivision that's sprung up at the south end of town, around the intersection of Hwy 214 (South Water Street) and Ike Mooney Road.

The area I lived in there was called by adults East Hill (West Hill being the opposite side of Silver Creek, where West Main Street ascended the heights) and was called by us kids Danger Hill: at the foot of it, just east of Third Street, where East Main ascended in about a 5% grade, a red diamond sign proclaimed DANGER and a rectangular sign below it explained HILL. Danger Hill. I don't know how they deal with it these days; those houses on East Main between Fifth and Rock, which are perched on that slope, must have some pretty nervy days when its icy or when the snow that seems to visit us more often comes to pay another visit.

Sic transit gloria iuventae, and all that. So it goes.

[map] A Comparison Graphic: Salem, Oregon 1956 vs Salem, Oregon 2017

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As a way of exploring GIMP and telling a story I've always wanted to (and indeed, fascinates me) I created a graphic giving one an idea of how much the capital city of Oregon, Salem, has grown territorially over the past sixty years. My sources are the city limits as defined by Google maps (close enough for my level of work) and the city limits as shown in the inset of the 1956 State official map I showed off a few entries back.

Here's what I came up with.

I am as impatient a cartographer as I am an any other mode of artist, so this was totally eyeballed. But GIMP allows me fine enough control that I was able to pretty much nail the aspects.

What I'd like to do is figure out how to realistically estimate areas of irregularly-sized objects. I can get the modern square-mileage of any town easily enough; the historical data is much more obscure. The magic beans for that, I not yet have and not know how to find.

I think a poster containing nothing but silhouettes of Oregon cities, arranged adjacent to each other and at the same scale for gut-level comparison of territorial sizes, would be devilishly interesting. I know I've always wanted to see such a thing. I'd stare at it for hours.

NB: After posting this I realized there was a considerable swath of territory that I had included in the incorporated area which was on the southwest side of the city, east of the southward bend in the river and west of the actual city boundary, at the western edge of Minto-Brown Island Park. This error has been corrected.

[maps] Salem, Oregon, Within Her 1956 Boundaries

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I'm leaving this here as a pretty and a bauble and a sort of a bookmark, and also drilling down into some more interesting detail of the 1956 Oregon Official State Map.

The back of the map has, as intimated, a number of insets giving detail of larger Oregon towns. One of the more important would be, of course, the state capital - then, as now, doughty Salem. The 1950 Census, as recounted in the city list in the index plus, one would assume, estimates for the six years thereunto, give a population for Salem as 43,140 (today's population is around 165,000, headed for 170,000, which is a change from my own childhood my mind's still having trouble encompassing). According to the state map, Salem laid out about thusly:

I could look at that hand-done lettering all day, it's so charming.

Okay, anyone familiar with the current geography of Salem will probably gasp a little at how small she was. Commercial Street, the main drag south (labelled BUSINESS 99) ends, in this panel, right at the point where modern-day Liberty Road forks off, or just south, where Vista Avenue crosses. By the time the late 60s were around, barely a decade later, the city had annexed Commercial all the way out to where it merged with what was then being called I-5 (and what was being called BY-PASS 99 in this map). The city also breached the bypass freeway on the right by the mid-60s. Another obvious difference is that what we today call Market Street NE is, on this map, outside the modest city limits, anyway, "Garden Road". Swegleing to the freeway would have to wait a few years.

I'm going to try to combine information from this and another map to tell a third story. It won't be a complicated one, but it'll be a story that I enjoy being told and telling again. Check back here for that.

[maps] Portland to Salem, from the Official Oregon State Map of 1956

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As a companion to the Portland-Salem map I posted a few days back, which see, I give you this clipping, which is from a circa 1956 Oregon official state map.

And what a visual difference there is.

... and what a difference there is, yes? This is handcrafted, a thing that went out of style in the Pacific Northwest for about half-a-century before coming back into vogue with the coming of the microbreweries. A steady, practiced, passionate hand accomplished this work. 

All the place names we know so well are there, including one that not longer is (note the "To Valsetz" director in the lower-left-hand corner of the map, a little south and west of a small place called Falls City). The footprint of the City of Salem was appropriate for the city limits during the 50s, but seemed to survive on Oregon state maps well into the 70s, after the city had annexed much territory (as noted in that entry on that map).

While the roads are largely where they were going to be, a few reroutings strike some intrigue. 99E and 99W area still US highways at the point. Longtime Salemites will no doubt be delighted by the old routes of Hwy 22 going west and east - particularly Hwy 22 to the east, a great diagonal expressway reaching out to just east of Stayton, follows a much more circuitous route. That can still be followed today, if one cares to, by going south on Lancaster Dr SE until it becomes Aumsville Hwy SE. Follow that back road to Stayton and you'll get a hint as to how our grandmothers and grandfathers got out that way.

You'll also find US 99 north from Salem in the familiar alignment of today's I-5. The Interstate highway system was just aborning at that point. The bridge over the Willamette at Wilsonville was, at most, only a fraction of a year old by this point (it opened sometime between 1956 and 1958). Also, State Hwy 217 in the Beaverton-Tigard area followed a route that still exists today as SW Hall Blvd to Tigard and SW Boones Ferry Rd from Tigard south to Wilsonville.

And, while well-served by paved roads, a great deal of the mid-Willamette Valley could only be gotten to by gravel roads. Modern times were still a few years off for some of these places (and indeed could be argued they still haven't gotten there - modern times being what they are, that might actually be an asset, these days)

[maps] Oregon State Offical Map 1971, The Mid- and North Willamette Valley

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This is a further scan from the 1971 Oregon-official state map I've uncovered. The previous map scan was of an inset-map from the back of the map, where city detail thumbnails and lovely state photographs can be found. This particular one is from the front, and is clipped from the main state map.

The ardent reader will by now have noticed the fold-marks, dark areas, and some areas slightly out of focus. All an occupational hazard when scanning maps that have spent the better part of the last twenty years folded and scanned in on a desktop scanner; please excuse the technical difficulty.

Only cities north of 30,000, give or take, are given the dignity of footprints on this map; the yellow-outlined areas are meant to give an idea of the expanse of the incorporated areas of the towns. Still, the were rather out of date at that time; the city limits detailed for Salem are more appropriate for about 1955-60, rather than 1971, which was about the time urban growth in Oregon really picked up steam.

At the time, that inaccuracy infuriated me; now, it's the most charming thing in the world, as is the kind layout, the conservative choices of colors and typefaces (especially for the larger town; the thickness and the squashed aspect ratio of that type has a subtext of cheerfulness, approachability, and friendliness.

A sort of "Oregon nice".