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