Hillsboro Civic Center

The Hillsboro Civic Center at 150 East Main Street covers 6 acres over three city blocks with 168,436 square feet. The 6-story main structure is tied with Tualaty Community Hospital for the tallest building in the city. Designed by LRS Architects in 2002 and built to centralize city government functions under one roof, it includes government offices, retail space, public plazas and residential housing. Constructed from 2003-2005 by Skanska USA, it was the second LEED Gold certified city hall in the United States after Seattle’s and the seventh LEED Gold certified building in Oregon. 92% of its construction waste was recycled. It was also the first municipal building in Oregon to meet all its energy needs with renewable sources, including 18 solar panels, and is 42% more energy efficient than comparable buildings. The Hillsboro Civic Center won Best Public Project in the state of Oregon for 2005 from Northwest Construction magazine.

Along the east edge of the plaza are a series of five interpretive signs about the history, economy and culture of Hillsboro and Washington County called Foundations of Community. The signs are titled Roots of the Community, Abundant Resources, Evolving Connections, The Fruits of Labor, and Cultivating Community. I have paraphrased these signs to produce the following condensed history of the Hillsboro area.

Prehistoric camels, elephants, and giant beaver once lived in the area now known as Washington County until about 15,000 years ago, when dams from the ice age began breaking, releasing floodwaters from Lake Missoula in Montana at a rate ten times greater than the flow of all today’s rivers combined. These waters deposited topsoil from eastern Washington, leaving the hills and prairies of the Tualatin River basin with a rich alluvial soil. Cottonwood and ash forests along the streams provided homes for elk, deer, cougars, bears, foxes, woodpeckers, raccoons, beavers, hawks and eagles. The Tualatin River valley also became home to several family groups of Kalapuyas, including the Twality. The fertile land and plentiful water provided a variety of seasonal opportunities for gathering food, including fishing for steelhead in January, gathering berries in June, summer trading for salmon, collecting hazelnuts and caterpillars in July and August, and hunting for deer and elk and fishing for chinook and chum in the fall.

The Lewis and Clark expedition revealed the potential of the American West, as immigrants began arriving in the mid-1800s. The first were employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company, who were under British rule, and French-Canadian and American trappers and mountain men, who often brought with them Native American wives and families. Later, an evangelical movement brought missionaries. The first missionary was Jason Lee, who came in 1834 with a trapping party to establish a Methodist mission in Salem. In 1838, Francis Norbert Blanchet, a Roman Catholic priest, arrived at Fort Vancouver. More members of their congregations and others soon followed. Farmers and their families from the Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi River valleys began arriving in wagon trains. These first pioneers were mainly of European descent, including English, Scots, Irish, Dutch, German, Swedish and Swiss. As more Europeans arrived, the Native American population fell due to a lack of immunity to foreign diseases. Immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and Hispanics from Mexico also began to arrive. Settlers cleared land, planted crops, and stored food for the winter. Grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts, and hops were produced and traded locally. To bring in the harvest, the settlers shared food, manpower, threshers and steam engines. They sometimes traded wheat for goods when they had no currency.

Fewer than 200 settlers lived south of the Columbia River in 1843, when a meeting at Champoeg formed the Tuality District, stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Willamette River and from the Yamhill River to the 54th parallel. Joseph Meek, a retired trapper and adventurer, encouraged the adoption of an American style of government. David Hill became one of the three provisional “governors” of the new district, and his small cabin served as a courthouse. Trails used by the Twality Indians had become the first roads, one east and west from the Willamette River towards the Coast Range and another north and south. Near the crossing of these roads, Hill and Isaiah Kelsey donated land to establish the townsite of Columbia, with a courthouse and a post office. In 1848, Joseph Meek traveled to Washington, DC, to argue for the Oregon Country to become a federal territory. After David Hill’s death in 1850, the town of Columbia was renamed Hillsborough in his honor. The spelling was later changed to Hillsboro. The Tuality District later became Washington County, with Hillsboro, as the county seat, becoming a center of government. The original plat for the city of Portland was filed in Hillsboro. Washington County was later broken up, with the current Washington, Multnomah, Columbia, and Clatsop counties being created from it.

In 1847, Henry Davis built one of the first flourmills, after hauling the grinding stones from the east coast, burying them in Eastern Oregon for the winter, then bringing them the rest of the way to Hillsboro the following spring. Oregon wheat was first sold to gold miners in California. By the 1850s, home canning equipment was available to seal cans of corn and peas. In 1851, the Portland and Valley Plank Road Company began construction of Canyon Road to link the Willamette and Columbia rivers with Hillsboro. In 1856, the Tualatin River Transportation & Navigation Company was chartered by the legislature to improve the Tualatin River and connect it to the Willamette River. The Tualatin River’s wide bends nearly formed loops that allowed boat passengers to get off to pick berries and then meet the boat as it came back around. In 1871, the first of three railroads connected Hillsboro to the rest of the Willamette Valley. By 1880, wheat from the Hillsboro area was being shipped to England and Europe.

By 1892, a water tower that doubled as the first electric power plant provided Hillsboro with both fire protection and street lighting. One of the oldest businesses in the area, the Hillsboro Argus printed its first issue on March 28, 1894, at its office across North Second Avenue from the courthouse. The community of Orenco was the company town for the Oregon Nursery Company from 1896 to 1927, shipping trees and roses worldwide. Before pasteurization, horse-drawn wagons brought milk from company farms to the Carnation condenser on South First Avenue, when the milk was condensed by heating, then sugar was added to kill bacteria. The first Oregon Electric interurban train arrived in Hillsboro on September 30, 1908. In 1920, B. E. Maling and H. W. Ray expanded the Hillsboro Canning Company to include a commercial canning and cold pack operation, the first quick-freezing of food products on the Pacific Coast. It was later sold to the Birds Eye Division of General Foods Corporation.

In 1998, Tri-Met’s MAX light rail restored interurban rail service to Hillsboro for the first time since the 1930’s, using the same right-of-way the Oregon Electric Railroad Company did in 1908. What began as an open field in 1928 is now the second busiest airport in Oregon and the site of the annual Hillsboro International Airshow. Hillsboro’s Fourth of July parade is the second largest in Oregon. Hillsboro’s biggest employers today include Intel, Fujitsu, Toshiba, and Epson.