PORTLAND, Ore. - The newest addition to local mass transit, the TriMet Max Line from downtown Portland to Milwaukie, opens this September, but its construction has unearthed a direct link to the past and a treasure trove of historical artifacts.
As bulldozers worked through the years to build the rails, they found some amazing Portland history buried underground. This week, archaeologists are showing it off for the first time to the public.
The finds include a broken toothbrush made of bone and missing its bristles, pieces of colorful dishware, a coin dated from 1892, porcelain doll parts from the 1900s, and amazingly, fully intact glass bottles. In addition to being apothecary jars, some of the bottles were also thought to have contained mustard and horseradish.
These clues into Portland's past were all carefully dusted off and plucked from the construction zone of the new Max Orange Line.
"I was really surprised. The construction team was just as excited to find artifacts as we were," said Joe Rucker, in charge of environmental permits for TriMet.
It's a requirement to have an archaeologist on site for building projects using any federal money. So when something was spotted, even as small as a shirt button made of bone, or as involved as cobblestone trolley tracks, all work had to stop.
"I think the way things were done back then, they would bulldoze and then cover with a new layer of asphalt and continue to do that over and over again," Recker said.
The painstaking work added a few weeks to construction, but TriMet says it was worth it. In the 8-mile corridor from downtown Portland to Milwaukie, six areas turned into a gold mine of city history.
"This material is like a textbook," says Portland State professor and historian Chet Orloff. "It reminds us, it can inform us, educate us, about who our predecessors were, what kind of lives they lived, what their economy was, what they threw away and what they could afford to throw away."
Orloff says around 1900, Portlanders were getting rich shipping goods down the Willamette River. But poorer folks tended to live close to the river, where many of these items were found. He says together, they paint a picture of newly arrived immigrants. And that's why the newly built Tilikum Crossing translates to "Bridge of the People".
"I'd like to think it encourages people to preserve things: good buildings, landscape, nature. And that is one of the most important roles history can play," Orloff said.
TriMet is hosting a presentation of all the artifacts Wednesday, June 17 at Bridgeport Brew Pub, 1313 NW Marshall St., Portland, at 6 pm. Then, all the items will be put on display at a state historical museum in Eugene.
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