Albany History

Transportation in Albany around 1900

We take our modern transportation system for granted, but it didn’t exist in the 1880s, and that had huge implications for everyday life. In 1900, Henry Ford hadn’t formed the Ford Motor Company, and the Wright Brothers hadn’t flown an airplane. This meant long-distance transportation relied entirely on railroads, rivers and canals. Local transportation relied on horses and wagons. This explains why Albany hugged the all-important Willamette River and had become important as a major railroad hub. Albany’s industry was almost entirely lumber and agriculture-related activities. Warehouses and small factories lined the river, homes were immediately south. N. H. Allen's lumber mill was at the end of Montgomery Street right on the Willamette River, so logs could be floated to the mill and finished lumber could be carried away by rail.

Retail stores in Albany around 1880

The transportation system determined how retail goods were sold. Big box stores made no sense before cars. Instead, every home in Albany was only a few blocks from a Mom-and-Pop store which was often just a living room/front parlor area filled with groceries for sale. Even more convenient, the local milkman used a horse-drawn wagon to deliver milk and other groceries. Frequent deliveries were essential because electric refrigerators for home use weren’t invented until 1913.

Sadly the corner grocery stores are all gone, so we can’t browse their shelves to learn about life around 1890. But we can browse through mail-order catalogs from that time. The Amazon.com firm of that era was Sears Roebuck & Co. Their catalogues let people in far-away places like Albany, Oregon order merchandise directly from the Sears headquarters in Chicago.

I ordered a paperback reprint of the 1897 Sears catalog, and it will be bundled with the N. H. Allen Home's sale. It’s 736 pages provide an in-depth view of the products used when the N. H. Allen family lived in their new home.

Utilities in Albany around 1890

Electricity

According to Wikipedia,

On December 17, 1880, Thomas Edison founded the Edison Illuminating Company, and during the 1880s, he patented a system for electricity distribution. The company established the first investor-owned electric utility in 1882 on Pearl Street Station, New York City.

So when the N. H. Allen house was built in 1880, there wasn't a single electric public utility company anywhere in the world. This makes it all the more remarkable to find out how soon the house was wired for electricity.

N. H. Allen owned a lumber and a planing mill on the Willamette River. So sometime in the mid1880s, he strung a wire from the dynamos in his mills to his home.

Water was delivered to Albany homes from a 12-mile canal dug by 150 Chinese laborers in the 1870s. The canal was expected to serve as a transportation route to move goods from the eastern part of the valley to the "Port of Albany" on the Willamette River, but barge traffic stopped when users found the current was too swift for travel upstream. However, the canal continued to supply Albany with fresh water, and by 1889, N. H. Allen used it to produce electricity for his Allen and Goeff Electric Light Station.

Telephones

Alexander Graham Bell was a Scottish-born scientist and inventor best known for inventing the first working telephone in 1876 and founding the Bell Telephone Company in 1877. But telephones were exceedingly rare in residential homes before the 1920s: their use was limited to businesses in larger cities. A major limitation came from their expense: prior to the introduction of automatic switchboards in the mid-twentieth century, each phone call had to be placed by patching cords into a physical switchboard, as shown in Figure 10. No customer could place their own phone call until the introduction of the first rotary-dial phone, the Western Electric model 50AL in 1919.

Radio

The first commercial radio broadcast was in 1920, so in the late 1800s, news travelled by telegraph, newspapers and magazines.

Earthquakes

Sorting real risks from perceived ones isn’t easy. The average person has inaccurate ideas about risk management based on gut feelings, scare stories, personal phobias, and other similar mental bloopers.

Some dangers in popular culture just aren’t worth worrying about: you are 75 times more likely to be killed by lightning than by a shark attack, and both smoking and heart disease kill roughly a million times more often than shark attacks. Yet few movies have been made about death from smoking or heart disease, while shark attacks are a common cinematic theme. In a similar way, news articles have extensively talked about lead testing of the water in Portland public schools, so that issue is on many people’s mind. But because the N. H. Allen house has copper and PEX piping and gets its water from the Santiam-Albany canal, I don’t need an expensive test to know its water supply won’t have significant amounts of lead.

On the flip side, some serious and preventable risks get inadequate attention. Oregon’s Willamette Valley sits on the “Ring of Fire” -- a zone around Pacific Ocean’s rim characterized by high earthquake risk. In relation to the true risk, people don’t talk or think about this much because earthquakes are infrequent events--especially in Oregon because its tectonic plates are locked together. Oregon hasn’t had a major earthquake since 9 p.m. on January 26, 1700 when 600 miles of the Cascadia fault line ripped open and slid an average 66-feet displacement (see the Wikipedia “1700 Cascadia Earthquake” article). Indians in Oregon didn't keep written records of this horrific event (though it did affect their oral histories). We only know its exact time because people in faraway Japan recorded the huge tsunami created by this quake. The approximate time of the quake was determined by dendrochronology; that is, careful analysis of growth rings in trees killed by the quake’s huge tsunami. This quake’s violent ground shaking effects would have continued for many minutes.

Scientists have only recently learned how dangerous Oregon’s lack of earthquakes really is: because Oregon doesn’t have small earthquakes that release the ever-growing tectonic tension, when the plates do finally slip, they release an almost unbelievably massive amount of energy that has been stored for centuries. Primarily from the damage visible in silt layers of Oregon’s coastal estuaries, we know Oregon has a really, really big earthquake with a frequency that varies between 300 and 900 years. Since the last major one took place 320 years ago, the next monster quake could hit any day, and unlike volcano-based quakes, a subduction-zone quake comes entirely without warning.

How does this affect the N. H. Allen house? Well, the home originally didn't have a basement. But when nearby houses where constructed, they had above-ground basements, and that made them seem taller and more imposing which bothered Mary Allen, the first owner. So she asked to have her home jacked up to construct a basement. You can see signs of this modification if you look carefully at the way floor joists are built around the basement stairway.

Next, a double layer of bricks was installed around the home's perimeter, and wood columns were used to hold up the home's center. The bricks are held together with the lime-based mortar available in the 1880s that is very weak -- today's mortars use Portland cement to hold bricks more stoutly.

All this means the N. H. Allen house was just a mild earthquake away from disaster. Even a mild earthquake would have caused bricks to tumble down, and then the wooden center supports would have toppled the home sideways about eight feet. Because the home is built from resilient wood framing, it wouldn't have completely collapsed, but the jolt wouldn't have been fun for an occupant, and the home would have been a complete wreck.

All this explains why I hired Paul Hightower to design an earthquake resistant foundation. I won't say it is earthquake-proof, because a crack could theoretically open up under the house and cause the entire house to fall into a huge abyss ... we don't get any guarantees in life. But I am confident the house wouldn't settle more than a fraction of an inch if all foundation bricks were removed.