The "Old Town" route

My Garmin tracks a recent run thru old town. Wagon drivers on the old ferry road (yellow) had to slalom the grid if they were going through.

I run down this street on most days. The railroad tracks still exist behind the green car on the far right.

It might be obvious by now that I love history. More exact, I like to understand my relationship to history. Someplace inside me craves to feel connected, to give my life context and know how I belong amongst the flurry that surrounds.

Now I live in a sweet little town. Surrounded by farm land, small wooded areas and orchards, Sherwood, at least for the time being, is as Mayberry as Mayberry ever hoped to be. Yes, urbanization has taken over the strip along the main highway with supermarkets, fast food joints and even a big box store, but if I run just few blocks off the main drag the sense of small town quickly returns.

The heart of the town for me is still at it's original 6 streets, semi-officially designated as "Smockville" but we locals call it simply "Old Town". I really love running through these old streets. Filled with houses fronted by white picket fences, sprinkled with cozy mom and pop type shops and looked over by a few old and not so old multi-story, multi-use brick anchors on some of the more prominent street corners, Smockville sets the pace for who we are.

I have kind of a hazy idea of how this place came to be, but it goes something like this: when white settlers, mostly french Canadians, arrived in droves to take advantage of the fertile Willamette Valley in the mid-1840's, the Atfalati indians were the poor losers. Within a single generation most of them had succumbed to disease. The farmers that they quickly replaced prospered taking advantage of the near perfect growing conditions. And the Willamette River provided a ready made water road placed perfectly down the valley's center. Steamboats cruised along it's length moving people and produce. Along the river small towns popped up, gathering points really where products could be loaded or unloaded from the ships. Slowly, wagon roads were cut through the wilderness, often following the trails left by the Native Americans.

One early settler, a little to the north, was John Taylor. His ambitious scheme was to build a road from the emerging berg of Portland to the lower end of the Tualatin Valley. The payoff would be the money he would charge not only for using the road but also the use of his ferry boat needed to cross over the Tualatin River on the way to the end at Dayton. After Taylors east-west road was operating in 1852 a secondary road was built splitting off to the south to access the riches of the larger Willamette Valley. This twisting road through the woods would greatly increase traffic on the main toll road. It's destination was the steamboat port of Butteville on the far bank of the Willamette and literally at the top of the valley in an area called French Prairie. Again, a ferry was used to cross the water to reach Butteville on the other side. Some homesteads were scattered among this splinter roads less farm worthy forests, but most people still lived near the rivers or in the open valley farm land.

One such woodland based pioneer living along the road was James Smock who first chose this forest area to set up a saw mill and provide lumber for new construction. Later he created a grist mill to feed the ever increasing locals, refining the crops from both valleys. Ever diligent in seizing upon a new opportunity, Smock's big chance really happened when he caught wind that a railroad was going to be built near his place.

This was a time of big dreams and seemingly unlimited potential for capitalists. The railroad, with the wildly ambitious name of "Oregon & Transcontinental" would parallel John Taylor's ferry road to the south and give it a run for it's money. James Smock found out where the tracks would cross the road to Butteville and started buying up the land there. Twenty years of being a mill owner were about over. Smock was about to go big time!

When the dust of the railroad workers had settled Smock obliterated a section of the road linking Butteville with John Taylor's ferry road and plotted out a 9 block town right up against the tracks. The rail bed at that point did not run directly east-west or north-south but instead sliced through the woods at almost a perfect 45 degree angle, but no matter to Smock--he just squared his new town to the tracks anyway. This was about access to that railroad, not neatness on a map. Smock was no fool. He perfectly placed the grid so that travelers passing through would enter at one corner and would have to exit at the opposing side ensuring they would see the town. It worked, and modern day drivers are faced with the same options when they enter the little checkerboard today: "Which way will I go this time to get to the other side?"

The names to those few streets he laid out in 1885 he kept pretty simple too; Railroad, Washington, 1st, 2nd and Pine; and the name of the new town itself even less of a shock: Smockville. Here where wagons from the gathering place of Butteville would meet the railroad headed back toward Portland, businesses emerged; a livery, a tavern and eventually a store owned by Smock himself built right where the wagon road crossed the tracks.

While other small towns eventually withered or died out(Butteville's sister city of Champoeg was washed away in 1861, Middleton just a few miles down the tracks from Smockville did not sustain itself commercially) Smockville continued to slowly grow and diversify. Soon after a town government was formed they decided that the name of Smockville was a little too folksy and limiting to their grand plans and so the name was changed to the more sophisticated sounding "Sherwood" simply because the area reminded someone of the famous forest in the U.K.

Like a geographical Rip Van Winkle the little town slept for the next hundred years. Most of the forest was cut and replaced with fruit trees and a cannery and brick making plant were built on the railroad tracks-- but mostly nothing happened here for a long time. While other areas of the Portland area grew up and got developed, not so in Sherwood. That is until the Geiger's moved to town!

Yep, that's about when it all went nuts. Home Depot, Regal Cinemas, Target, Albertson's, Safeway and of course a McDonald's, all built along the Highway 99W: which ironically paved over Taylor's Ferry road and put the railroad practically out of business. Funny how things run in circles. Now there is a movement to put a commuter train back on the tracks because there are too many cars on the highway!! That's awesome!!!

But James Smock's original 9 blocks, the one's we locals like to call Old Town, still sit at an odd angle along the railroad tracks, looking not too much different than the day when he saw them last. Only now a middle-aged dad with bad posture, a drippy big nose and holding a diaper plods through on his long runs. And wonders how he got to be so lucky as to live in a place called Sherwood.