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Portland District: Serving the Nation since 1871

For more than 140 years, the people of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Portland District have played an important role in the region. In the past, District engineers constructed coastal fortifications, cleared river channels and surveyed the frontier. Future efforts will focus on resource management and a growing role in environmental protection. Portland District has responded to the needs and concerns of the people of this region for more than six generations, and will continue to do so.

Part I: Opening the frontier

The Corps' role after the Revolutionary War was to survey and build roads, railways and bridges, to improve navigation on the nation's waterways, and to map the vast, unexplored wilderness that was this nation. But the Corps' Portland District office traces its beginnings to April 17, 1871, when Maj. Henry M. Robert stepped off the steamship Oriflamme onto Portland's bustling waterfront.

Robert was there to open the Corps' Portland Engineers Office--the forerunner of Portland District. He rented a single room in the Portland First National Bank Building as office space; installed one desk, one paper case, one map case, and four office chairs; then hired a clerk for $150 a month. The goals of the local office were loftier than the actual facility: to eliminate impediments to navigation in the region's rivers and to obtain a precise knowledge of the territory.

The region's network of waterways provided the means to export wheat and mining rushes, to import supplies, and to transport passengers. But boats had to be portaged around Cascade Rapids and Celilo Falls with mule-powered tramways. Drifting sandbars caused vessels to run aground and sometimes sink. Snags and debris in the rivers were constant dangers to shipping and coastal harbors were far from safe.

The Corps' first river and harbor work in Oregon was in response to a petition to Congress from Portland city officials' for help dredging the river bars that impeded shipping. During the next three decades, Corps engineers surveyed local rivers and rapids, and provided dredging, snagging, rock removal and bank protection. Jetty construction provided safe water at Coos Bay, Yaquina Bay, and the mouths of the Columbia, Siuslaw, Coquille and Nehalem rivers. In 1902, construction was begun on a canal at the four waterfalls between The Dalles and Celilo -- the sole remaining block to open river navigation for the 407 miles upriver from the mouth of the Columbia to the currentsite of the Priest Rapids Dam.

NEXT: Growth and large-scale resource planning