Old City Boundary Marker

Here's an odd little object. Along the east edge of NE Portland's Columbian Cemetery, next to a tree and buried in underbrush, is a small stone that isn't a headstone. Its northern and southern faces are inscribed "CITY BOUNDARY", with a scratch mark along the east and west faces that (presumably) indicates the exact line of what was once Portland's northern city limit. I don't have even a rough date for it; I'd guess early 20th century, maybe 1910-1920 going by the typeface, and the fact that it's concrete and sort of shaped like Columbia River Highway mile markers, not the older milestones along Stark St. I don't think there is anything particularly special about this spot, so I assume there are (or were) other boundary stones like this. But I have no idea where any of them might be. The city has a handy Annexations by Decade map, which tells us that this became the city limit between 1891-1900, and stopped being the city limit some time in 1971-1980 when the city annexed up to the Columbia River. So the map's interesting, but it doesn't really give us a narrow date window. It might be a guide to where other city boundary markers are (or were), though. Vintage Portland has a 1915 annexation map with a note that the exact boundary ran "150' N. of and parallel to NL of Columbia Slough Boulevard", and further that it had been annexed in 1891 by the erstwhile City of Albina, the same year Albina and East Portland merged with the City of Portland.

When I visited, I knew precisely two things about this marker: A blog comment from Gentle Reader Aimee Wade alerting me to its existence (thanks!), and someone else's Panoramio photo showing what it looks like. That photo was crucial, and I never would have found the marker otherwise. I sort of wandered around the cemetery for a while, looking for a spot that matched the photo. The surrounding brush was taller than in the photo, partially obscuring the marker, which complicated the search a bit, but I eventually found it. For anyone who's interested in this sort of thing, it's right on the eastern edge of the cemetery. The blank wall of a giant warehouse is just inches away; I think they built it right up to the property line. I found the marker by going to the SE corner of the cemetery, near the entrance, and following the wall north, looking around the base of each tree until I found it. I'd say the marker's about 1/4 to 1/3 of the way back along the wall, on the south side of a small tree. (Alternately you could just measure out 150' from the north edge of Columbia Blvd. and look there, although I assume the street's been widened since 1915.) The marker was shorter than I'd expected, and I had to rummage around in the bushes to get these photos. As I was doing this, an elderly volunteer wandered over and we chatted a bit. He didn't seem know anything more about the marker than I did. He had some other trivia to share about sorta-famous, uh, residents of the place, but I'll save that for another post.

Maybe-Milestone @ Peninsular & Farragut

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Today's episode of the ongoing milestone quest takes us to North Portland, where the stone pictured here sits along Peninsular Avenue, near the intersection with Farragut St. This one was spotted by keen-eyed Gentle Reader av3ed, who sent me a tip about it (along with a few other interesting spots you'll probably see here sooner or later).



Like a couple of the other recent finds (the big tilted one at 23rd & Hawthorne, and the one marked '5' on SW Spring Garden Road), we have something of a mystery on our hands. As with the one on Hawthorne, I don't absolutely know for a fact that this is a milestone; it doesn't have any numbers visible on it, and neither Peninsular nor Farragut are major streets that you'd think would require a hefty marker like this. What's more, so far I haven't been able to learn anything at all about the thing. Nothing on PortlandMaps, nothing in the old Oregonian database, nothing anywhere on the net that I've been able to find.



So unless new information turns up somehow, we're left to guess at what this stone might be. One possibility is that someone hoped Peninsular would be more of a major street than it turned out to be. It's kind of a grand name for a quiet residential street, so I think this isn't a totally unreasonable guess. As for the time period, it looks newer than the Stark St. milestones, but it's still stone and not concrete like the ones along the Gorge Highway, or the Spring Garden one. The house it sits next to dates to 1894, and the design of the stone does look a bit Victorian, so I'm going to guess a few years on either side of when the house went in.

The stone has a couple of round markings on its sides, as if something was attached there at one point. If this was a milestone, that may be where its key informational bit was once located, and everything would suddenly make sense if only that item hadn't been misplaced at some point.

Another possibility that just occurred to me is that this might be an ornate stone hitching post, and not a milestone at all. I'm not aware of any examples of fancy hitching posts around town -- in downtown Portland people relied on metal rings fixed into the sidewalk -- but it's one other possible explanation I can think of. Maybe the circular parts are where the metal rings were once attached, although I don't see holes that would indicate something had once been bolted there. So I dunno. I'm going to go ahead and tag this under 'milestone' for the time being, since it does look very much like one. If it turns out I'm totally off base here and it's something completely different, I'll fix it later and we can all have a hearty laugh at my expense. Trust me, it wouldn't be the first time.

Hawthorne Milestone P2 (?!)

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I don't get a lot of reader suggestions here at this humble blog. And when I do, I don't always follow up on them in anything resembling a timely manner, if I get around to them at all. But just yesterday morning, a keen-eyed Gentle Reader pointed out a possible milestone sighting that I just had to check out:

To go back to the milepost saga, I was on a walk last night and noticed a milepost-looking stone embedded in the parking strip on SE 23rd, just south of Hawthorne behind Grand Central Bakery. Looks like the top of it might be broken off. I wonder if it's one of the missing stones, relocated? Haven't had a chance to investigate further, though

That sounded intriguing, and I had a spare hour to burn, so despite the awful weather I set out for the corner of 23rd & Hawthorne. There I found the stubby, off-kilter, moss-encrusted stone you see here.



As a sign of my very, uh, selective powers of observation, I've been to the adjacent Grand Central Baking a couple of times in the last month or so, and I'm certain I walked right past the stone here without noticing it. This was after the recent milestone project, and I think I was even chatting to someone about said project on a recent stop here. But I wasn't looking for milestones at the time, so the thing just didn't register.

Now, in my defense, everyone knows the milestones are on Stark St., some blocks north of here, and not on Hawthorne. Also, the stone here looks similar but not quite identical to the the Stark St. stones. And it's not like it has a big neon sign attached. Although sometimes I wonder whether I'd miss that as well, if I wasn't specifically looking for neon signs.



In any case, I'm not entirely sure what we're looking at here. It was pouring rain on me at the time, so I didn't go over it as meticulously as I could have looking for any signs of writing. There are marks here and there that look deliberately chiseled, but I couldn't really tell if they're supposed to say anything or not. Maybe it would help to peel some of the moss off of it, but I'm not sure you're supposed to do that if it's a protected historical object, which it may or may not be.

I see 3 basic possibilities here:

1. It's something else entirely, and merely bears a striking resemblance to a milestone. Possibly a bit of historical research would dig up what sort of structures have been here over the years. I do know that across the street, where the outdoor produce market currently stands, there was a gas station at one time. And before the real estate bubble burst, there was a monstrous 50 unit upscale condo project slated for the site. On this side of the street, I dunno. It's been a Grand Central as long as I can remember. Which, I'll have you know, is really not that long at all, historically speaking. Maybe we're seeing the base of a column of a long-lost building, or the base of an old lamppost, or the only remaining piece of Hawthorne Stonehenge, or who knows what.
   
2. As suggested above, it's a rescued milestone from elsewhere, either Stark St., Capitol Highway, St. Helens Road, or somewhere else entirely. If there was a readable inscription on the stone, that could help prove this hypothesis. But it would raise another question: Why here? It's in an obscure spot down a narrow side street, at the back of a commercial building, without any sign or marker explaining what it is. The crazy tilt of the stone seems to argue against the rescue theory. It just really looks like it's been at this spot, unmaintained, for a very long time. It also looks wider than the Stark St. stones, and seems to be more trapezoidal than square, so if it's a refugee, my guess is that it's from somewhere other than Stark.
   
3. Which leads me to an even more intriguing possibility: What if this is a survivor, perhaps the sole survivor, of a series of Hawthorne milestones parallel to those on Stark? The key argument in favor here is the location. It seems like an obscure and nondescript little place, but 23rd Avenue places it exactly due south of Stark St. Milestone P2. P2, as you might recall, is in the 2300 block of Stark, embedded in the north wall of the Lone Fir Cemetery, and it signifies being two miles from a point in downtown Portland somewhere near the Galleria MAX stop. If this is a 2-mile marker, technically it would be two miles from a different "P0" point parallel to and south of the original. My rough guesstimate would place this point somewhere in the area of Keller Fountain, more or less. I could be wrong.
   
   In any case, for now and for lack of a better name I'm going to refer to the rock here as "Hawthorne Milestone P2", since it does actually mark distance, whether that was the original intent behind it or not.
   

So, assuming we've got one milestone on Hawthorne due south of one on Stark, the obvious question is are there any others out there? I haven't gone searching in person (so far), but based on a little poking around in Google Street View I don't think there are.

• P1 would be around MLK & Hawthorne, but Hawthorne is still on the bridge viaduct at that point. So it would either be on the Hawthorne Bridge, or under it, or stuck somewhere in the freeway-style interchange with MLK.
  
  
• P2 is what you see here.
  
  
• P3 would be around 42nd & Hawthorne, but I don't see any sign of it. It's a shame. There's an antique store next door where I bought an old camera a while back. It would seem sort of fitting to put a roll of film in it and take some pics of the milestone nearby, if it existed.
  
  
• P4 would be at about 61st & Hawthorne, which is to say it would be at the bottom of Reservoir #6 at Mt. Tabor. Hawthorne has sort of petered out at this point, although it picks up on the other side of Mt. Tabor.
  
  
• P5 would be around 78th & Hawthorne, but it's not there either. Although Hawthorne continues again east of Mt. Tabor, it's just a quiet residential street at this point, and unlike Stark it only continues in fits and starts.
  
  
• P6 would be at 98th & Hawthorne, if that intersection existed, but it doesn't. Instead, the P6 point is somewhere on the campus of Portland Adventist Academy, just east of I-205.
  
  
• P7, 117th & Hawthorne: The intersection exists, with another stretch of Hawthorne ending at 117th. It's a little residential street here, again with no sign of any milestones.
  
  
• P8, 138th & Hawthorne: No Hawthorne here, where "here" is just east of David Douglas High School.
  
  
• P9, 158th & Hawthorne: There's a short one block stretch of SE Hawthorne Ct. here, but no stones in sight.
  
  
• P10, 178th & Hawthorne: No Hawthorne here. The P10 point would be in the Greater Portland Christian Academy parking lot.
  
  
• P11, 197th & Hawthorne: Again, no Hawthorne. It's an industrial area next to a huge quarry pit. The closest street is 199th, also called 11 Mile Ave.
  
  
• P12 & P13 would be in the middle of Gresham suburbia. The Portland street grid basically doesn't exist at this point, and I haven't bothered taking a straightedge to a map to figure out exactly where these two would be. If there's no Hawthorne, there are almost certainly no milestones, in any event.
  
  
• P14 would be around the SW corner of the MHCC campus, where the Stark P14 is at the NW corner.
  
  
• P15 would probably be on Stark, actually. After its own (missing) P15, Stark departs from the street grid and winds down the hill to the Stark St. Bridge over the Sandy River. In the process, it intersects where Hawthorne would be if it existed at this point. Except that Hawthorne would need to drop straight down a steep bluff to get here.
  
  

So, if there was a series of Hawthorne milestones, my guess is that they didn't extend past Mt. Tabor, and this is the only surviving one. I'd say there's an off chance there was a P5 too, but it's not there now either. It's a shame. If there was at least one more, it would nail the case for milestones on Hawthorne. As it is, I could be making all this fuss over absolutely nothing. Although it's still a very old rock, and it would be interesting to learn what it is and how it got here, regardless.

Mysterious Milestone 5

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So now we've come to the last milestone that I know of, and it's a mysterious one. Like the "other" P7 I mentioned the other day, this one's located in Southwest Portland. It's on Spring Garden Road, between two houses, just east of the intersection with 17th Ave. South side of the street, between the first and second houses east of 17th. The Stark Street Mile Markers mini-blog makes no mention of it, and I only learned of it when I ran across photos of it on Flickr. Beyond that, I know nothing definite about it. It's a stone or possibly concrete post with the number 5 on it, that much is certain. I assume the "5" represents distance (though we don't know even that for a fact), and I assume that's distance in miles to somewhere, and I assume that somewhere is probably downtown Portland -- although there's no 'P' this time to indicate that. It's not clear what route they're measuring it along, though. The "5" is sort of near both Barbur/99W and Taylor's Ferry, and Capitol Highway isn't far to the west. But I don't know that any of them ever ran along this exact route. I could be wrong. I don't have a handy source of authoritative info on that. If there was somewhere on the net that had historical maps of the area at various times, that would be ideal. But if it exists, I haven't run across it yet.

The milestone is clearly of newer vintage than the others. It most closely resembles the mileposts on the Columbia River Highway, which went in circa 1914. Although they could easily be decades older or newer. So we don't know if it's on the same route as P7, and as with P7 we don't know whether this is its original location, or whether this is the original stone. If it's a stone, and it might not be.

While looking into Mysterious Milestone 5, I wandered off on a tangent for a while and learned far too much trivia and arcana about how state highways are named and numbered. And I still don't think I know enough to explain it properly. I was curious about Capitol Highway, which today is just a secondary road that winds its way rather aimlessly through the West Hills between Barbur (in the area of George Himes Park) and roughly PCC Sylvania. It was, we're told, the route of OR-99W before it was rerouted to its current location. So far so good, except that we haven't explained the "Capitol" in the name, since 99W doesn't go to Salem. Apparently the original full-length Capitol Highway branched off just before McMinnville, and headed due south to Salem via Dayton. This is present-day OR-221.

Or, if you prefer, "Salem-Dayton Highway No. 150". It turns out that state roads in Oregon often have two separate numbers, as Wikipedia valiantly tries to explain here. The numbers you normally encounter (like OR-99W, etc.) are route numbers, a system the state introduced in 1932 that semi-replaced the earlier highway numbers from 1917. Nobody uses the old numbers anymore except ODOT, and they use them internally for reasons I can't guess at. And I think I read somewhere that the numbers on road mile markers are based on highway mileage, not route mileage, leading to weird results when the two aren't coextensive. If you drive across the state on US 20, you will, I'm told, encounter "mile 1" no fewer than five times. In any case, in addition to being OR-99W, plus any local street name it happens to have, the same road is also "Pacific Highway West No. 1W". I saw a mention that Capitol Highway was once Highway #3, although at present that number belongs to "Oswego Highway No. 3", better known as OR-43 or Macadam, among other names (and present-day Capitol Highway isn't a state highway at all anymore.) In the same vein, I-405 is also "Stadium Freeway No. 61", parts of Boones Ferry Rd. and Hall Blvd. are "Beaverton-Tualatin Highway No. 141" (, and an obscure stretch of Marine Drive and N. Portland Road are, officially, "Swift Highway No. 120". The latter two were recently (2002) designated OR-141 and OR-120 respectively, although they haven't put up route signs for either one so far....

Um, how did I get off on this tangent again? We've covered how to get to the Capitol via the historical Capitol Highway, and I previously covered how to get to erstwhile Taylor's Ferry via the original route of Taylor's Ferry Road. As for Barbur, it was only built in 1933 (construction photo here), and prior to that it was the route of the Southern Pacific Westside Line. And all of this is very interesting and so forth, but I still have no idea how Spring Garden Rd. fits in. Unless maybe it just doesn't fit in.

Southwest Milestone P7

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Ok, so we finished up the last Stark St. Milestone a few days ago, but we aren't quite done with Milestone Madness just yet. In my post about the P7 on Stark St., I mentioned there was another P7 out on Capitol Highway in SW Portland. And this, o Gentle Reader(s), is that other P7. As you can sorta-see here, it's located right at the entrance to the Capitol Hill Library, just a couple of feet from the entrance curb cut. Park at the library and look for it. It's hard to miss, once you're looking for it and you know it's there.

The milestones on Stark follow an obvious pattern, and most of them still exist. This milestone seems to be the sole survivor of at least 7 heading SW out of downtown. So it's more mysterious than the Stark stones, and raises a few questions I can't answer right now:

• 7 miles(?) from where, along what route? Presumably it's in miles, presumably it's miles from downtown Portland, and presumably it follows the route of Hwy 99W to the SW of here, to the site of the actual Taylor's Ferry, and beyond. The route between downtown and here is less certain -- somehow or other it has to add up to 7 miles, so it's not as-the-crow-flies distance, since it seems to be just short of 5 miles in a straight line. Unless the stone is newer than it looks, the distance isn't likely to be along the current Hwy 99W / Barbur Blvd. route, since that was a railroad right of way until some time in the early-mid 20th century. I suspect it's measured along the route of old Taylor's Ferry road, following Macadam south out of town until the start of present-day Taylors Ferry Rd., just south of the Zupan's grocery store. And if I'm wrong about the route, I have no idea what the real route might be.
• I don't know for a fact whether this is the original milestone, or its original site. Could be both, could be neither. I suppose I could've gone inside and asked, since if anyone's likely to know about the milestone it would be someone with the library. But their open hours and my free hours don't mesh up very well, and I had to run off for an important meeting just as they were getting ready to open for the day.
• The existence of this milestone suggests that others existed, at least between here and downtown, and possibly between here and the old site of Taylor's Ferry. If so, what became of the others? Were they all lost to road-widening projects (which is distinctly possible, especially as we go further away from downtown)? Or do they still exist somewhere, awaiting discovery by intrepid urban explorers?
• As you can see, this P7 is in better shape than most of the ones on Stark. I don't know for a fact that it's the same age as the Stark milestones. It could be the same age but abused less, or it could be slightly newer, or it could be a modern reproduction, for all I know. I suppose I could call or email the library and ask about it, since it's the 21st century and all. They may even respond to tweets, or whatever it is that one does on Facebook, for all I know.

Just south of the library is Portland's new Holly Farm Park. I thought about visiting, and drove past and took a look, but I didn't stop. It's new, but it's just a neighborhood park, and it looks far more interesting from space than it does at street level. Oh, well.

Milestone P14

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So here we have the last Stark St. milestone on our tour: Milestone P14 is way out on the far end of Gresham, on the campus of Mt. Hood Community College. It's near, but not quite at, the intersection of SE Stark and 257th Ave. / Kane Drive. The milestone is east of the intersection, on the south side of stark. There's a low tree-lined berm separating the MHCC parking lot from Stark, and the milestone sits on this berm between a couple of trees. Just a few steps east of it is a big greyish (or maybe green-greyish) utility box of some kind. It's bigger than the milestone and closer to the street, and may be easier to find.



The most convenient way to visit P14 is to park in the college lot just steps away from the thing. As far as I could tell, there's no parking permit system similar to what PCC and Portland State have, and you can park here without getting tased by a campus rent-a-cop. They usually have signs up for that sort of thing and I didn't see any. However, if you do run afoul of a zap-happy security guard, it's not my fault, and I hereby disclaim and renounce all responsibility, real or imagined, for anything that does or doesn't occur here, and you hereby accept that this is one of those inherent dangers that come from acting based on information you found on some random site on the interwebs. A random site with a peculiar and obscure name, no less, run by some random guy with a stupid anonymous nym he doesn't even like very much anymore and is seriously considering changing. Just so we're all clear on where things stand, I mean.



If worse comes to worse, you could always park at the gas station across Stark, or in one of the strip-mall parking lots across 257th. Although they're probably patrolled by predatory towing companies, come to think of it. So there's always TriMet, but the nearest #20 stops are a bit of a walk. Actually this is as far east as the #20 goes; at 257th it turns south and meanders its way down to the Gresham Transit Center. The area's also served by the #80 and #81, which I'm not very familiar with.

Basically the point of all of this handwringing is that I'm trying to conjure up a little excitement around P14, and it's not really working very well. Other than the college, the area is your basic suburban mix of fast food chains, drugstores, big box stores, a few offices here and there, and I'm sure it's perfectly nice and everything... but it leaves something to be desired in the (sub)urban exploration department. You could be anywhere, I mean, if there wasn't a milestone here to tell you exactly where you were.



The stone itself has a pronounced Pisa-like lean to it. If you've arrived here at the tail end of the hypothetical milestone pub crawl I keep going on about, it may help to be aware of this and know that it's not just you. You could probably do some trick photos like people do with the Leaning Tower of Pisa, where you pretend to hold it up, or push it over -- the difference being that your accomplice needs to stand behind the stone instead of in front of it to get the perspective trick right. Which you could easily figure out for yourselves if you were sober, which you aren't, because this is the last of 9 (or so) stops if you're just doing extant milestones, and the 14th of 15 otherwise. Which either way is a whole lot of stops. Speaking of which, there's what looks like a sports bar across from the college on 257th/Kane, or there's a Starbucks just west of here if you'd rather have some coffee at this point, which would be understandable.



The Stark Street Mile Markers blog argues that, as part of conserving and restoring the milestones, P14 should be reset in an upright position. I'd argue "not so fast" on that particular point. The milestone's so old that the lean itself may have some historic value worth preserving. I mean, it's one thing if it started leaning 15 years ago for no reason and it leans another degree or two every year. You'd want to correct that, obviously. But if, hypothetically, it leans due to an accident with an errant Stanley Steamer in 1903, the Northwest's first recorded DUI incident -- or possibly was the work of especially dimwitted Nazi saboteurs in 1942 -- you may want to leave it the way it is. Don't laugh; stranger things happen all the time in the historic preservation world. I'm not saying it should or shouldn't lean; I'm just saying the matter requires further research, and no messing with it in the meantime. There's no rush, after all. It's a rock, it's operates on geological time, and it's survived close to 130-150 years already, which is way more than we can say for whoever put it here.

Besides, I think I kind of like it this way. It's a distinguishing mark. It gives P14 a little character. It's almost jaunty, even. But then, I've been spending far too much time of late staring at old rocks. So it might be best to just ignore me. At least on this particular topic.

Milestone P13

So we've reached the penultimate stop on our tour of the Stark St. Milestones, namely Milestone P13, in the 23600 block of SE Stark. The closest cross street is Cleveland Avenue, about a block west, so we're squarely into suburban Gresham at this point. At the corner of Stark and Cleveland is the Olympic Gym fitness club, and the milestone sits in a little landscaped triangle at one corner of the gym grounds. Immediately east of the milestone, Stark is bordered on both sides by one of those grey concrete sound walls. Concrete sound walls are usually a clear sign that a road was widened from two to four or more lanes, probably no earlier than the mid-1980's. The Stark St. Mile Markers mini-blog says of P13: "This stone was rescued by the Gresham Historical Society and reset in 1987." I think the story is that it was knocked down by a thoughtless road crew during the road widening, and the local historical society had to go track it down and find it a new home near its original location.

Updated 9/10/11: Thanks (once again) to the magical Historical Oregonian database at the Multnomah County Library, we have a bit more detail on the rescue of milestone (or "mile post") P13. The May 14th, 1987 Oregonian had a piece about the milestone being restored to its rightful place: "Historic Baseline milepost saved in Gresham":

At the 13th hour of the 13th day of the month, a stone marking the 13th mile east of the Multnomah County Courthouse was dedicated on Wednesday. The ceremony took place at the original site of Milepost 13, now adjacent to the jogging track at McIntire's Athletic Club, 23500 S.E. Stark St.

...

The 133-year-old 13th milepost that was rededicated Wednesday had been lost since it was inadvertently removed by workers during a construction project.

By chance, Gresham residents Rob and Bud Bunting found the hand-hewn stone obelisk in a pile of construction debris.

After the marker was rescued by Jim Chase, former president of the Gresham Historical Society, it was nearly lost again when garbage collectors tried to break it up with sledge hammers and haul it away.

When the Multnomah County road department showed no interest in claiming the milepost, Gresham Historical Society members took it upon themselves to move the 500-pound stone to a storeroom for safekeeping.

Ad the Wednesday ceremony, Gresham Historical Society President Connie Johnson and Multnomah County Commissioner Polly Casterline unveiled the obelisk by pulling off a sheet of plastic.
...

Don McIntire, owner of McIntire's Athletic Club, said he was delighted to have his business located near something of historical significance.

"I promise to do my best to safeguard it," he said. "The first thing we should do is give it a bath."

McIntire said Southeast Stark Street is scheduled to be repaved, after which he plans to build a mound for the milepost marker and accentuate it with a spotlight.

At this point, the idea of a milestone pub crawl kind of breaks down, since there aren't any businesses of any kind nearby except for the fitness club. It would require a flexible definition of "nearby". Or friends who live near the milestone and don't mind hosting roving packs of drunk geography nerds.



You might actually have better luck a mile west of here. Milestone P12 is on the MIA list, sadly, but the neighborhood around its former home (roughly the 21700 block of Stark) is known as Twelvemile Corner. I don't know that area very well either, and I didn't actually stop and look around since there wasn't a milestone to search for. But it's Gresham, so there's bound to be fast food nearby, and probably an old-school tavern or two -- windowless, featuring pool tables and video poker, and full of old-timers who gripe endlessly about the new smoke-free law. Also, Google Maps says that there's an Applebee's due south of here on Burnside. I've only been to an Applebee's once, and I don't want sound all urban and snobby and whatever, but it was just soul-crushing. But maybe you're into that sort of thing, I don't know.

A few blocks further west is the only Portland-area outpost of Abby's Pizza, an Oregon-based chain with stores all over the place except Portland. I'm not sure why that is. Sometimes I get the impression the rest of the state eats a lot more pizza than we do here, but I haven't found any stats to back that up.

In any case, "Twelvemile Corner" is one of the rare geographic names derived from the mile marker system. The only other one I know of is the obscure "11 Mile Avenue" near Milestone P11. There's nothing equivalent to Detroit's Mile Road System. The best known of those is 8 Mile Road, which as I understand it is considered the border between the rich and poor parts of town. Plus it's the state's survey baseline (like Stark St. is), and is also the title of an Eminem movie. As I said, we have no local equivalent.

Milestone P11

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Today's episode of Milestone Madness takes us even further east, to the 19800 block of SE Stark. Milestone P11 (the mid-19th Century marker indicating exactly 11 miles to downtown Portland) is, like most of the milestones, located on the south side of Stark. Just west of it is the Stark Market convenience store, and to the east is the Mobile Park Plaza, uh, manufactured home community. The milestone is probably part of the property boundary between the two, come to think of it.

If you're trying to locate the milestone by counting cross streets, be aware that despite the address, the nearest streets to the east and west are both numbered as 197th Avenue. Go figure.



I regret to say that I didn't take any sufficiently closeup photos of P11 to tell whether the yellow on this one is paint or lichen. It's been reported that various milestones show evidence of having been painted either white or yellow at one time. P5 was, and still sort of is, white. But all the yellow I've seen so far has been of natural origin. Maybe P11 is the exception? I guess I could go back and look again, but I think I'll leave this question for other intrepid adventurers, in the unlikely event anyone besides me really cares one way or the other.

One thing worth pointing out is that the historical marker next to P7 lists which milestones are extant and which are lost, and it lists this one as "lost". The Stark Street Mile Markers blog mentions that P11 was stolen some time in the late 90's and later recovered, so that might give us a general time frame for when the historical marker went in.



I also ought to have taken more photos of the trailer park next door, or at least the entrance to it. It's got quite the wannabe-grand entrance, flanked with lions and what were probably fountains at one time. It would be a good subject for a series of moody indie Holga photos, if you're into that. Although from the few people I saw in the few minutes I was there, it seems like many area residents are elderly, so if you're here too long taking photos someone's likely to call the police. And this far east is Gresham, not Portland, so I don't know what their policy is on tasing people who look vaguely suspicious. Also, someone connected with the place is a Republican donor, which I mention just so you know you are no longer in the commie pinko part of SE Portland this far east. But you probably knew that already, or guessed as much on the drive here.



If you'd rather not drive -- whether for ideological reasons, or because you're hitting all the milestones as a pub crawl -- the nearest TriMet stop is just east of here (stop id #5477, served by bus #20), at the corner of Stark and ... drum roll ... 11 Mile Avenue. Also, the Ruby Junction MAX station is at 197th & Burnside, a short walk due south of here.



Well, that more or less concludes this stop on the tour. I don't know this part of town that extensively, so if you're doing a milestone pub crawl there aren't any establishments around here that I can recommend from personal experience. But hey, when you're an intrepid urban explorer, sometimes you just have to go find your own damn beer. If you have an iPhone, there's probably an app for that.

Milestone P9

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Yes, o Gentle Reader(s), it's time for yet another milestone. This time we're visiting P9, at the 15800 block of SE Stark St, on the south side of the street. Similar to milestone P6, there isn't a cross street right at this point, and the stone is on a long block between 157th and 160th. The Stark Street Mile Markers blog gives the exact address as 15802, but it seems to be a bit west of there, more of a 15780, if we're going to be really anal about these things, which we are. It's next to a garage building on the west end of the U-shaped Victoria Gardens apartment complex. There's a Trimet stop a few steps west of the milestone, stop ID 5450, served by eastbound bus #20. So it's between the bus stop and the first curb cut for the apartments, which should narrow it down to a stretch of maybe 15 feet or so.



I should point out, however, that this isn't a very nice part of town. Where "nice" is what everyone says when they really mean "affluent". It's a little west of Rockwood proper, but the same basic demographics are at work here. I mean, nobody's going to drive by and randomly shoot you or anything while you're looking at the milestone, probably. I'm just mentioning this just so you know not to expect picture-postcard Portland around these parts.

The main danger, actually, is having your car towed if you park at the apartment complex while checking out the milestone. East Multnomah County is ground zero for predatory tow truck companies, and I understand the company listed on the sign here is especially notorious. Turn your back for just a moment and your car's gone, and it's all 100% legal. So heed the sign and just park on a side street or something instead.



You know how our elected officials like to prattle on about how ultra-Euro-fancy Portland supposedly is? Generally that's just marketing talk, intended to attract tourists and upscale condo buyers. But increasingly we resemble Paris in at least one respect, in that we're developing our own ring of les banlieues. Like Paris (and probably a lot of other European cities), poor people and minorities are increasingly squeezed out of the central city, by housing prices and government policy, and they typically end up in a belt of inner-ring suburbs, areas that tourists and local residents alike have no reason to visit. Except for the occasional milestone, I mean. When the mayor goes on yet another of his fact-finding trips across the Atlantic, there are parts of town he isn't interested in seeing, and his hosts aren't interested in showing him, and nobody brings it up, and everyone's happier that way. So it's out of sight, out of mind, problem solved.



I'm not exactly accusing the city of doing this deliberately. They may be cynical enough, but I'm not sure they're clever enough. It's that we go to a lot of trouble to have a nice central city like the Europeans do (or we imagine they do), and as a result we get the same (possibly unintended) side effects that they've got. I mean, Rockwood is no Clichy-sous-Bois, and we don't have packs of rioters going around torching cars or anything like that. I'm just saying there are certain interesting parallels, and the equivalent situation in Paris hasn't exactly turned out well, has it?

Milestone P6

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The latest installment of the ongoing milestone adventure takes us to the 9800 block of SE Stark, just east of I-205. There's no 98th Avenue at this point, so milestone P6 isn't on a street corner like many of them are. The few accounts out there simply describe it as "near the Elmer's Restaurant". Precise directions are important when tracking down anything this small and this grey, so let me expand on that. Just east of Elmer's is a small one story office building with a 60's-ish mansard roof. Between its parking lot and the parking lot for Elmer's, there's a small landscaped bit with a few trees and shrubs. Milestone P6 is tucked in there, a few feet off the sidewalk, lurking behind a big conifer tree. Believe me, this one was hard to find. I didn't see it when driving past (several times, on two separate occasions), and when I stopped to look for it, I walked past once before finding it. The Google map here is centered on it, if that helps at all.



The surrounding area isn't quite as cute as Montavilla, a mile west of here, but it's next to the freeway, and it's got everything. As noted, Elmer's is right next door, so there's a convenient source of bacon nearby. Which is crucial, obviously. Also I think they have a bar section with video lottery if you're into that. A couple of blocks south is Mall 205, with a Home Depot, a Target, a mostly-empty indoor mall part, and a McMenamins. The lighting in my condo uses a variety of dodgy little halogen bulbs that only Home Depot seems to carry, and this is the closest location to home, so I actually know this area reasonably well. Also, Kelly Butte is a few blocks further south past the mall, so I have this part of town to thank for a large percentage of visitors to this humble blog.

Being near the freeway there are the usual fast food outlets, which I won't bother to list. And just east of the milestone are a couple of, er, "gentlemens clubs", if that's more your speed. Also just east of here is Sayler's Old Country Kitchen, home of the 72 ounce, eat-it-in-an-hour-and-it's-free top sirloin steak. I used to know a guy who kept threatening to have a go at this monster, back when there was also a westside Sayler's location. We lost touch some years ago, so I don't know if he ever worked up the nerve. Perhaps the steak is to blame for us losing touch. It would've been a hero's death, to be sure.



A curious thing I've noticed: Despite all the "gentlemen's clubs" along Stark (and there are quite a few of them), it doesn't appear that any are named "Stark Naked", even though that would seem to be the obvious choice. Maybe that industry has a desperate shortage of clever people or something, I dunno. So, maybe, if this whole software thing doesn't work out, and I can't make a go of it in subsistence agriculture, or as a gentleman jewel thief or housesitter-to-the-stars, and I can't bring myself to take money for blogging or photography, then perhaps, just perhaps....

Milestone P4

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So I'd like to announce the achievement of another milestone. This time it's P4, at the corner of SE 61st & Stark. It's at the NE corner of the intersection, next to the Tabor Heights Methodist Church parking lot. I'm rather pleased about finally finding this one. I tried and failed to find it maybe 3 or 4 times before, albeit strictly from a moving vehicle each time. This time I noticed it right away -- seeing milestones gets easier after you've seen a few others -- and this time I stopped and took a few photos. The stone's not extremely prominent, and there are a bunch of juniper bushes around it, but someone was nice enough to trim out a cozy little niche for the milestone so passers-by can see it. Aww, how cute...



Across the street is Cooper's Coffee, which (according to one Yelp reviewer) also has a tasty beer selection. And wifi. So despite being 4 miles, or over 21 thousand feet from downtown, we still haven't exited the civilized world just yet.

Of course we're still on the west slope of Mt. Tabor at this point. All real Portlanders know for a 100% truthy fact that there's nothing on the far side of Mt. Tabor except meth labs and pit bulls as far as the eye can see, and you won't see another trace of the civilized world until roughly the Hudson River. And even then, there are a few parts of Manhattan we aren't too sure about.

Well, except for Montavilla. As I've already mentioned, Montavilla's quite cute. Which means of course that as soon as the real estate market comes back to life, we'll have to tear out large chunks of it to put up condo towers for the rich Californians, because that's just how it is, and resistance is futile.

Oh, and Ikea. Ikea's civilized too, although a bit less so of late. You have heard of Verdanagate, right? Right?



All snarkitude aside, I do have a few more links and items to pass along:

• I just discovered that someone has put together a custom Google map pointing out all the milestones. So check out the "Baseline Road Mileposts" map, and send props to whoever put it together.
  
• A couple of Gresham Outlook stories to pass along, profiling a local retiree who investigated the milestones well before we interweb folk ever heard of them: "Marking the miles of history" and "Retired administrator takes up local history".
  
• And the latest two milestone posts over at the ZehnKatzen Times (although unlike this humble blog, he does actually cover stuff besides old rocks with numbers on them.) "The Stark Street Milestones" references my P5 post, so it's only fair to return the linky luurrrve. And "More Portland Milestones" mentions those Flickr photos of the other P7 on Capitol Highway.
  
• At the end of my P7 post, I mentioned the existence of additional milestones along the Historic Columbia River Highway, suggesting them as a project for some ambitious soul out there. A commenter then asked if the numbers on those milestones might be a continuation of those on Stark. I was completely skeptical, but I just so happened to be out that way this afternoon, and just south of the Stark St. bridge (over the Sandy River) I noticed a mile marker with a "17" on it. Which meant it was at least plausible. And then, I just tracked down the nomination form for adding the Gorge Highway to the National Register of Historic Places. Right there, on page 5, is this tidbit:
  

  
  Historic Mile Posts (HMPs) on the Columbia River Highway
  Mileposts were established along the CRH at the time of construction. According to a “Mile
  Posting Data” log of the entire highway that the Oregon State Highway Department (OSHD)
  prepared in 1924, HMP 0.00 was established as the intersection of SW Washington Street and
  SW Broadway in downtown Portland. The route leading to the beginning of the CRH and
  nominated district, followed Portland’s arterial system for about six miles before picking up the Base Line Road (also known as Stark Street) or the Sandy Road (later known as Sandy
  Boulevard). Stark Street intersected the CRH on the Sandy River (Stark Street) Bridge, at HMP
  16.7. The Sandy Road crossed the Sandy River two miles downstream over the Sandy River
  Bridge at Troutdale before heading into the county’s road system. The roadway between the
  Sandy River Bridge at Troutdale and the Sandy River (Stark Street) Bridge was added as a
  second access route to the CRH, a few years after work originally began on the highway.[1]
  The Sandy River Bridge at Troutdale is 2.5 miles northwest of the Stark Street structure, so its HMP has been calculated as 14.2. For purposes of this nomination for the CRH, and the 1983
  NR nomination for the CRH Historic District, HMP 14.2 was determined as the western most
  point of the nominated property.
  
  [1]See the entire section of F. N. Drinkhall, “Field Notes: Mile Posting Data, Upper Col. River Hwy., Lower Col. River Hwy., and Old Oregon Trail,” Oregon State Highway Department, Salem, 1924, devoted to the “Upper Col. River Hwy.”
  

  
  It's not clear whether the document was written by the National Park Service or by ODOT, but either way it sounds fairly definitive. Although I'm still not sold on the fabled P0 point being located at SW Washington & Broadway. That would put it a few blocks north of the actual Willamette Baseline. Although I've never actually seen any reference saying P0 was on the baseline; I just keep assuming that was the case, because all the others line up so nicely, and it would be a shame to break up the pattern.