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Milwaukie Ecosystem Plan Memories
Residents Reminisce: Stories from Johnson Creek Then & Now

Much around Johnson Creek has changed over the years; some things have remained surprisingly unchanged.


Bell Station at the beginning of the 1900s. This grocery store was a convenient stop for riders who deboarded the Springwater line at Bell Station. Photo courtesy of the Milwaukie Historical Society 		 
The Bell Station store still stands and now is a convenient stop for hikers and bicyclists along the Springwater Corridor. Photo courtesy of A.G. Flynn, 2000

Waiting for the train near Milwaukie. Photo courtesy of the Milwaukie Historical Society
When I first, we first came here there was a train that traveled from Barn and Damascus and he would often see me and wave and he would go on and toot his whistle when he got to the road there. – Long time resident of Johnson Creek.

David Schwitzer interviewed by Jake Lancaster, 1999:

  • DS: Mahogany, I think from the Philippines, came in and they had a mill in Gresham and they made that Mahogany veneer.
  • JL: So how big was the train?
  • DS: Probably eight or ten cars, regular box cars. They used to run once a day but then later on it was once a week and they used to go clear to Boring and haul a lot of lumber out of Boring. I think that was one of the main things that they hauled to the very last was railcars full of lumber. There were two or three mills out in Boring.


Sellwood street car. Courtesy Milwaukie Historical Society

It was originally a trolley….that came out of Portland, out of Milwaukie, and came up the Johnson Creek Canyon. There was a station there..(Littleman…Letterman) junction. Another station there just right on the edge of where that…the welty's wrecking yard was. In fact that station, that was still there when I was a kid. There was also a transformer station because dig up the history it was an electric, it was the Oregon or Portland electric…I mean electric was in the name you can on that. – Tony Birch.

Well I was so sorry to see them (the trains) go because they were so friendly and they would always wave to me if I was out there. – A long time resident of Johnson Creek

Johnson Creek is a pretty good-sized creek, and then there are some branches about two miles up the creek, two or three miles, yeah about two, two and a half to three miles. One of them goes up to…one branch goes up, ..the main branch goes up towards Orient and Cottrell that's about where it begins over there someplace, and then theirs one branch that follows the railroad and goes up towards Boring. It doesn't get to Boring though it only gets….it gets a little bit past Haley Station, one mile. Now half way between Boring and Haley Station is what they call the summit and they have a spur there which they called the summit spur and they used to bring ..when they hauled logs, you know by train….there was quite a grade you know, from Barton to Boring and they would bring it up in sections usually two. But I think once in a while they had three sections they brought up well when they would bring it up to, they would bring one section up and park it on that summit spur and then go back and get another section and bring it up and then hook it up and then it's down hill all the way see to Portland because it follows the course of Johnson Creek, all the way to Portland. –James Aubin


Works Projects Administration project on Johnson Creek. Courtesy of City of Portland, Stanley Parr Archives and Record Center
Pat Brost, interviewed by Wanda Berry, 1999:
  • PB: [My] dad did work for the county. Before he did that, he worked on the WPA project, which was when they put the rock bank on the Johnson Creek. But he didn't actually do the work; he was a watchman. Was that for a couple of years. Well, the WPA, they started in, I think, in 1933 in that area and probably went on into the late 30's, maybe even the early 40's. As to how long he worked there, I'm not sure. The rock may have come possibly from Rocky View, because there was a rock quary at the east end and it was quite bare and you can see the rocks.

They (the salmon) came up to where the creek practically ended. And there was a chicken yard that was on both sides of the creek, the creek ran through the middle of the chicken yard and I don't think the salmon could get any farther than that fence, but I saw salmon, one salmon almost up that far in 1921 than as years passed the salmon didn't come up that far. We didn't see them up that far. We would see them down…well each year they would be farther away. – Miles Aubin

Tony Birch interviewed by Michael Turner, 1999:

It's a kind of pollution that we never used to worry about. I mean, originally there were no sewer systems around the creek...probably a lot of sewage went into the creek but the creek had the capacity to absorb it. If a house had a sewer system and a septic tank and a drain field, it probably had a bypass. There was a bypass at my folks system because when the water goes high and the whole system was under water, sewage had to go somewhere. There was literally a straight line to that bypass to the creek, but a living creek can absorb an awful amount of raw sewage as long as that raw sewage is not full of all sorts of chemicals -- you know, soaps and bleaches and things of that nature. Nowadays, sewage is full of all sorts of chemicals besides the sewage itself. Quite a few years ago they did put a major sewage trunk line right literally down the road and it's underneath the parkdrive right down the road and everybody is hooked up to sewage now supposedly so that contaminant is not affecting the creek. It's the golf courses and the parking lots and the lawn fertilizers and the pesticides that have got to be affecting the water.

I think there's a few more houses down at the end of the road, the end of Park drive, or what used to be barns converted to houses, but basically it's the same. Of course all the old timers are gone and new folks are there. – Tony Birch

As you get a change in demographics of who lives along the creek, where you used to have people who were born here and grew up here and they tended to maintain their property in a way that a lot of current day homeowners do not. They seem to have a much more transitory attitude towards land. We buy a property, we live for a few years, we move on, whereas people of the last generation, the land was like forever theirs and they tended to maintain it differently. And so your seeing a lot more junk, brush, uncut willow along the creed bank, which continues to impede the flow of flood water, and I think it's making the flooding worse. – Mary Rosenblum

Pat Broust interviewed by Wanda Berry, 1999:

The construction of I-205 did alter the creek down near Favel St. where Favel and 92nd and the freeway are. They rechanneled the creek. They took out some sharp bends and made some more gradual bends and put it in a concrete channel in some spots down there. Of course, now it looks like it's always been that way.

Mary Rosenbloom interviewed by Jake Lancaster, 1999:

One of the things that I've noticed distinctly is a difference in ambient air temperature in the summer. It used to be that in this area, for example, which was very undeveloped would be significantly cooler than similar terrain than say on the Sunnyside corridor where there was much more development and that's beginning to change because you're losing the cooling effect of all the greenry and you're seeing an increase in buildings and asphalt and you really do raise the summer temperatures. And noticably, two or three degrees at least. That's something that I've compared in different areas and it's a dramatic difference. It's noticable even if you don't measure it with a thermomenter. Just the way is feels.