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Changing Economies: 1930s-1950s


These renovated rowhouses on Denver Avenue once housed workers from the Swift Meatpacking Company. Today they are apartments. Photo by Donna Sinclair

. . .In the early days, the thirties or forties or fifties, everybody that lived here, worked here. Nobody worked in the other part of the city. . . Most of the people I know on our street walked to work. They all were employed along Columbia Boulevard. If they weren’t employed by the packing houses and the slaughter houses and the sawmills, there was Beal Tank & Pipe Steel Fabricating Company, truck builder. There was Malarkey, M&M Woodworking that built tanks and all that, so they had opportunity here for whatever their skills were . . . Victor Nelson, former Kenton resident and current Kenton business owner

   From the early to mid-twentieth century barges and towboats came down the Columbia River and into the Slough through the City Canal carrying horses for slaughter and logs to the mills. By the 1930s, federal projects heralded the development hopes of the future. The New Deal's WPA provided jobs building the Portland International Airport and the St. Johns Landfill on the Slough. WWII brought prosperity to north Portland as shipyard workers settled there.

   After the war, many changes took place in Slough communities. The shipyards closed, leaving many jobless. In 1948 the Vanport Flood plugged the City Canal, halting commercial navigation. Increased stagnation in the Slough resulted from loss of tidal action from the Columbia River, and by the 1950s mills and slaughterhouses shut down.

The Port of Portland sponsored WPA Project 975 to build the Portland International Airport in 1936. Photo courtesy of the Oregon Historical Society

PSU Student work -- History of the Portland Airport, St. Johns Landfill and the Port of Portland

PSU student work -- Changing Economies on the Columbia Slough


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