In this column, we take a look back one hundred years ago in western Washington County. This week, the clips come from the Washington County News-Times and the Hillsboro Argus, published May 15, 1924.

We also have a very special feature this week: A Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, hand lettered with the names of businesses and buildings in and around Banks in September 1921. View the images below, but the absolute best way to view them is to scroll down and click on the link below each map, which will take you to a zoomable image hosted at the Library of Congress. Their website is clearly more robust than mine, which refused to host the original size file, so I had to shrink the size a bit.

These news clips are selected for relevancy for the geographic area our newspaper covers, and occasionally include areas in Forest Grove (a shopping, business, and transportation hub at the time) and Hillsboro (the county seat) for news events that I believe would have been of significance to rural readers of the time. They are presented as-is, and without comment. At the time, the newspapers of the day often expressed viewpoints that today would be considered racist, xenophobic, and sexist, frequently using slurs to describe ethnic groups and often stepping outside the norms of what we consider to be ethical journalism today.

Want more local history? Visit the Banks Historical Society online at www.bankshistory.org for Banks-area history, and Friends of Historic Forest Grove, which often works in the Gales Creek area, online at www.fhfg.org.

View the full size map here.

View the full size map here.

View the full size map here.

View the full size map here.

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Chas Hundley is the editor of the Banks Post and sister news publications the Gales Creek Journal and the Salmonberry Magazine. He grew up in Gales Creek and has a cat.

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