Bloody 1925 prison break ended badly for everyone involved It was a typical balmy August evening at the Oregon State Penitentiary. The bell had rung for supper, so inmates were streaming out of their cells and heading toward the dining hall for the evening meal, as they always did. But[Read More…]
Author: Finn J.D. John
Caralyn Shelton, America’s first woman governor, had crazy early life
If you ask most Oregonians who the first woman governor in state history was, they’ll have an immediate answer … but they’ll be wrong. Conventional wisdom holds that the first woman to take the gubernatorial purple in the Beaver State was Barbara Roberts, who was elected to the job in[Read More…]
Offbeat Oregon History: Body-snatchers planned to hold ex-mayor’s corpse for ransom
The nineteenth century was a kind of golden age of body snatching. Digging up the freshly dead to cash the corpses in at the back door of a nearby medical school was — well, not common exactly, but far from unheard-of. So when, around the middle of May 1897, Daniel[Read More…]
Offbeat Oregon History No. 599: Stewart Holbrook preserved the spirit of mid-century Oregon
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON LIBRARIES/PHOTO Stewart Holbrook (left) with Washington Governor Arthur Langlie, Oregon Governor Earl Snell, and Arthur Priault of the West Coast Lumbermen’s Association, standing on the Interstate Bridge in 1943. I. Ninety-eight years ago, in a logging camp deep in the forests of British Columbia, a logger in[Read More…]
Not all fugitives in Oregon were running from the law
Sometime in 1915, a 40-year-old Black woman named Frankie Baker stepped off the train at Portland’s Union Station. She had come to stay; Oregon would be her home for the rest of her life. At that time, Portland had a a reputation as a good place to hide out when[Read More…]
Oregonians played prominent role in 1930s’ most horrific murder
OREGON DIVORCEE AGNES Anne “Annie” LeRoi arrived in Phoenix in the first few months of 1931 with her best friend and roommate, schoolteacher Hedvig “Sammy” Samuelson. They were climate refugees: Sammy had tuberculosis, and at the time the only cure for “consumption” was a dry climate and rest. Agnes Anne LeRoi[Read More…]
Offbeat Oregon History: Coos Bay shipwreck was scene of massive, drunken looting party
PHOTO: COOS HISTORY MUSEUM The steamship Santa Clara stands almost high and dry on the beach at the mouth of Coos Bay early in the day on Nov. 5, 1915, surrounded by onlookers and would-be looters. ON THE MORNING OF NOV. 5, 1915, at the back of the entrance to Coos[Read More…]
