Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 21.djvu/13



PACIFIC UNIVERSITY 3

was laid by men who were dedicated to missionary labor and to planting the seeds, in this far-away land, of a Christian civilization.

The first in order of time, at least, of these men of high ideals and a lofty vision was the Rev. Harvey Clark, a native of Vermont, who, with his young wife, a graduate of Oberlin, fired with zeal for missionary work among the native tribes, had come to Oregon in 1841 as independent, self-supporting missionaries.

He settled upon his land claim, on which the town of Forest Grove now stands, and built a log house in which he and his wife taught the children of the settlers, being thus the first school teachers in Washington County.

Mr. and Mrs. Clark had a vision of a school of higher rank that might in time be established and that should mean much for the highest enlightenment and culture of this new land.

Meanwhile they waited some time for the opportunity and the means to realize their ideal.

Their first helper came in the person of a woman, Mrs. Tabitha Moffet Brown one of that long list of most heroic forerunners of civilization, to whom all too little tribute has been paid, the pioneer wives and mothers of the Pacific North- west.

This is hardly the place to dwell very long upon her roman- tic story ; it is a familiar one in Washington County. She was the widow of an Episcopalian minister of Stonington, Conn., who was left without property and with three small children to support. After teaching school several years, at the age of nearly three-score years and ten, she came to Oregon to be with her sons and grandchildren who had preceded her.

She crossed the plains with an ox-team, coming into Oregon by that ill-fated Southern route and suffering untold dangers and hardships on the way.

This was in 1846 and almost immediately "Grandma Brown," as she came to be affectionately called far and wide in the