Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 1.djvu/466



Pea Green fails to blow it out, Portland factories are supplying the wants of a pioneer and cultured people.

There are furniture factories in Portland employing hundreds of skilled me- chanics. There are iron and steel works furnishing steel frames for "sky scraper" office buildings, equal to anything in Chicago or New York. There are woolen factories in Portland turning out cloth and blankets — no shoddy ; equal to anything produced from the looms of New England or Philadelphia. There are mills in Portland that can and do produce better oatmeal and other cereal foods than is produced in Battle Creek, Michigan, or Aberdeen, Scotland. There are clothing factories in Portland that employ as many as two hundred women to run the machines and finish the work. Portland has ten-story department stores that employ fifteen hundred people to run them, and they do everything and sell everything but saw timber, make threshing machines, run foundries and boil soap.

Portland has made great progress in developing the industries in the country. But there is a vast country to be supplied. From California all the way up the coast to the regions of eternal ice ; and from the Rocky mountains to the Pacific ocean, and to the islands in the great South Sea ; and to the five hundred mil- lions of Asiatic pagans just in our front across the Pacific, Portland is the nat- ural and most economical and effective distributing center, and offers its advan- tages at first hand on the most liberal terms and promising hopes of success to the industries and energetic mechanic from any part of the world.

STATISTICS.

Without attempting to give full statistics of all manufacturing industries, a few may be given as samples.

There are in Portland nine cigar factories employing 150 men; sixteen wagon and carriage makers with 160 men; thirteen flour and cereal mills with 130 men; fifty foundries and shops working in iron with a thousand men; fourteen sash and door factories with 500 men; three soap factories to keep clean with 30 men; eighty-six plumbers' shops with 252 men; twenty-one furniture making shops and factories with 500 men ; three paper mills with 865 men, turning out $4,500,000 worth of paper annually; twelve tanneries with 105 men, turning out $536,000 worth of leather annually. Total number of manufacturing plants of all kinds 2,000, with $65,000,000 capital invested and turning out annually goods worth $85,000,000, with 28,000 men employed.

HOPS AND BEER, ,

Some good people may think that a chapter under the above heading might properly be left out of a work of this kind. But a little reflection will show any observing person that it is quite as important to see how every phase of human activities affect the development of the race. History would be of little account if it preserved no record of the frivolities, vices and profligacy of mankind.

The farmers of the state of Oregon produce and sell about one hundred thousand bales of hops a year. Each bale will weigh on an average three hun- dred pounds, and each pound of hops will make a barrel of beer. And that makes thirty million barrels of beer. The Oregonians don't make or drink all that beer. But the breweries in the city of Portland make and sell two hundred and twenty-four thousand seven hundred and twenty-one barrels of beer in a year. That is about a barrel of beer to every man, woman and child in this city. But it is not all consumed in Portland, not one-tenth of it. The breweries of Portland, especially the great establishment founded and built up by Henry. Weinhard, ships beer to all the Pacific coast states and territories, and to Siberia, China, Japan and the Philippine Islands. So that beer is one of the important industries of Portland. Whatever may be thought of the moral