Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 1.djvu/547

Rh for two years, and at the last session of the legislature a charter was granted for a university to be called Pacific university, with a limitation of $50,000.00. The president and professor are already here from Vermont. The teacher and his lady for the academy are from New York. I have endeavored to give general outlines of what I have done. You must be judges whether I have been doing good or evil. I have labored for myself and the rising generation, but I have not quit hard work, and live at my ease, independent as to worldly concerns. I own a nicely furnished white frame house on a lot in town, within a short distance of the public buildings. That I rent for $100 per year. I have eight other town lots, without buildings, worth $150 each. I have eight cows and a number of young cattle. The cows I rent out for their milk and one-half of their increase. I have rising $1,000 cash due me; $400 of it I have donated to the university; besides $100 I gave to the academy three years ago. This much I have been able to accumulate by my own industry, independent of my children, since I drew 6¼ cents from the finger of my glove."

Pacific university at Forest Grove is practically a Portland institution; and Mrs. Tabitha Brown was its real founder. The college, for that is all it is, is one of the oldest and best in the state; and has never received one dollar of public money to help it along.

Mr. Alvin Brown, a son of Mrs. Brown, still resides within sight of the college his mother founded.

Harvey W. Scott, the first graduate of this college started by Mrs. Brown, and editor of the Oregonian, said of this school and its founders in the Oregonian in 1903:

"The mists of fifty years dissolve the light of the present and the old academy building half-finished square and in need of paint, gleams among the oaks that stand upon the college campus at Forest Grove. At a little distance among the trees is seen the log cabin in which religious services were held on Sundays, and a little farther on another cabin in which other services were held—there being even at that early day church factions, each with a leader and each stubbornly intrenched in what was believed to be 'the right.' Hard by stands a rambling structure, half shanty, half log cabin, the boarding-house of the infant college, of which Grandma Brown is the head. President S. H. Marsh is there, and the worthy woman whom the academy girls firmly believe had never been young, enforces a discipline partly in his honor that makes meals there as formal and solemn an occasion as the most orthodox commemoration of the Lord's Supper. There are few who with mortal eyes can see this picture now, but to those who can, it furnishes a glimpse of another world. The landscape only is the same. And the remaining few to whom the vision of fifty years ago appears look upon it fondly for a moment and are fain to steal softly away as 'from a house where someone lieth dead.'"

As is well known in all communities where the membership of the Roman Catholic church is strong enough to support a sectarian school, they freely give of their means to establish and maintain such a school, while at the same time paying taxes to support the American idea public schools. And nowhere in the United States has the intention to maintain schools separate from those established by the state has been more firmly maintained or energetically asserted than in Oregon and Portland. And with a view of thoroughly developing and carrying out that proposition the present archbishop of the diocese, Alexander Christie, D. D., has organized the Oregon Catholic Educational Association. This association was brought into existence four years ago in response to a demand for systematization of Catholic education in the archdiocese. During its brief existence it has done much to unify the curricula of the various schools and to promote a desirable uniformity of text-books. It has charge of the annual in-