Greetings;

The other day I sent out to several people a plat map for the “Subdivisions of Risley Farm” which I had found on the Clackamas County Surveyor’s website.  The map itself is not dated.

Though the map is not dated there is a good clue on the map which helps date it.  Baldwin Van der Bijl noted that the trolley line that cuts through the map is identified as “O.W.P. Ry.”    I did a little checking and found that:

From “Electrifying Eden by Craig Wollner 1990”, the history of P.G.E., O.W.P. R’y stands for “Oregon Water Power and Railway Company”. What we affectionately refer to as the “Trolley Line” went through several corporate name changes over the course of it’s lifetime. The Oregon Water Power and Railway Company was formed in June 1902 [Electrifying Eden p.69], and changed again about 1906 during “The biggest merger ever in the history of the Pacific Coast” [ Electrifying Eden p.62; Oregonian, May 4, 1906 ]. Thus we can use the name of the railway on this map to date it sometime between 1902 to 1906.

This narrowed down the range of possible dates for the plat map.  I also noted that Jacob S. Risley’s name is not mentioned anywhere on it.  I looked up his date of death and found that he died in June 1902.  So I suspect that this plat map shows how Jacob S. Risley’s Donation Land Claim was divided up following his death.  Thus I’m dating it as circa 1904.

To give us perspective I compared this plat map to a current Oak Lodge area map, used the CC Surveyor’s overlay feature, and a Donation Land Claim map I’ve been creating.  This process enabled me to identify current road names and landmarks on the plat map which you will see on the attachment. All of the area between today’s McLoughlin Blvd. and the Willamette River was Jacob S. Risley’s Donation Land Claim – – but the area between McLoughlin Blvd. and Oatfield Rd. was not.

Charles W. Risley was the oldest son of Jacob S. Risley, and as you can see he came to own the nearly 66 acres between McLoughlin Blvd. and Oatfield Rd., which today includes Kronberg and Kellogg Ave.s    This large parcel, as well as the nearly 8 acres that went to daughter Alice (Risley) Starkweather where Fred Meyer is today, probably belonged to Jacob S. Risley until he died.  I have not yet researched the sequence of transactions that led to Risley’s owning those parcels.

I just wanted to share this impressive plat map with you.  Please feel free to forward it to others that you think might enjoy seeing it.

Mike Schmeer
Chairman, Oak Lodge History Detectives