12/21/2023 0 Comments Balch gulch water flume![]() ![]() "I have been engaged in placer mining for years and have always found my dump too small, so when I came here five years ago and saw what a dump Guild’s Lake and Balch Creek would make, it made me feel sick that it was not out by some placer claim of mine. He said when he came to the city that he saw something else: Lafe Pence’s ideas of civic development differed a little from those of Colonel Hawkins. The Colonel sat upon the new Parks Board. The Colonel was excited to see much of Guild’s Lake preserved as a city park after the Fair came down. Plans were drawn up for the Fairgrounds but also for parks across the city as a whole. In preparation for the fair, a designer from New York, one of the Olmsted brothers, came out to see the city. The land around the creek had just been donated to the city for a steep, lush park, Macleay. The Colonel was very proud of the city and the hill and Balch Creek which ran below his house and into the lake. In one of them lived a man named Colonel Hawkins. In the hills above the lake were some fine new homes. As it was a popular swimming and fishing spot, the lake also claimed an annual drowning victim. ![]() In the winter the lake filled with rain and runoff and then drained out considerably in the summer. When the Indians came in from the reservations to trade, they camped along the lake or near the the mouth of the creek. There were Chinese vegetable gardens lining St Helens Road on its west and north side. Both spit and roadhouse were once called by that name. It was mostly owned by a Mr Guild and there had been a two-story log roadhouse that sat out on this spit of land in the middle called The Tongue. Before the Fair, the lake was a big marsh north of the city between the Tualatin Mountains and the Willamette River. Then it cascaded down the bluff to the edge of Guilds Lake and a beautiful bridge crossed out to Government Island where the double-towered Government Building stood. It began on the bluff at the edge of Upshur, near our school and the ball field. The Fairgrounds covered the land just north of town. Mr Pence chose the right time to be in Oregon because the 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial and Pacific Exposition and Oriental Fair was opening. After that Mr Pence thought he’d stay in Oregon. Utah wanted it to be Salt Lake City, but Mr Pence orated and made a joke out of their appeal. They were trying to choose a permanent home for their organization. ![]() ![]() In 1904 he came to Portland for a meeting of the National Mining Congress. He stood up for the Pullman strikers, and said things that got him in the paper all the time, but he lost the next election and went back to the law and to mining. He was a supporter of Free Silver and Colorado elected him to the House of Representatives in Washington DC. In Colorado he had been a lawyer and a miner. Mr Lafe Pence was from Indiana by way of Colorado. He went to work for a man named Lafe Pence. My mother moved us to Chicago and there married a man named Charles Skemp. He got very sick, too sick for us to take care of him and he took the train back to Oregon to die in the home of his parents. When I was a little girl, I lived in Chattanooga, Tennessee with my mother, father, and my brother, Jackson. Some notes about a man we knew when we lived in Oregon and the effect he had upon my family, the city of Portland, and an unfortunate house-painter out for a day of fishing. “Lafe Pence has planned and already begun to construct a series of ditches for the purpose of sluicing down the steep hills, filling Guild’s Lake and making land where there are only water and steep canyons now.” "Lafe Pence, the wit of the Colorado delegation in the lower house of Congress, has declined to stand for re-election on the ground that he cannot live in Washington on $5000 a year.’ The Reclamation of Lafe Pence or The Killing of Guild's Lake ![]()
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