The Columbian

Clark County history: Irishman John Wark joined the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1814

Hudson’s Bay Company fur trader John Work (1792-1861) traveled much of what is today Washington, Idaho, Montana and California. An Irishman, he was one of the founding families of Victoria, B.C. and served on Vancouver Island’s Legislative Council. His travels often brought him to Fort Vancouver.

When Irishman John Wark joined the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1814, the firm made him a steward and anglicized his last name to “Work” on his contract. In 1823, after the HBC and Northwest Company merged, the firm assigned him to the Columbia District, the most distant and financially tenuous… Read story

Clark County history: The trouble with saloons and liquor

Frank Lackaff operated a saloon at 500 Washington St. in downtown Vancouver, as seen in this photo taken in about 1906. A blacksmith shop on the right is in a building that still stands. Today the site of the saloon is home to a business called REV Rides.

In the years leading up to Prohibition, the “dry” Clark County contingent saw saloons as chambers of criminality, where prostitution, gambling, brawling and even murder took place. They believed crimes extended beyond saloon walls, harming the community. The “wets,” of course, saw the saloons otherwise. Read story

Clark County history: John Roffler came from humble beginning to build the Pittock-Leadbetter House

The 3,700-square-foot Pittock-Leadbetter House is a Camas landmark. The Queen-Anne-style structure was built in 1901 for Oregonian Publisher Henry Pittock’s daughter and son-in-law.

In 1889, a Minnesota widow, Katharina Roffler, and her four children moved into a small homesteader’s cabin near the split at La Camas and Fern roads, where they lived until 1895. From that tiny home came the boy who would someday build the grandest homes in Camas. Read story

Clark County history: With a passion for planes, Wally Olson built Evergreen Airport in east Vancouver

Waldo “Wally” Olson (1911-1997) grew up as a farmboy watching airmail planes passing over his Scandinavian parent’s land in Lewis County. After flying in World War II, he built and owned Evergreen Airport in east Vancouver.

Learning to fly for Wally Olson was a series of hops rather than a smooth takeoff. He flew first in 1933 but didn’t gain a pilot’s license until six years later. After flying in World War II, he went to California to teach discharged pilots stunt flying or aviating Douglas… Read story

Inspired by the journey of the Lewis and Clark expedition, in 1832 John Ball traveled overland to Fort Vancouver as part of the Wyeth Expedition. He spent only two years in the area, but left a lasting legacy as a teacher, farmer and amateur geologist.

Clark County history: John Ball taught at Oregon’s first academy after a rough trek west

July 27, 2024, 6:10am Clark County Life

The family of Sgt. John Ordway lived near John Ball’s parents in Hebron, N.H. Ordway had crossed the country with Lewis and Clark, returning in 1806. Young Ball was an eager listener about the journey’s adventures, people, wildlife and geography. Imagining the far corner of the continent appealed to him,… Read story

Taken before 1908, this photograph shows early Vancouver policemen — Winfield Gasaway, Henry Burgy and John Secrist — wearing their seven-pointed badges and caps with curved olive branches. Burgy and Secrist would go on to serve as Vancouver police chiefs.

Clark County history: Law enforcement in Vancouver started with a single marshal

July 20, 2024, 6:08am Clark County Life

There seems to be a gap between Vancouver’s 1857 incorporation and any official call for law enforcement. Policing wasn’t high on the city council’s priority list until after 1880, when the census counted 1,722 inhabitants in town. Read story

Activist Francis Willard believed in suffrage first and temperance. She’s seen here in a photograph from her book, “A Wheel within a Wheel,” learning to ride a bicycle. Safety bicycles were new; many women showed independence by riding them and learning as Willard did here.

Clark County history: Women’s Christian Temperance Union

July 13, 2024, 6:10am Clark County Life

The second Women’s Christian Temperance Union president shifted the organization’s focus from temperance to suffrage. When Francis Willard took office in 1879, she launched a “do everything” policy. She reasoned, “meet argument with argument, misjudgment with patience, denunciation with kindness, and all our difficulties and dangers with prayer.” She first… Read story

Local pilot and inventor Marvin Joy stands next to his experimental wingless plane that he called the “pumpkin seed.” The plane was flown twice at Pearson Field, in perhaps the first test of a lifting body aircraft.

Clark County History: Local inventor’s ‘flying flapjack’ was an aircraft ahead of its time

July 6, 2024, 6:05am Clark County Life

A decade before Roswell’s stories of flying saucers and little green men in New Mexico captured the mind of the nation, Pearson Field saw its own unidentified flying object. Marvin Joy, a bridge tender on the railroad crossing the Columbia River Slough, appeared at the Vancouver airfield with a strange… Read story

William Shoenig stands behind the bar at the Lehthle Saloon at 502 Main St. in Vancouver in this undated photo. Before Prohibition, local groups fiercely debated the propriety of saloons, and how to regulate and tax them.

Clark County history: Liquor licenses come to Clark County

June 29, 2024, 6:09am Clark County Life

The first house built on Vancouver’s Main Street was a saloon. On July 4, 1854, Pete Fergusson opened it as a tenpins bowling alley with liquor sales. Vancouver wasn’t incorporated until 1857, so getting a liquor license wasn’t a problem for him. From the start, Clark County residents split into… Read story

Stories by Martin Middlewood

Columbian freelance contributor

Clark County history: Bickering and scandal at the Fort Vancouver school