Edgefield: Two Thousand Graves Beneath the Resort

The grounds of the Edgefield resort in Troutdale are pleasant in the way that old institutional properties often become pleasant once the institution is gone. There are gardens, a winery, a brewery, a hotel in the main building, a concert venue. McMenamins purchased the property in nineteen ninety and restored it as an entertainment complex.

Before McMenamins, before the resort, the property was the Multnomah County Poor Farm.

From nineteen eleven to nineteen eighty-two, the county operated this institution for people it deemed unable to care for themselves: the destitute, the chronically ill, those classified as mentally ill by the standards of the era, orphaned children, tuberculosis patients turned away elsewhere. The county provided housing, food, and basic care. In exchange, residents worked the farm's fields and operations. The system was presented as charity. It functioned, in practice, as a form of institutionalized confinement.

An estimated two thousand people died on the property over seventy-one years. Most were buried in an unmarked cemetery on the grounds. There was no systematic effort to record the names on permanent markers. There was no community of family members with the means to demand otherwise.

McMenamins placed markers acknowledging the dead when they restored the property. The scale of the unmarked burial ground is not widely known among guests who come for the beer and the concert schedule. The cemetery is still there. The people in it are still unidentified by any public record accessible to the families they may have left behind.

The Poor Farm also operated adjacent to Oregon's eugenics program, which between nineteen seventeen and nineteen eighty-three authorized the sterilization of approximately two thousand six hundred forty-eight people documented in state records. The actual number may be higher, as some records were lost. Governor John Kitzhaber issued a formal apology in two thousand two.