Stumptown: The City Built on Clearcuts

Portland's first nickname was not particularly flattering, but it was accurate. By the early eighteen fifties, settlers had felled so many Douglas firs to build the growing city that the stumps outnumbered the buildings in some blocks. The stumps were enormous, as old-growth stumps tend to be: six, seven, eight feet in diameter, too large to remove quickly and too embedded in the mud to ignore.

The solution, at least at night, was to paint them white. Painted stumps reflected whatever light the gas lamps and candles could provide, which kept pedestrians and horses from colliding with them in the dark. The city was building itself on top of a cleared forest, one board at a time, while the evidence of what the forest had been sat in the streets like monuments to its own removal.

The nickname "Stumptown" attached to Portland before it had a proper commercial district. It became a term of local pride as the city grew, a piece of origin mythology that admitted, without quite apologizing for it, that Portland had been built on the clearcut of one of the largest temperate forests in North America.

One hundred fifty years later, a Portland coffee company named itself Stumptown Coffee Roasters. The brand spread nationally. Younger customers in other cities encountered the name without necessarily knowing what a stump had to do with coffee, or with Oregon, or with the original Douglas firs that once stood where the buildings now stand.

The nickname outlasted the stumps. The forest is still not back, not where the city is.