City of Roses – Khris Soden

City of Roses: The Adventures of Mayor Harry Lane

Mayor Harry Lane, in office from 1905 to 1909, is one of my favorite mayors that Portland ever had. If you’ve never heard of him, you should read the Wikipedia entry on him. Some of his highlights: “Father of the Rose Festival”, pro-suffrage and anti-white supremacy (unlike his grandfather). Oh, and he ended up being a US Senator, too. He hated corruption, and was very hands-on with some of his practices. According to E. Kimbark MacColl in The Shaping of a City (pages 340 – 341), the two incidents drawn in the comic were described by Harry Lane himself and widely reported by others.

City of Roses: Another Riot

And they say downtown is bad these days.

City of Roses: Origin of Stumptown

One of the familiar nicknames for Portland is “Stumptown”, but do you know how it received that name? “Stumptown” just happened to be the first nickname that Portland ever had. Here’s a comic that explains it.
City of Roses comic: Stumptown

City of Roses: Will Overton, Founding Father

Although credit usually goes to Francis Pettygrove and Asa Lovejoy for founding the township that would become Portland, it was really Will Overton that came up with the idea of claiming the land. Here’s a little comic about him that I came up with. William Overton, a City of Roses comic

Stories of Overton meeting his end in Texas are hard to verify. In Harvey Scott’s History of Portland, it’s Pettygrove that describes this as his fate, while it’s Lovejoy’s wife that claims he actually went back to Louisiana to take care of his mother. Either way, there’s not a very good record of Overton’s story.