Brian's Ghost Town Safari #3: Tonquin

This is when I realized my hobby was getting serious.

In February, I made plans to go to the gun range with a friend. I hadn’t been shooting in a while, she’d never done it, and we’d found a discount on an introductory handgun class. It was to be held at the Tri-County Gun Club outside Sherwood, a good ways drive from our respective houses, and so as the date of the class neared I looked up the route on Google Maps to see how long it would take us to get there. Then I spotted an unfamiliar placename on the map.

Fig. 6.1: I used to work at a trucking company where Google Maps was the only website we had access to. I spent a lot of my down time exploring places like this virtually.

The greyed-out, widely kerned placenames usually correspond to places that are unincorporated and don’t have their own zip codes. Some ghost towns appear on Maps that way, and this one looked like it could be one of that species of towns that has kind of lost its independent identity and merged into the surrounding exurbia. I looked up Tonquin, Oregon, and that’s exactly what had happened. Once I saw that there was a picturesquely shabby historic building there, too, I knew we were going to have to make a detour.

Tonquin, Washington County, OR

Est. 1908

After receiving some quality firearms education (I’ll put in a plug for 540 Tactical here, I promise it’s not paid sponsorship) we drove back along SW Tonquin Road and turned left at the WES tracks. Here, sandwiched by a quarrying operation to the west and Tualatin’s new-build tract homes to the northeast, was Tonquin.

Fig. 6.2: All aboard.

Just west of the tracks, the center and raison d’être of the vanished place looms large. The Tonquin Electric Transformer Substation (as the state historic preservation office calls it) was built circa 1913 in a Spanish Revival style that might be familiar to residents of Northeast Portland. The building provided power for nearby sections of the Oregon Electric Railway, an interurban train service; it also appears to have served as a post office for the small community that sprung up around the stop.

Fig. 6.3: Check out those OG wooden louvers.

The MAX and WES systems were not the first commuter train services in the Portland metro area. You may have seen old tracks poking through the asphalt in various spots around town, but not only was the city crisscrossed with streetcars in the early 20^th century, there was a whole passenger rail network spread across Western Oregon. The PEPCO line, whose main right of way is now the Springwater Corridor, spread deep into rural Clackamas County. The OER connected downtown Portland to Salem, Corvallis, and Eugene. Now, I’m not a gearhead and I’m not going to go into the details of rail gauges or different kinds of rolling stock or anything. I’m mostly interested in the social effects the trains must have had. What would it mean to be able to commute from Salem to Portland at the turn of the twentieth century? What would it be like for a rural community like, say, Monitor to be accessible by rail from the city? I’m only just beginning to learn about the topic and looking at the PEPCO and OER maps lately has been blowing my mind, not least for all the ghostly station names. (And check out this recently-made Underground-style map of all the metro area’s interurban lines.)

Before the OER was built the Tonquin area was a nameless stretch of farmland. According to my edition of Oregon Geographic Names, its very identity as a locale came straight from the railroad and its promoters: “When the Oregon Electric Railway was built in 1907-08, it was the policy of the company to establish stations with names of historic interest to Oregonians and the station Tonquin was named for the ship that brought the Astor party to Astoria.”

Not to digress too far, but the story of the Tonquin is worth retelling. New York-based fur mogul John Jacob Astor sent the ship west in 1811 to set up a trading post at the mouth of the Columbia and gather pelts for sale in China. After establishing Astoria as the first white settlement in the Pacific Northwest, they sailed north to begin trading for pelts on Vancouver Island. They never returned. Eventually, the ship’s only survivor, a native Quinault man named Joseachal who had been working for the Astorians as an interpreter, returned to the mouth of the Columbia to tell the tale.

Fig. 6.4: The Tonquin being boarded, complete with contemporary fake news chyron

The Tonquin had been commanded by one Joseph Thorn, a 32-year-old Barbary War hero whose arrogant and capricious leadership had already cost him the crew’s loyalty. Apparently, during trade negotiations with the Tla-o-qui-aht nation on Vancouver Island, Thorn had lost his temper again – fatally, this time. He smacked his interlocutor across the face with a fur. Fighting broke out and the outnumbered Astorians were quickly slaughtered. Joseachal was taken as a slave. However, one wounded man was left alive on the ship as the Tla-o-qui-aht retreated for the night. When they returned to loot the Tonquin’s stores the following day, the survivor torched the powder magazine and blew up the ship in a spectacular act of revenge. It’s a grim story – pretty far from the pleasant monikers like Springfield or Hillsdale that we usually give our planned towns – but it is interesting, I’ll give the OER that.

If we’re talking names, though, we can go further back. Astor’s ship’s name was a variant spelling of Tonkin, which was then the Romanized term for northern Vietnam: Đông Kinh. There are a million towns in the United States named after locations overseas, from Paris, Texas, to Canton, Ohio, but I’m not aware of any other placenames of Vietnamese origin. Tonquin might be unique.

Naturally, the announcement of a station serving this sleepy section of the valley led to a flurry of property speculation. An incomplete grid of numbered streets still exists around the substation today, indicating that the area was platted separately from the surrounding burghs; newspapers of the 1900s and 1910s are full of breathless advertisements and land deals. One early investor in Tonquin was A. L. Barbur, the Portland city auditor for whom the clogged artery in Southwest is named.

Fig. 6.5: Call Billy Grippo now.

The area was probably never much busier than it is today. As far as I can tell from The Oregonian’s archives, only two newsworthy events ever happened in Tonquin after the station opened. First, in 1916, a murder victim was found in a ditch nearby. Then, in 1918, there was an accident involving a pair of railroad hand carts. Two teams of workers were returning the carts to the substation at the end of the day, pumping along the tracks, when one of the men on the lead cart lost his hat and stopped the cart to pick it up. The other cart’s operators didn’t notice and kept on seesawing along until they collided. Fortunately, since they were right on the rail line, all four men could be rushed to the hospital in Portland by train. Most other mentions of Tonquin in the newspapers relate either to property sales or misdemeanor arrests.

Like many other big booms in the American West, the era of interurban rail was short-lived. Ridership on the OER peaked in 1920. As the personal automobile began its inexorable rise to domination of our built environment, rail commuter numbers tumbled across the country. (Meanwhile, the intra-urban streetcar lines that fed into them were allegedly bought up and steered into deliberate collapse by a cabal of auto manufacturers. The “streetcar conspiracy” is a very big and controversial story so I won’t get into it here. You might recognize it as the plot of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which is probably still the best movie ever made about American transportation. I’ve always thought that if they ever make a sequel, it should be about Roger and Jessica teaming up with Jane Jacobs to stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway.)

The OER began closing branch lines in 1931 and ceased passenger service altogether in 1933, only 25 years after it opened. The Tonquin substation was abandoned and the post office closed. Overnight, Tonquin lost any pretensions of being a town. The railroad still ran through it – the OER line was operated by Burlington Northern for freight through the rest of the 20^th century, and this section is now used by the WES – but trains no longer stopped. The federal government still has the name on the books as a “populated place,” but it’s not census-designated and does not have its own zip code.

Tonquin was never a major hub of activity, just a quiet spot on the fringe of the metro area with an exurban mix of residential and industrial buildings. This is what makes it an interesting variety of ghost town. It’s not that it was destroyed or abandoned, it’s just no longer as much of a distinct locale. The railroad station was the seed out of which the place grew, and it’s been disused for over a century. Sherwood and Tualatin have grown around it and blurred its borders.

If I was a real journalist or historian, and if I’d known I was going to write this, I would have stopped there a little bit longer. I’d have gone up to one of the houses across from the substation, knocked on the door, and asked if Tonquin exists as a community for its residents. Do people lend each other tools, give each other lifts, invite one another over for dinner? Are people proud to live in Tonquin? Maybe it’s not a ghost town at all, not for them. (If you know anyone who lives there, please direct them to this article!) But to the rest of the world, Tonquin, Oregon is just a label – and one absent from most maps.

Like I said, I’m not much of a rail guy, but I am kind of interested in doing some more exploration and seeing how the interurbans affected settlement, community-building, and placemaking. At some point I’m going to check out the Oregon Electric Railway museum outside Salem, and there’s supposed to be another one of these Spanish Revival substations in the similarly-faded locale of Waconda nearby. I’ve also been told there are a lot of railroad artifacts left behind on the eastern end of the PEPCO line. Like most things I’ve looked at so far on the blog, the interurbans can be a real rabbit hole.