Some pictures of Portland’s early microbrewery scene
I’ve been spending a lot of time over the past couple of months processing collections -- putting them in order, creating guides, having my colleagues review the guides, and then (hopefully) getting those guides out there into the wider world for researchers to discover.
I was finishing up a guide for the Fred Bowman Papers, one that we have only in digitized form (the originals still live with Bowman).
Fred Bowman co-founded Portland Brewing Company in 1986 with Art Larrance and Jim Goodwin.
Read about Portland Brewing Company on Wikipedia.
I’ll be posting information about that when the guide is up, but for now know that it is a delightful collection with digitized photographs showing the renovation of the original Portland Brewing location and early events at the brewery – including all the demolition, construction, and brewing equipment delivery! All the photographs from this collection have been digitized and are available in Oregon Digital. The digitized documents, which aren’t online, include newspaper articles, Portland Brewing business documents, and a personal pocketbook with Bowman’s handwritten notes.
I know, this is a long lead up to the main subject of this post... Hang with me a bit longer...
In tying up the loose ends for this guide I was reminded of a set of photographs we digitized and returned to Art Larrance. Those have also been accessible through Oregon Digital, but we didn’t have a collection called out for Larrance. That will change. Soon. Ish.
Archivists are great at saving stuff and helping people find stuff. Sometimes archivists need help finding their own stuff. That was the case this afternoon when I went on a search through the archives shared drives for the original scans of the Larrance materials. A student who worked for me in 2014 scanned these items. He graduated.
Before you PANIC and think I can’t find stuff, my escape hatch for getting the e-versions of these records would have been to download them individually from Oregon Digital. It would have been tedious, but doable.
In my search I happened upon this set of slides/negatives we digitized from the Fred Eckhardt collection. I figured the internets would appreciate this.
Pics of Cartwright Brewing Co.
There are also a few lovelies from BridgePort. Karl Ockert on the left, Matt Sage on the right.
And of the Widmer Bros (and their dad).
Lots more where these come from! Learn about all the OHBA collections and see a list of the oral histories online at:
https://guides.library.oregonstate.edu/brewingarchives
