The Little Red House
Contrary to lore, it was never a pony express way station, but the cottage in Bridlemile has a long, rich history.
By Audrey Metcalfe
As published in the “SW Community Connection”, September 1997
(Story courtesy of the Southwest Community Connection and Pamplin Media Group)
The little red house on the corner of SW Shattuck Road and Hamilton Street in Bridlemile endures amidst local curiosity and rumor.
Mention the house to almost anyone living in the area and you’ll likely hear the common legend repeated with relish – “Did you know the place was once a station for pony express riders?”
I’d like to dispel the rumor,” scoffs 41-year old Roger Hancock, owner of the house and the third generation of his family to live there.
Hancock, dressed in a plaid flannel shirt, high-top leather work boots, jeans and a tattered jacket, is a stocky, optimistic man, easy to talk with, especially about his passions.
And one of his passions is family history.
He points out that historical records show the one-time farmhouse was built sometime before 1860 by Andrew Tigard, an immigrant from Arkansas. Andrew arrived in Oregon with his brother Wilson, who founded the town bearing the family name.
The area, now in the Bridlemile neighborhood, was called Fairvale in those times, Hancock adds. Shattuck Road, then named Cooper Road, ran by the house as it does today. Hess Road, SW Hamilton Street today, came from Scholls Ferry Road and stopped at Cooper Road.
“In those days, the house was out-of-the-way. It wasn’t on a route to anywhere,” Hancock says by way of offering evidence against the pony express story.
Hancock is the great-grandson of two Fairvale families who immigrated to Oregon in the later part of the 1800’s.
He chuckles at the fate that brought the ancestral home of his maternal great-grandparents, Edward and Esther Rogers, into his possession.
“I hadn’t intended to buy it. I was mowing the lawn at grandfather’s house next door when I saw a Realtor pounding a sign into the lawn.” He gets into the story by lightly pounding one hand into the palm of the other.
But when Hancock, a self-proclaimed packrat, learned the old homestead might be demolished, he stepped in and bought it.
So in 1981, the house returned to the Rogers family, after 40 years of offering shelter to strangers.
Hancock, who has never married, treasures the old place partly because he can’t stand to see anything lost but also because his life is tied to the land by memories passed on to him by his grandfather, Arthur Rogers.
The house is a curiosity in Bridlemile because long periods of time pass without any apparent activity there.
Hancock, somewhat apologetically, says he should do something about the untrimmed rhododendrons, chipped house paint and years of moss collecting on the roof. Then he gets side tracked talking about the time he spends reconditioning steam engines – his first love. A vintage 1903 steam-engine driven farm tractor is stuffed in a garage beside the house. Another 1896 tractor resides in the rose garden out back.
If Hancock hasn’t maintained the house in pristine condition, he has preserved its history.
Hancock, an archivist of hundreds of old family photos, carefully withdraws an old black and white photo of the house from the safety of an envelope.
Glancing from the photo, taken around the turn of the century, to the house itself, the viewer has trouble believing that nearly 100 years has intervened.
The trees are larger, a TV antenna adorns the roof and the once white house is now red.
Inside, plumbing and appliances are modernized, but the hand-hewn logs of the original floor betray the age and workmanship of pioneer skill.
“I remember sitting beside my grandfather and listening to him tell stories. Sometimes he told them a hundred times over. It was hard not to remember them,” says Hancock, who clearly enjoys retelling the stories.
Arthur Rogers was 70 years old when Hancock was born. But the patriarch lived for another 30 years, painting a verbal portrait of the family for Hancock to remember – and pass on.
Hancock’s maternal great-grandparents, Edward and Esther Rogers, came from Penzance in Cornwall, England. The family arrived in Oregon in 1875 and purchased the farmhouse and 180 acres of Andrew Tigard’s farm.
They raised Arthur and his 11 siblings on the farm.
At one time, 18 people lived in the little two-room house, explains Hancock, who confesses he is still astonished by the fact.
The couple also raised herds of sheep and acres of apple, pear and cherry trees and grains. Several pear trees still grow near the side of the house.
One of two coastal pine seedlings planted by Esther Rogers continues to grow in the front yard.
The seedling was a souvenir of a rare family vacation at the Coast. Passersby still admire the one remaining pine in the front yard. The pine is now designated a Heritage Tree by the City.
In 1891, Edward Rogers donated one third of an acre of his land to the county to build the Fairvale School. The two-room school house, located just south of the farmhouse and across Cooper Road, served the community until 1928.
Another contribution to the community came from Joe Rogers, one of Arthur’s brothers. Joe lost an arm in a saw mill accident. He returned to Fairvale and launched the Fairvale Grocery Co., a general store that stood just across the street from the Rogers farmhouse. Eventually, Joe moved the store to the corner of the Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway and Shattuck Road where the store remained open until about 1950. He also started selling gasoline, which was delivered in wooden wagons – another fact that astonishes Hancock. Today, Albertson’s is on the Fairvale Store site.
In 1922, Arthur married Barbara Streiff, a milliner and daughter of his Swiss neighbors Albrecht and Barbara Wartenweiler Streiff. The Streiffs owned a place just to the north of the Rogers place on Cooper Road.
The three-story Streiff farmhouse remains standing and in poor condition although not forgotten by Roger Hancock, who owns it.
Eventually Arthur and Barbara moved into a place of their own, next door to the Rogers homestead. Today, Hancock owns their small, white house too.
Arthur and his wife had four daughters. The second oldest, Arlene, is Hancock’s mother, who still lives in Bridlemile.
When the Depression hit, the 180-acre farm was sold off in pieces to pay debts, Hancock says with a tinge of bitterness.
When Roger Hancock is not working as a machinist in Northwest Portland, he criss-crosses Oregon searching for bargains in model train engines and old farm equipment.
It’s the steel hardened stuff of the history Hancock likes to share – far from flimsy fantasies about pony express stations on roads that lead nowhere