Fort Vancouver Cultural Landscape Report

Site

General Description

During this period, all former Hudson's Bay Company acreage beyond the 640 acres of the U.S. military reservation, which centered on Fort Plain, fell into the hands of Americans. The small town of Vancouver, on the west edge of the military reservation, increased in population and became a shipping center for produce and lumber. The Company's former outlying farms, had, by 1860, largely fallen into the hands of Americans, but throughout this period, the functional uses of these sites continued to be agrarian in nature.

The most significant impact on the entire area was the completion of the Spokane, Portland and Seattle Railway in 1908, which linked Portland to Vancouver via a railroad bridge, crossed the military reservation at Vancouver Barracks along its south edge, and continued to Pascoe and Spokane in eastern Washington, where it connected to both Great Northern and Northern Pacific railroad lines to the Twin Cities in the midwest, and from there to points on the east coast. This impacted the spatial, organizational and functional aspects of the military reservation's site, but, more importantly, led to an increase in the importance and growth of the town of Vancouver as a shipping center, contributing to its dramatic increase in population. In 1912, the facilities for the newly-established Port of Vancouver were built along the river in the vicinity of the Hudson's Bay Company's Lower Plain Farm, and in 1917 the Interstate Highway Bridge was completed, linking Washington and Oregon via the Pacific Highway (Highway 99), which ran north-south through the town of Vancouver.

Circulation Networks

The principal routes leading from the military reservation in 1860, most of which were based on old Hudson's Bay Company roads, still served as primary arterials at the outbreak of World War I. Upper Mill Road (today East Fifth Street), crossed the reservation from east to west on roughly the same alignment used in previous decades; however, by the early 1870s, it was shifted slightly to the south at the west edge of the reservation, near the old quartermaster's depot, to align with the growing town of Vancouver's Fifth Street. To the east, it connected with a north-south road running along the east edge of the military reservation. Beyond the military reservation the roads to the Back Plains and to Mill Plain essentially followed the same routes established by the Company. A route to the north, Salmon Creek Road, in place by 1860, was still a main road in the teens. The road extending north to Puget Sound from the northwest corner of the reserve in 1860 had been rebuilt by 1914, although it followed much of the earlier alignment until it reached the northwest region of the army post, where, instead of swinging on a diagonal east towards the reserve, it continued south, connecting with Main Street in Vancouver, and forming part of the Pacific Highway.