"The closer you get to the present, the more difficult it is to determine what will be historical 50 years from now." --OHS's Marsha Matthews

by CHRIS LYDGATE
clydgate@wweek.com

Standing deep in the catacombs, dwarfed by rows of ancient metal shelves stretching toward distant windows, Richard Engeman searches for a word to describe the labyrinth of artifacts surrounding him.

"It's boggling," the Oregon Historical Society's director of manuscripts and archives says at last. "The first time I saw it, I thought, 'Oh my God, what have
I gotten myself into?'"

The society's anonymous Northwest Portland warehouse bulges with roughly 80,000 historical objects, including 4,000 Native American artifacts, 2,000 works
of art, 10,000 costume pieces and approximately 160 miles of film, enough tiny celluloid squares to stretch from their home at Northwest 14th Avenue and Glisan Street to the south side of Seattle.

The society wasn't looking to move, but the booming Pearl District property values offered the organization the chance for some long-needed financial stability.

Two months ago OHS sold the warehouse for $12.75 million to Centennial Real Estate, a Dallas-based developer that intends to gut the 160,000-square-foot warehouse and lease tiny parcels to telecommunications companies looking for space to run their computers.

In the meantime, the society faces the Herculean task of moving the entire collection to its new home, whose suburban location, according to OHS spokeswoman Erin Malecha, is not being disclosed due to shaky security considerations in the new building. Lile Moving and Storage, a national company that OHS has used in the past, started hauling the precious cargo Jan. 8 and will probably take at least two months to completely empty the trucks and fill the waiting shelves. There is, after all, a lot of history here.

Wandering through the collection is like crawling through the city's collective unconscious. Here's the giant neon sign of the late, lamented Fox Theater. There's the soda fountain from Newberry's, complete with horseshoe counter and naugahyde swivel seats. An old dentist's chair whose padded hand-rests bear the marks of many a patient's white-knuckled clenching. A slew of crates containing a gigantic, three-dimensional topographic map of the interstate highway system.

Over there sits a '58 Dodge Coronet, a symphony of chrome and fins with a push-button tranny and enough room in the back seat to commit any number of youthful indiscretions--and speaking of which, here are Bob Packwood's senatorial papers, all 2,200 boxes of them. Cans of film rising like stalagmites from the floor. Barbells, squash rackets, fishing harpoons, spinning wheels, pianos, rocking horses, empty barrels by the dozen, croquet mallets, typewriters, rusty sawblades 6 feet tall, their wicked teeth glinting through the gloom.

Nearly 130 years of collecting, soliciting, researching and accepting donations in the name of Oregon's past have netted some indisputable historical treasures, such as a 10,000-year-old sagebrush-bark sandal. Others, well, let's just say that history is in the eye of the beholder. "We guess the future," explains Marsha Matthews, director of artifact collections and exhibits. "The closer you get to the present, the more difficult it is to determine what will be historical 50 years from now."

The collection's relentless swelling won't slow anytime soon. Its guardians know that unless time itself stops, accumulation is really the only possibility for the body of tangible history they watch over.

--Christie Scotty contributed to this article.