On the Margins of Prosperity: The Mortimore Family in Oregon

Abstract

RonaldH. Limbaugh Ob the Margins of Prosperity TheMortimore FamilyinOregon EFORE the 1950s, small farmers and their families in theAmeri can West lived on the margins of urban-industrial society. Rural families tended tobe large, influential, and wide-ranging, with parents, children, and sometimes grandparents and other relatives living under the same roof. Extended family networks provided emotional support and served various economic and social functions, including employment, protection, education, religion, and recreation.1 Family size and function changed as the new urban era created the nuclear family, amore pragmatic, less inclusive structure with more limited func tions. In itsmost idealized version, as the popularity of the "Ozzie and Harriet" series on television suggests, the nuclear family was amonocratic, staticmodel of Waspish values, a powerful icon ofAmerican popular cul ture. Since the cultural revolution that began in the 1960s, however, much of this idealistic imagery has fallen away to reveal a much more diverse and dynamic family structure that is still evolving today.2 The Mortimore family story exemplifies many of the characteristics and problems of extended families trying to cope with the changing realities of life inmodern America. The Mortimores reached the Pacific Northwest at the beginning of the twentieth century,more than a century after their British or Scots-Irish ancestors had landed on the East Coast. After generations of acculturation, the Mortimores did not have to endure the burdens of racial prejudice or the language differences that stood in the way of the thousands of minority families who were also seeking a better chance in the FarWest. Nevertheless, the road to upward mobil ity contained two formidable obstacles, poverty and ignorance. The lack of both capital and education severely handicapped young families in O 204 OHQ vol. 106, no. 2 ? 2005 Oregon Historical Society All photographs courtesyof theauthor The Mortimores first home inPortland, at East Fifty-Eighth and Glisan streets, in 1906 search of theAmerican Dream, although not everyone recognized their own shortcomings. Farmers, inparticular, could see the obvious need for money, but few advocated education as an answer to the Farm Problem, as the late nineteenth-century decline of agricultural prosperity came to be called. For many small farmers at the turn of the twentieth century, better times ahead meant better crops, better markets, higher prices, less expensive transportation, and better equipment. Few thought of changing occupations as the new century dawned. An exception was Edward Merit Fenton Mortimore, who abandoned hisMadras, Oregon, homestead in the spring of 1906, failing by two years tomeet the residency requirements for title.Though times were relatively good for farmers in the pre-war years leading up to the Sarajevo crisis in 1914, after a three-year struggle Edward saw little future on a remote, dry-land tract covered with sagebrush and far from the nearest railroad terminus. Needing a reliable source of income, he took his family to Portland. IfEdward was slow to accept defeat as a homesteader, his wife, Martha Elizabeth Tucker Mortimore, was not. She hated the primitive life and Limbaugh, On theMargins of Prosperity 205 refused to bear children in a tent. Three years earlier, at her insistence, Edward had rented space inMadras and built a one-room cottage where she could be near a doctor during her second, and last,pregnancy. Doubt less her fears and frustrations as a frontier farmer's wife weighed heavily in the decision to return to the Willamette Valley, where they had started married life eight years before. Portland beckoned to her like a biblical oasis, a glistening City on a Hill.3 Martha s spiritual imagery had secular roots. Portland was an alluring city tomiddle-class Euro-American families in 1906, as a new generation of progressive businessmen took charge of planning and development. Urban reformwas a persistent theme in the Progressive Era, and Portland's leaders mirrored national thinking in promoting beautification, temper ance, zoning, election reform, mass transit, and other improvements to make the city look better and function more efficiently.City fatherswere also profit-minded, encouraging urban expansion and industrial growth to prevent economic stagnation and offset the threat from upstart Se attle two hundred miles to the north. The result was a decade of reform, prosperity...