The Vanport community scattered after a massive flood in 1948, but a cluster of trees whose shade they might have enjoyed still grow there today.
The Vanport Cottonwoods are located in a grove near the eastern end of the slough at the Portland International Raceway, constructed on the historic Vanport site. On May 29, the Oregon Heritage Tree Program welcomed the historic trees as the 86th addition to an esteemed group of trees.
It was a misty day, and survivors and descendants from Vanport gathered with members of the Heritage Tree Program to share their connection to the site and its importance to their families, communities and country at large.
Among them were former Vanport resident Ed Washington and Levita Gilmore Jones, a descendant of residents, as well as David Harrelson, cultural resources manager for the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. Portland City Councilor Elana Pirtle-Guiney stood alongside community members and organizers, including arborist Ryan Gilpin, who managed the ecological aspects of the project.
“Potentially Vanport kids were playing underneath (these Cottonwoods) in the 1940s,” Gilpin said.
As the cottonwoods continue to reproduce in the future, Gilpin said they will keep telling the story of Vanport, just like their parent trees — and “like many of the children growing up in Portland and other places who tell the story of Vanport.”
Dave Hedberg emceed. Chair of the Oregon Heritage Tree Committee, he leads an interpretive walking tour of downtown Portland he calls “From Stumptown to Treetown.”
Hedberg cited Vanport survivor and civic leader Ed Washington as part of his inspiration for seeking a Vanport tree nomination. Washington was a child during the flood. His family had moved to Portland in 1944 from Birmingham, Alabama to work at the shipyards. Hedberg and Washington volunteered on the Heritage Tree Committee together.
The story of Vanport reveals the racist underbelly of Portland’s past — a past in many ways still present in the economic and geographical divisions of the city today.
Hedberg said the nomination of the Vanport cottonwoods “reflects community-based oral histories,” knowledge often dismissed from a traditional historical canon.
“We are in an environment where there are people that want to silence histories that aren’t 100% positive,” Hedberg said. “In my opinion, that is censorship.”
Washed away, but not gone
Vanport was constructed in one year and operated from 1942 to 1948, primarily in the Vancouver and Portland shipyards — Vanport’s respective namesakes. It was the second largest and most diverse city in Oregon at the time.
According to the Oregon History Project, up to 42,000 people lived in nearly 10,000 homes in Vanport. Shipbuilding magnate Henry Kaiser created the 650-acre town in response to urgent housing shortages during the country’s early involvement in World War II.
Kaiser purchased a floodplain outside of Portland city limits (thus outside city authority), using federal funds and cheap materials to build the city. The businessman traveled the country, recruiting men and women to work in his shipyards. His efforts attracted nearly 100,000 people who he then employed at the shipyards. At the height of the war, up to 10,000 Black Americans lived in Vanport, more than three times as many as had been living in Portland two years earlier.
Other marginalized groups lived in Vanport as well; many Native Americans lived there, especially members of the Confederated Tribes of Grande Ronde. Japanese American families exiting imprisonment from the Oregon State Fairgrounds also lived in Vanport.
Vanport was integral to West Coast war production; Vanport residents built nearly half of U.S. aircraft carriers used in WWII. Meant to be temporary, Vanport addressed a serious housing shortage in Portland at the time, a predominantly white city not welcoming to workers and families who weren’t white.
The city’s housing economy could not handle the influx of labor and people flocking to its shipyards — and city leaders did not want to. The real estate industry’s Code of Ethics barred Black occupants from living in most parts of the city.
Among a flush of press, Vanport was referred to as the “Negro Project,” the “Miracle City” and the “Northwest’s unique sociological experiment.”
Vanport’s community housing, hospitals, most of its recreation centers and shops were racially segregated. White people lived in separated zones and Vanport generally adhered to Jim Crow-era standards except for schools and theaters, which were integrated.
Portland, in the 1940s, had long been known as what a national Black leader called “the most prejudiced (city) in the west.” Around 2,000 Black people lived in Portland before WWII, with very small populations in the rest of Oregon.
This can likely be attributed to Oregon’s state constitution, which initially prohibited Black people from living in the state, as well as Oregon’s chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, which in the 1920s had up to 35,000 members.
On May 30, 1948, disaster struck. Vanport was wiped out by Columbia River floodwaters. Fifteen people were killed and 18,000 left homeless. Initially, residents were sent to temporary refugee camps in public buildings. Many left Portland.
Over time, some Black and Indigenous families who stayed were displaced to deteriorated public housing. Many Black Portlanders were then de facto segregated into North Portland neighborhoods, such as the Albina neighborhood.
Thomas Meinzen, operations director for the Vanport Placemarking Project and author of the written dedication, said Portlanders today needs to understand “how hard it was for people to find housing if they were Black or brown, and how those inequalities continue today in who owns homes and who has access to money, access to shade and clean air, who lives where in the Portland area – it’s all connected.”
“Particularly in a time where our federal government is working to further marginalize communities that have been marginalized in history, and propel us back into some of the racist policies of our past, it’s so important that we remember where we came from and the context in which our communities developed,” Meinzen said. “Vanport is such an important part of that story.”
The art of remembrance
Today there are few remnants of Vanport’s physical existence. The land that once housed over 40,000 people is now home to the Portland International Raceway and the artificial Vanport wetland, created to mitigate environmental damage from the airport.
The Vanport Mosaic — a “memory-activism platform,” according to organizers — was founded in 2014 to document and honor the survivors and descendents of Vanport, as well as to foster resistance through collective memory.
Mosaic leaders say they are a “community-led collective of story-keepers, cultural organizers, historians, media makers, artists, educators, students and advocates.” They “tell stories with, not about, Portland’s communities of color, particularly those with roots in Vanport and Albina.”
The nonprofit has curated an extensive collection of first-hand accounts from Vanport, the flood and its aftermath. Every spring, the Vanport Mosaic Festival commemorates the disaster with exhibits, oral history recordings, reunions and celebrations of former Vanport residents.
This year’s roster included the induction of the Vanport Cottonwoods into the Oregon Heritage Tree Program, in collaboration with Oregon’s Travel Information Council’s Heritage Tree Committee, Portland Parks & Recreation Urban Forestry and the Vanport Placemarking Project.
The trees range from 75-100 feet tall with an average crown spread of 34 feet, and are estimated to be approximately 90 years old.
Researchers compared in-person observations of trees growing at Portland International Raceway with archival aerial photographs of the groves from the 1940s onwards.
The typical procedure for determining the age of a tree involves boring into the truck and removing a cylinder-shaped sample to count the rings. However, this procedure exposes trees to infestations and disease, and the Vanport Cottonwoods are old and already vulnerable to these things.
That was a no-go, according to Gilpin, the arborist.
“I didn’t know anybody with equipment to bore cottonwoods this big,” Gilpin said.
The Heritage Tree Program cannot be completely certain that the Vanport Cottonwoods populated the outskirts of the housing project in the 1940s. The photographic evidence is nonetheless very strong.
“We’re telling a story that isn’t often reflected in these heritage trees,” Hedberg said. “Most of the heritage trees in the past have been about white men and pioneers, because they have dominated the history books.”
“A lot of folks can quickly get behind a story about World War II, and (Vanport) was absolutely critical to the war effort. But this is also a story about BIPOC people we’ve forgotten that were critical to that war effort,” Hedberg said.
Hedberg encouraged anyone who knows a tree that should be honored to submit a nomination here.
“Moving forward,” he said, “we need more people to nominate new, diverse, interesting Oregon stories.”
This article appears in June 10, 2026.