Misnomer, Ore.

Most of Oregon's Willamette River was shaded to the water's edge by a vast and unbroken Douglas fir forest in 1845, but two optimistic New Englanders who had just decided to found a metropolis on its west bank paid little attention to this awesome sylvan roadblock. They had a more important problem--picking a name for their dream city. Neither wasted a moment considering any local Indian words. Massachusetts-born Asa Lovejoy insistently cried: "Boston!" Maine-born Francis Pettygrove stubbornly cried: "Portland!" Finally they tossed a big, old-fashioned copper one-cent piece. Petty-grove and Portland won.

Both partners felt, as they set about chopping down trees, that they were transplanting New England to the Northwest. But though many a New Englander followed them, Portland persisted in developing a tone of its own. In 1851, for instance, the stumps in downtown streets were whitewashed to keep late (and often unsteady) pedestrians from tripping over them. An early Portland matron startled the populace with a carriage robe made of the breast feathers of 144 canvasback ducks. And Portland's pioneer St. Charles Hotel boasted a lock on every door and a hand-knitted wrapper on every chamber pot.

For more than a century--while Portland (pop. 373,628) grew bigger than its namesake--few people bothered to wonder whether or not it had been misnamed. Last week, however, Portland Author Stewart (Holy Old Mackinaw, Ethan Allen, Murder Out Yonder) Holbrook, a transplanted Vermonter himself, was suggesting that Portland should be Portland no longer. Backed by a committee of six, he petitioned the city council to let Portlanders vote on changing the city's name in a special election this autumn.

"Even in the Midwest," he complained, "it is necessary to explain that we do not live in Maine, while on the Atlantic Coast it is taken for granted that anyone from Portland means Maine's." On top of that, he pointed out, there are more than a dozen other Portlands in the U.S.* The committee suggested an Oregon Indian name first noted by Lewis & Clark: Multnomah.

Though Portland is already used to the word (it is in Multnomah County, and has both a Multnomah Hotel and a Multnomah College), most of the citizenry showed boredom or open hostility to the idea. Local officials seemed genuinely horrified at the prospect of the expense and bother involved. Cried another Portland writer, Richard L. Neuberger, in summing up the general reaction: "I think Neuberger is a hell of a name, too, but . . . I'm not going to change it now."

* The U.S. Postal Guide lists others in Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.