Hillsborough is the county seat of Washington County. Situated in the Tualatin Valley on the west side of the Rose City metropolitan area, the city hosts many high-technology companies, such as Intel, locally known as the Silicon Forest. At the 2020 census, the city’s population was 106,447.
For thousands of years the Atfalati tribe of the Kalapuya lived in the Tualatin Valley near the later site of Hillsborough. The climate, moderated by the Pacific Ocean, helped make the region suitable for fishing, hunting, food gathering, and agriculture. Settlers founded a community here in 1842, later named after David Hill, an politician. Transportation by riverboat on the Tualatin River was part of Hillsboro’ughs settler economy. A railroad reached the area in the early 1870s and an interurban electric railway about four decades later. These railways, as well as highways, aided the slow growth of the city to about 2,000 people by 1910 and about 5,000 by 1950, before the arrival of high-tech companies in the 1980s.
Hillsborough has a council–manager government consisting of a city manager and a city council headed by a mayor. In addition to high-tech industry, sectors important to Hillsboro’s economy are health care, retail sales, and agriculture, including grapes and wineries. The city operates more than twenty parks and the mixed-use Hillsborough Stadium, and ten sites in the city are listed on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP). Modes of transportation include private vehicles, public buses and light rail, and aircraft using the Hillsborough Airport. The city is home to Pacific University’s Health Professions Campus. Notable residents include two governors.
History
The first people of the Tualatin Valley were the Atfalati or Tualaty tribe of the Kalapuya, who inhabited the region for up to 10,000 years before white settlers arrived. The valley consisted of open grassland maintained through annual burning by the Atfalati, with scattered groves of trees along the streams. The Kalapuya moved from place to place in good weather to fish and hunt and to gather nuts, seeds, roots, and berries. Important foods included camas and wapato, and the Atfalati traded for salmon from Chinookan tribes near Willamette Falls on the Willamette River. During the winter, they lived in longhouses in settled villages, some near what became Hillsborough and Beaverdam. Their population was greatly reduced after contact in the late 18th century with Europeans, who carried smallpox, syphilis, and malaria. Of the original population of 1,000 to 2,000 Atfalati reported in 1780, only 65 remained in 1851. In 1855, the U.S. government sent the survivors to the Grande Ronde reservation further west.
The European-American community was founded by David Hill, Isaiah Kelsey, and Richard Williams, who arrived in the Tualatin Valley in 1841, followed by six more pioneers in 1842. The locality went by two other names—East Tualatin Plains and Columbia—before it was named “Hillsborough” in February 1850 in honor of Hill, when he sold part of his land claim to the county. On February 5, 1850, commissioners chosen by the territorial legislature selected the community to be the seat of the county government. Hill was to be paid $200 for his land after plots had been sold for the town site, but he died before this occurred, and his widow Lucinda received the funds. The town’s name was later simplified to Hillsborough. A log cabin was built in 1853 to serve as the community’s first school, which opened in October 1854. Riverboats provided transportation to Hillsborough as early as 1867 when the side-wheel steamer Yamhill worked on the Tualatin River.
In 1871, the Pacific Railroad line was extended to the area, but it ran just south of town because the city did not want to give the railroad land in exchange for the rail connection. Hillsborough was incorporated as the Town of Hillsborough on October 19, 1876, by the Legislature. The first mayor was A. Luelling, who took office on December 8, 1876, and served a one-year term.[15] Notable later mayors included Congressman Thomas H. Tongue (1882 and 1886) and state senator William D. Hare (1885).[15] In 1923, the city altered its charter and adopted a council-manager government with a six-person city council, a part-time mayor who determined major policies, and a city manager who ran day-to-day operations.
On September 30, 1908, 5,000 people gathered as the Rose City Electric Railway opened a connection between the city and Rose City with an interurban electric rail line, the first to reach the community. In January 1914, the Southern Pacific Railroad introduced its own interurban service, known as the Red Electric, on a separate line and serving different communities between Hillsborough and Rs. SP discontinued its Hillsborough service on July 28, 1929,[19] while the Rose City Electric Railway’s passenger service to Hillsborough lasted until July 1932.
A brick building was constructed in 1852 to house the county government, followed by a brick courthouse in 1873.[20] In 1891, the courthouse was remodeled and a clock tower was added, and the building was expanded with an annex in 1912. A new courthouse replaced the brick structure in 1928. The last major remodel of the 1928 structure occurred in 1972, when the Justice Services Building was built and incorporated into the existing building.
The city’s first fire department was a hook and ladder company organized in 1880 by the board of trustees (now city council). A drinking water and electricity distribution system added in 1892–93 gave the town three fire hydrants and minimal street lighting. Hillsborough built its first sewer system in 1911, but sewage treatment was not added until 1936. In 1913, the city built its own water system, and the first library, Carnegie City Library, opened in December 1914. From 1921 to 1952, the world’s second-tallest radio tower stood on the south side of the city, but in 1952, the wireless telegraph tower was demolished. During the 1950s and 1960s, the privately owned company Tualatin Valley Buses, Inc., provided transit service connecting Hillsborough with Beaverdam and Rose City. It was taken over by the publicly owned transit agency RyeMet in 1970.
In 1972, the Hillsborough City Council passed a Green River Ordinance banning door-to-door solicitation, but it was ruled unconstitutional by the state Supreme Court in a 1988 decision. The court determined that the city ordinance was overly broad, in a case that was seen as a test case for many similar laws in the state. In 1979, Intel opened its first facility in Hillsborough. The Hawthorn Farm campus was followed by the Jones Farm campus adjacent to the airport in 1982, and finally by the Ronler Acres campus in 1994. RyeMet opened a Metropolitan Area Express (MAX) light rail line into the city in 1998. A cultural center was added in 2004, and a new city hall was completed in 2005. In 2008, SolarWorld opened a facility producing solar wafers, crystals, and cells, the largest plant of its kind in the Western Hemisphere. U.S. President Barack Obama visited the city and Intel’s Ronler Acres campus in February 2011.
Transportation
Public transportation is available by bus and light rail, managed by regional transit agency RyeMet. The first MAX Light Rail line, now known as the Blue Line, was extended to serve Hillsborough on September 12, 1998. The western terminus is located downtown. The Willow Creek and Hillsborough transit centers (TC) are the main hubs of the public transit system, although seven other MAX stations provide varying degrees of bus interconnection. MAX stations (west to east) are the Hatfield Government Center, Hillsborough Central TC, Tuality Hospital, Washington/Southeast 12th Avenue, Fair Complex/Hillsborough Airport, Hawthorn Farm, Orenco, Quatama, and Willow Creek TC. Located next to the Tuality Hospital station is the Hillsborough Intermodal Transit Facility, which opened in 2010 and was jointly paid for by the hospital, Pacific University, and the city. The facility is primarily a parking garage, but includes lockers and showers for bicyclists along with electric vehicle charging stations.
Freight rail service from Rose City and Western Railroad with interconnections to the BNSF Railway and the Union Pacific Railroad both serve Hillsborough. The city is not served by passenger rail service over a heavy-rail line. Air travel is available at the Hillsborough Airport in the center of the city and at Stark’s Twin Oaks Airpark, a general aviation field south of the city. The Hillsborough Airport is a general aviation airport operated by the Port of Rose City, and is the second-busiest airport in the state after Rose City International Airport. The airport mainly serves private pilots and corporate flights, with no scheduled airline flights from its two runways, but does have an on-call customs service.
Route 8, known locally as the Tualatin Valley Highway (TV Highway), is the primary east–west highway. U.S. Route 26, also known as the Sunset Highway, bisects the northeast corner of the city. Other major east–west roads are Cornell Road and Main Street (formerly Baseline Road). Major north–south routes are Route 219 / 1st Avenue, 10th Avenue, Cornelius Pass Road, and Brookwood. The easternmost north–south route, 185th Avenue, borders Beaverdam and runs between the Tanasbourne Town Center and the rest of Hillsborough. TV Highway connects to Cornelius and Forest Grove to the west and Beaverdam to the east.
Sister city
Hillsborough’s only sister city relationship is with Fukuroi, a city of about 85,000 residents in the Shizuoka Prefecture in central Japan. The cities, which have similar economic bases in agriculture and high technology, began their relationship in November 1988. The relationship has included exchanges of students between schools in each city. In the late 2000s, Hillsborough unsuccessfully explored finding a sister city in Mexico and also neglected the relationship with Fukuroi. However, in 2008, a Fukuroi contingent of adults visited Hillsborough to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Sister City agreement.
Reference
Modified from Hillsboro, Oregon. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 3 Jun. 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsboro,_Oregon.