Where to Stay in Gresham, Oregon

What is Gresham known for?

Gresham grew out of farmland the Powell brothers settled in the early 1850s and stayed unincorporated until 1905, by which time the name of Walter Quintin Gresham, an American Civil War general and United States Secretary of State, was fixed to it. The Gresham Carnegie Library still stands. Multnomah Greyhound Park gave the place a second sort of crowd, and the listed houses scattered through the older streets, among them the Charles and Fae Olson House, record how the town looked when Portland was still a separate one to the northwest.

What are the main landmarks in Gresham?

Heritage listings do the work. The Gresham Carnegie Library is the most public of them, and the rest are houses: the Charles and Fae Olson House, the William Gedamke House, the Emanuel and Christina Anderson House, the Charles Hunter Hamlin House and the David and Marianne Ott House. Bethel Baptist Church and East Hill Church cover the congregational side.

Multnomah Greyhound Park and the Louise Home Hospital and Residence Hall complete a list that runs domestic and civic rather than monumental.

What is the history of Gresham?

The Powell brothers came first. They took up ground in the early 1850s, when the site was farmland on the Willamette Valley floor and Portland was a separate town a short way to the northwest, and nothing here carried a corporate name for another half-century. Incorporation waited until 1905.

The name honours Walter Quintin Gresham, an American Civil War general who later served as United States Secretary of State, and it was attached to the place well before the metropolitan area grew out to meet it. Multnomah County framed what followed. The Gresham Carnegie Library heads the heritage list, and the houses beneath it, among them the Charles and Fae Olson House, the Emanuel and Christina Anderson House, the William Gedamke House, the Charles Hunter Hamlin House and the David and Marianne Ott House, form the built record of the decades when the town was still small.

Congregations left their own mark. Bethel Baptist Church and East Hill Church survive from that side of the story, and the Louise Home Hospital and Residence Hall stands for a third strand, the institutional building its name still spells out. Multnomah Greyhound Park stands apart from all of it.

Where is Gresham?

Valley floor, county line. Gresham takes up part of the Willamette Valley inside Multnomah County, with Portland pressed against its northwestern edge and touching it again on the southwest, so the division between the two is administrative rather than physical. The Portland Metropolitan Area covers both.

Ground spreads wide enough here that the Gresham Carnegie Library and Multnomah Greyhound Park sit well apart from one another.

What is the climate of Gresham?

The Willamette Valley sets the terms. Gresham lies on its floor within the temperate band of the northern hemisphere, which gives the year a plain division into a warm half and a cool one and keeps the swing between them moderate. Extremes stay rare.

The jazz festival and Multnomah Greyhound Park belong to the warmer months, while the Gresham Carnegie Library and the listed houses along the older streets of Multnomah County carry the rest of the year.

How do you get to Gresham?

Arrival runs through Portland. The larger city lies against Gresham's northwestern edge and carries the transport that serves the whole Portland Metropolitan Area, so a trip in from beyond Oregon means clearing Portland first and then covering the last stretch across Multnomah County. Distances inside the city add up.

Multnomah Greyhound Park, the Gresham Carnegie Library and the heritage houses are spread across a wide municipal area on the Willamette Valley floor, which makes a car the simplest way to link them in a day.