City of Lake Oswego Kicks Off Centennial Year
Honoring the Past, Celebrating the Present
and Imagining the Future

Lake Oswego turns 100 in 2010!

The year-long celebration will kick off on January 19, 2010 with a VIP special event at the Lakewood Theatre for the inaugural showing of a Lake Oswego historical retrospective video and the public unveiling of the Lake Oswego Building Blocks display, a pictorial history of Lake Oswego neighborhoods.  During the week following the event, the retrospective video will be shown at the Lake Twin Cinema in its entirety for the public. The Building Blocks exhibit will continue on display in the north wing of the Lakewood Center for the Arts through the month of April before traveling all over Lake Oswego with installations at various venues.

The Building Blocks exhibit, one of the many tributes to Lake Oswego’s history, will give residents a glimpse into the development of Lake Oswego neighborhoods in a 20-panel artistic presentation. “We really want to educate, inform and entertain our community with this exhibit,” says Marylou Culver, local historian and Building Blocks curator. “We hope the exhibit will draw people in, make them aware of our history and how they can help preserve it.”

Produced by local historians and curators Marylou Colver, Corinna Campbell‐Sack and Erin O’Rourke‐Meadors, this 20‐panel exhibit showcases the development of Oswego from the mid 1800’s to the present by focusing on how the city grew neighborhood by neighborhood.

“The exhibit conveys historical information and expresses the vitality of the city in each panel. I want people to become aware of Lake Oswego’s unique history,” says Corinna Campbell‐Sack. “Our goal is to preserve Lake Oswego’s robust history by making people aware of it.”

The exhibit highlights the development of Lake Oswego including:

• The Donation Land Claim Act of 1850, which brought the first settlers to the area;
• the Ladd Estate Company that enhanced and capitalized on the city’s natural landscape
• in the early 1900’s;
• the construction of Lake View Villas in 1912 bringing the only suburban lake resort near Portland at the time and marking the beginning of the community of Lake Grove;
• the beginning of the transition of recreational summer cottages to year‐round homes in the 1930s;
• the development of Mountain Park, which was destined to be the largest homeowners association in the United States in the late 1960s and remains to be one of the largest today;
• the expansion in the Holly Orchard area from agriculture to neighborhoods with Tabaridge, the earliest development in the area in 1979 and the site of the first Street of Dreams in Lake Oswego in 1980.

“We can retain some of the history for the future if citizens have some appreciation. As proud residents of the town, we would like to not only preserve Lake Oswego’s history but showcase it,” says Marylou Colver, who conceived the Building Blocks project.

Visit www.LakeOswego100.com for news, updates, history, photos – past and present, event information and an opportunity for community interaction with planners. News bulletins and updates can also be found at www.twitter.com/lakeoswegoinfo.