A hundred years ago, Polk County, Oregon, called itself the “Hop Center of the World.” A little self-aggrandizing, sure, but accurate: By producing the key ingredient for brewing beer, Oregon’s hop industry powered American beer making throughout the 20th century. And since 2013, Tiah Edmunson-Morton, an archivist at Oregon State University, has been collecting the industry’s ephemera and records for the Oregon Hops & Brewing Archives.
Edmunson-Morton sifts through retirees’ garages and scans Facebook pages, collecting oral histories and cataloguing documents from Oregon breweries. The result is a trove of technical research, beer koozies, trade magazines, photographs and historical writing about the lives of pickers, brewers and farmers, illustrating the contours and culture of 150 years of Oregon history — from Chinese immigrant farmers, who were integral to the economy but excluded from land ownership, to the Native American migrant workers who traveled from newly created reservations to pick hops. Edmonson-Morton also chronicles the role of women in the industry and teaches classes and writes about hop history.
The archive records the past, but it is by no means stuck there: Edmunson-Morton continues to collect material from contemporary breweries, creating a record of Oregon’s lively present-day beer scene. She tables at festivals, finds donors to help the cause, and joins every beer or hop-related organization she can find. “This was not something I wanted to do for my love of the beverage,” she said, “but more out of a love for place and good stories.”
Theo Whitcomb is an editorial intern at High Country News. We welcome reader letters. Email him a theo.whitcomb@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline A bright and hoppy Oregon history.
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