A short-lived power house for the Willamette Bridge Railway Company’s pioneering electric streetcar lines over the old Steel Bridge into Albina. Less than a year after being constructed, the plant was heavily impacted by a big flood in 1890 and was out of operation for some time. By 1892, the dynamo had been removed and transferred to the new central power house at the Inman, Poulsen & Co. sawmill.
Tracking down a definitive location for this power house proved to be tricky. Labbe (p67) briefly says, “The plant was located by the Montgomery sawmill, near the present approach to the Broadway Bridge, where a plentiful supply of water was available.” However, no contemporaneous map that I’ve found has supported this placement.
Articles referenced below finally allowed me to narrow the location to the northern end of the original town of Albina. One article mentioned that the plant was being built about halfway between the Albina ferry [at the foot of N Albina Avenue] and the “grain elevator”, which is almost certainly a reference to the massive Pacific Coast terminal elevator that had just recently been built a little further north along the Willamette and was already considered to be an Albina landmark. This immediately ruled out the Broadway Bridge location, which is south of the Albina ferry landing.
The next reference to the plant’s location was that it was was “near the O. R. & N. Co.’s incline”. This put it nearer to the Union Pacific rail yards, still situated at the base of N Greeley Avenue today, a location that is indeed halfway between the ferry landing and the grain elevator. But what was the incline? The answer was revealed in a 1901 Sanborn atlas: a line of rail on piles descending into the Willamette River in order to unload cargo from barges. This incline ended near N Essex Street, which was also the northern end of the Montgomery Dock No. 2 [note the same name as in Labbe, but it’s not a sawmill].
Finally, an article stating that the Albina Water Company “also will occupy part of this building” would seem to locate it definitively in the block bounded by N Loring, N Randolph, N Nesmith and the railroad line, as the Albina Light & Water Company’s pump house still occupied this site in the 1901 Sanborn atlas.