Skip to the Street Name Chart Below

The citizens of Forest Grove have renamed the city's streets twice in its history: first in 1892, and again in 1949. This is often an issue for residents who are researching the history of their homes, as current street addresses may not match with those in historic records. 

How and why did this renaming happen? Before 1892, many streets in town were named after trees, such as Cedar, Oak, Pine and Spruce. These names were in no particular order on the street grid, so visitors would have to ask directions to find specific addresses. In 1892, the city decided to make the street grid more rational. They renamed most roads that ran North-South to ordinal numbers plus the word "Street," while roads that ran East-West were renamed to ordinal numbers plus the word "Avenue." In addition, they decided to make two counts for the Avenues, so that roads north of Pacific Avenue would be counted upwards from that baseline, e.g. "N. First Ave," "N. Second Ave," etc.; while south of Pacific Ave., they were "S. First Ave.", "S. Second Ave.",  etc. Unfortunately, this created a perplexing situation, as a road like "Second St." was very easily confused with "N. Second Ave." and "S. Second Ave." In trying to simplify directions, the city had made it even harder to locate addresses reliably.

Thus in 1949, the city went through another round of renaming.  The tradition of using tree names was revived and applied to the numbered streets running north-south. This time however, they used the tree names in alphabetical order from west to east. This is why Old Town now has the streets Ash, Birch, Cedar, Douglas (for Douglas Fir), Elm, Filbert and Hawthorne. The two series of numbered Avenues running east-west (N. First Ave, S. First Ave., etc.) were renumbered into just one series. They left room at the southern border of town to add more numbered avenues, but most of the extra numbers have not been needed. This is why today, the numbering begins with 9th Ave. in the Carnation area, and then counts upwards all the way to 30th Ave. north of downtown. 

For links to historic maps of these streets and other resources, see our Help With Research page.