First Advisor

Dr. Catherine McNeur

Date of Award

Summer 8-30-2025

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in History and University Honors

Department

History

Language

English

Subjects

Hops, PNW History, History, Oregon, Portland, Original Research

Abstract

When the end of August came around, all kinds of people started rolling into the little town of Independence, Oregon. Some walked, some came by train, others by wagon, and still others by ferry, motorboat, and canoe. There were Armenians, Swedes, Chinese, Japanese, Indians, Russians, Germans, and Indigenous peoples. There were those who were called fruit tramps, individuals and families who managed to bridge the vast distances across the West to harvest whichever crop needed hands. Entire families arrived, young and old, healthy and sick, with horses, mules, chickens and dogs in tow. Rich men came dressed as poor men and Eastern boys came dressed as cowboys. Groups of school-aged children ran through the crowd while their guardians attempted to rein them in. Young women from the city and the country, alone or in groups, came in droves. Some came dressed for the occasion while others were already in their harvest garb. More and more and more came; thousands upon thousands of people, making their way from nearly every curve of the globe

From roughly 1880 to 1930, thousands of people dedicated the end of their summer to picking hops in the Willamette Valley, specifically the area surrounding Independence, Oregon, a place deemed by one contemporary journalist the “Hop Center of the World.” Altogether, the annual hop-picking migration to the area regularly reached upwards of 40,000 people. At the time, the only place in the entire state with a larger population was Portland. For three to five weeks, this group of strangers would come together to create the largest and most diverse gathering in the Pacific Northwest.

This gathering was shaped by the unique qualities of the hops’ biology, the push and pull of capital and labor, and the opportunities and constraints of Oregon’s environment. While various scholars have written about the hop harvests, this paper focuses on how and why hops were the plant around which these massive gatherings came to be around the turn of the twentieth century. By understanding the forces which created and shaped the annual harvest, we can begin to understand the impacts it had on those who came, worked, gamboled, brawled, found love, and returned year after year to the endless, fragrant rows. These fields were one of the few places in which the different people of the region found themselves encountering one another. The hop managed to wound its way into each of their stories, climbing across space and time to pull them together in ways which otherwise would never have happened.

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