HILLSBORO, ORE.––In celebration of the inaugural season of the Hillsboro Hops, a short-season single-A baseball team, the Washington County Museum takes a look at the game as played by the early-20th-century town teams—the Verboort Beavers, the Beaverton Beavers and teams from Tigardville, Banks, Hillsboro and Forest Grove.
These teams comprised men and boys who loved the game, and brought towns together at a time when the distances between them took much longer to travel than a brief highway ride.
“I enjoyed investigating the history of baseball in this area because it was such a strong force in bringing communities together across the county,” says Lindsay Zaborowski, museum archivist. “Town teams would develop rivalries and fans would take special caravans and trains to see their team play away games. Fans also, on occasion, would travel into Portland to see the professionals play.”
Washington County’s own major league players are featured in the exhibit, including Larry Jansen, Vern Olsen, Wes Schulmerich, Ben Petrick and Darwin Barney. The stories of such Oregon baseball greats as Johnny Pesky, Scott Brosius and Wally Backman will also be told. The exhibit will display historic photographs, autographed baseballs, uniforms and other equipment and memorabilia from games past and present to tell the full story of baseball in the region.
“We acquired some of the items displayed in the exhibit from the players themselves or from their family members,” says Marsha Matthews, formally with the Oregon Historical Society, who curated the exhibit. “The players and their families shared stories with me of their greatest triumphs and personal struggles, which motivated me to tell their stories in a more personal way.”
The exhibit would not be complete without looking at the loss of the Portland Beavers and the transformation of PGE Park into Jeld-Wen Field, a Major League Soccer stadium. The exhibit also tells how the city of Hillsboro brought baseball back to the region with the construction of the Gordon Faber Recreation Complex’s new Hillsboro Ballpark, home of the Hops.
The exhibit is sponsored by Frontier Communications and Pamplin Media Group. It opened in June and and runs through Sunday, Sept. 1, at the Washington County Museum’s Exhibitions and Educational Programs space located in the Hillsboro Civic Center Plaza Building, 120 E Main St., in downtown Hillsboro next to Starbucks. The museum is open Wednesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. Admission is free for members; non-member admission is $6 for adults and $4 for seniors, students, children 18 and under, and active military. Children 3 and under are free. Memberships start at $50.
More information about the museum can be found at www.WashingtonCountyMuseum.org.
