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Because of its location in the lower Columbia River Gorge, Menucha is a crossroads of heritage histories.
For millennia, one of the highest concentrations of aboriginal peoples on the continent sustained themselves by the abundance of this region. Each year, 16,000,000 salmon pushed up the torrents of the lower Columbia in a display of nature’s capacity for drama.
On a fall day in 1805, Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and their colleagues in the Corps of Discovery streamed past Menucha on their way to the Pacific Ocean.
In 1874, Captain Painter, an English sailor whose ship wrecked in Hawaii some years earlier, fled the island with his Hawaiian wife when family members were threatened with confinement to a leper colony. The Painters aimed for Oregon and homesteaded Menucha. Their orchard still bears fruit.
Forty years later, Julius Meier, partner in the Meier and Frank department stores, envisioned a country retreat. He scouted a site away from the bustle of Portland and the distractions of a political career – one that would see him become Governor of Oregon from 1930 to 1934. The Meier family purchased the Painter property and named it “Menucha,” a place of rural elegance where notables like Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt came for visits.
Initially, the Meiers reached Menucha from Portland by steam-power up the Columbia. But, in 1913, just as the Model-T automobile was rolling off assembly lines, ground was broken on the Northwest’s first major paved highway -- in the Gorge. Now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the “poem in stone” became the first Scenic Highway in America.
The primary estate residence, known as Wright Hall, was built in the 1920’s. Designed by architect Herman Brookman, Wright Hall influenced what became known internationally as a “Northwest” style of architecture.
In 1950, the First Presbyterian Church of Portland purchased the property from the Meier family, who were pleased to see it dedicated as an ecumenical center, a gift in perpetuity to communities of people from around the world.
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