Growth Isn’t the Enemy - Forgetting Is

By Gary Randall, For The Mountain Times

Growth is often blamed for what communities feel they are losing. New buildings go up, old ones come down, traffic increases, and familiar places begin to look different. It’s easy to point to growth itself as the problem. But growth isn’t the real enemy. Forgetting is.

Towns have always changed. That isn’t new. What is new is how often change happens without any understanding of what came before it. When history is overlooked — or never learned — communities lose more than old buildings. They lose context, identity, and guidance that memory provides.

A nearby example illustrates this clearly. The city of Sandy has a documented history reaching back to the mid-1800s. It developed as a traditional Western town shaped by early travel routes and local commerce. During a Main Street revitalization effort in the early 2000s that reshaped the appearance of the town, several historic buildings were lost, and the architectural direction chosen for downtown did not reflect that early history.

Instead, the look of the town shifted toward what is often called “Cascadian architecture,” a style associated with mountain lodges such as Timberline Lodge, which opened in 1937— long after Sandy had already taken shape. Timberline Lodge is an important building, but it represents a different era and a different purpose. The result is a town that feels disconnected from its own origins and traditional identity.

By contrast, Troutdale faced many of the same pressures but took a different approach. Existing storefronts were restored rather than reimagined, and new buildings were designed to reflect the town’s original architectural character. The result is a Main Street that feels cohesive and grounded in its own history, even where newer construction fills in the gaps.

The lesson isn’t that one town is right and another is wrong. It’s that decisions made without historical context quietly reshape identity. When a town forgets its own story, it often borrows someone else’s.

Highway 26 runs through our communities, just as it does through Sandy. It bisects the places where we live, work, and gather. We already have the beginnings of a commercial center at the stoplight, where the Thriftway, gas station, Post Office and small businesses have come together. It’s not hard to imagine how that area could expand, how more buildings could line the highway, and how quickly it could begin to feel like something different.

Growth is coming. Outside developers are looking at the available land, and there is pressure to increase housing and density. At the same time, our infrastructure — especially water — has not kept pace. Decisions being made now will shape what this place becomes.

Those decisions won’t just determine how much we grow. They will determine how we grow.

This has always been a small mountain community, shaped by its setting, its history, and the people who chose to live here for those reasons. If that context is lost, development doesn’t just add to the town — it replaces it with something more generic, something that could be anywhere.

People tend to protect what they understand. When we know the story of a place — what came before and why it mattered — we make different decisions. We ask better questions. We slow down just enough to consider what fits, and what doesn’t.

For those interested in learning more about the stories behind the places we live, I’ve been documenting local history — using original sources, photographs, and newspaper accounts — at mounthoodhistory.com.

Growth will continue. It always has. The question isn’t whether things will change, but whether they will change with awareness — or without it. Remembering isn’t about resisting progress. It’s about guiding it, so that what we build adds to the story instead of erasing it.

Photo caption should read if there’s room: “The Shake Inn along Highway 26 near Wemme, photographed in its early years. Many remember it later as the Inn Between, but this is how it began.”