Kellogg House | Clark County

Clark County has a long history of being home to self-made industrialists and entrepreneurs. Many of these individuals headed for the West to make their own fortunes and left behind established lives and generations of family. Others started locally from modest means and through hard work and perseverance established or assumed businesses of renown. This pattern started in the mid- to late 19th century and has continued to this day.

Additionally, it was not unheard of to have generations of these families involved in the businesses they established or assumed. By the 1950s, business and industry owners lived in Clark County but had operations that were regional, national, and international in their impact. These business leaders tended to live in neighborhoods together, and often their movement created new micro-communities.

This pattern started with business owners and industrialists living on the west side of downtown Vancouver, but in the mid- to late 20th century moving to the east of the city and along the riverfront of the Columbia River as the downtown corridor experienced a large shift resulting from urban renewal. This pattern of new affluent neighborhoods to the east of the city and the urban renewal movement in downtown Vancouver occurred simultaneously.

Charles Webster Kellogg, one-time owner of Northwest Copper Works, and his 1960s house embody this synchronous progression. From the foundation of an entrepreneurial mindset instilled in him by his grandfather and father, Kellogg took himself from a modest working-class career to own and grow a regionally important business. He grew his fabrication business in the early 1950s, aligning with the early period of manufacturing and product-based industrialism engaged in by Clark County’s early self-made business owners. The local and regional economy would transition, with obvious overlap, into a more finance-, real estate-, and service-based economy and with it the nature of the self-made business owner.

The Kellogg House, specifically stands as an apt representation of this pattern movement and development of these neighborhoods to the east along the river.