It is a Portland State landmark, but the Simon Benson House almost did not make it to campus. Originally located at on the corner of Southwest 11th Avenue and Clay Street, the house was condemned by the City of Portland in 1991.
Normally, that would be the end of the line and the house would be razed, perhaps making room for a new condominium high rise.
However, former Portland City Commissioner Gretchen Kafoury and a group of community members in Portland known as the Friends of Simon Benson funded a joint campaign to save the house from property developers who intended to tear it down. Kafoury and the Friends of Simon Benson began raising money to relocate and restore the house.
Approximately 1,200 bricks were sold for $100 a piece to fund a campaign that moved the Simon Benson House from its original location to its current spot on the edge of the South Park Blocks in December 2000.
The historic house, originally built and owned in the early 1900s by the timber baron Simon Benson and his family, symbolizes the 1950s neighborhood of Victorian and Queen Anne-style homes that formerly lined the South Park Blocks of Portland State.
Now, the house is property of the university, and maintained by the Alumni Association, which resides on its second floor.
Historical house saved by labor of love
At its original location, the Bensons moved out in 1912, and the house switched owners and occupants multiple times until it was well distressed and in a state of disrepair.
After Portland State donated the corner lot of Southwest Park and Montgomery as the new location of the Benson House, the civic group joined the Portland State Alumni Association and community volunteers in efforts to fund the move.
“Part of the fundraising campaign was a $100,000 matching grant from the Meyer Memorial Trust,” said Assistant Vice President of Alumni Relations Pat Squire.
The grant called for donations of $1,000 or less, and Squire said, “the Friends group decided a good way to get those gifts would be to launch a brick campaign as they would be a nice way to recognize people, and serve as a permanent reminder of the grass roots nature of the fundraising project.”
Squire appointed volunteer Joan Johnson, a 1979 PSU graduate who is involved with the alumni association, to manage the brick campaign.
Johnson was committed to the campaign along with Kafoury, who she called on to spearhead the fundraising campaign.
“It was hard to raise money, and selling bricks was a good idea,” Johnson said. “After a first couple of attempts to save the house, we finally got enough people to raise the money. It took a lot of time, but we were able to.”
According to the Benson Tour Guide, $1.4 million dollars were raised between May 1998 and November 2001.
The Simon Benson : A symbol of the PSU’s past
Another member of the committee that planned and conducted the restoration of the Benson house was Chuck Clemans, a 1956 Portland State graduate.
“It is still an absolutely perfect representation of what the neighborhood looked like, so I thought it was really great to bring that building back to the campus,” Clemans said. He contributed donations to the house restoration and bought bricks along with his children and family.
As a student of Education in the early 1950s, Clemans remembers viewing the Park Blocks neighborhood from the window of the only building on campus, Lincoln Hall.
“I can recall sitting in class looking out the window and seeing, largely the buildings around that were all Queen Anne and Victorian-style homes,” Clemans said.
Time passed, PSU expanded and the residential neighborhood was torn down to construct all of the additional buildings. Appreciative of his education at Portland State University, Clemans felt that the Benson House served as an iconic symbol of what the neighborhood used to look like when he attended classes there.