Archives West Finding Aid

John Adair was born at White Hall, Kentucky on August 8, 1808. He was the youngest child of Governor John Adair and Anna Palmer Adair. In 1834, he married Miss Mary Ann Cockburn Dickerson. In 1848, President Polk appointed him Collector of Customs at the Port of Astoria, Oregon. On December 18 of that year, John Adair and his wife and six children boarded the steamer Falcon at New Orleans, bound for Oregon via the Isthmus of Panama. After nearly three months, the family finally landed in San Francisco, where they boarded the Valdora. Adair would serve as the Collector of Customs for 12 years, through four consecutive presidential administrations, despite his being one of the leading Democrats in Oregon. At his retirement, he took up stock farming and other ventures. He died April 9, 1888, at his home in Astoria.

Herman C. Leonard was born February 1824 in New York. Leonard moved to Portland in 1852, where he and his partner, John Green, and Green's brother Henry, founded the gas operations of The Leonard and Green Company. In 1862, the three men founded the Portland Gas Light Company, what would eventually become the Northwest Natural Gas Company. In 1865, Leonard, along with former Portland mayors William S. Ladd and Henry Failing, incorporated an iron smelting company, which they named the Oregon Iron Company. The Leonard and Green Company would also eventually own several ships, which they used to export produce and lumber, and import coal.