Archives West Finding Aid

William M. King, of English-Welsh ancestry, was born March 4, 1800, in Danbury, Connecticut. He lived later in the states of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Missouri, and finally Oregon. He married Mary Hadley of Middlebury, Vermont, by whom he had six daughters and a son.

In the course of his career, King was involved in a large number of business and civic ventures. He is first identified between 1832 and 1840 with the firm of King & [Hiram] Hammon, doing contract work on the Pennsyvania extension of the Erie Canal. During this time (1834-1836) he was a contractor at Rutland, Washington County, New York, supplying water, lime, and plaster for small jobs in that area. In 1837, with two other men (Joel Murray and Jared House), he bought a sawmill at De Witt, New York, sawing lumber and manufacturing water cement. King bought part of a mill at Conneaut, Ohio, in 1839, and in 1842 he purchased land in Palmyra, Missouri.

While living in New York, King was appointed a major in the 176th Infantry (June 27, 1835) and colonel in the 170th infantry (June 24, 1839). He was known as "Colonel King" during his later life in Oregon.

King brought his family overland to Oregon from Missouri in 1848, and settled at Portland. The following year he built Portland's first sawmill, but it was destroyed by fire shortly after completion. In the same year, he erected a frame structure at First and Oak streets which was known for many years as "The School House," because of the school opened there by the Rev. Horace Lyman in the winter of 1849-1850. Between 1850 and 1855, King was in the mercantile business, first in partnership with J. B. V. Butler (1850) and later with George Kittredge (1854-1855). King was a member of the Portland and Valley Improvement Company, and later he suceeded Thomas Carter as president of the Portland and Valley Plank Road Company.

In 1850 King was appointed Surveyor and Inspector of Revenue for the Port of Portland. He also served in the Oregon legislature of 1850, and again in 1857. The 1852-1853 legislature appointed King, Shubrick Norris, and Samuel Parker to act as a board of commissioners "to build and locate a penitentiary." In 1854-1855, King and Kittredge were suppliers to the Penitentiary Company.

An active Democrat, King was caricatured along with several other leading Oregon Democrats in 1852 by William L. Adams, in a locally famous satire, "Treason, strategems, and spoils." King was one of the nine anti-organization members of the legislature who, in 1857 and 1858, called a convention of National Democrats for the purpose of nominating candidates for state office. He died in Portland on November 8, 1869.