Archives West Finding Aid

The present collection of records of the Oregon Roadside Council came principally from the files of one of its most active members, Alexander Bolton Pierce, Jr., a Portland area architect. Pierce (March 22, 1924 - July 14, 2003) held several offices on the Council , including that of President and Secretary. It appears that Pierce was the unofficial community “watchdog” when it came to issues of outdoor advertising, signage, and other forms of “visual blight” in Oregon, particularly in the Portland metropolitan area.

The collection contains a considerable amount of the Council’s incoming and outgoing correspondence, 1974-2002, plus correspondence from Pierce as an individual, usually relating to topics consistent with the activities and positions of the ORC. An effort was made, in the processing of the collection, to keep Pierce’s non-organization correspondence separate. However, a researcher must read both to get the full sense of the council’s activities and the dedication of its key members.

The minutes of the ORC’s Board of Director’s, although incomplete, from 1980 to 1998, offer a good look at the organization’s continuing vigilance and activities concerning outdoor signage and other key issues of interest to the council. Of particular interest are the position papers and reports generated by the ORC regarding billboards and outdoor signage in Portland and Multnomah County (particularly in the 1970s and 1980s), as well as copies of various drafts of sign ordinances, regional, state and federal legislation, copies of letters and articles regarding outdoor signage, and the work and position papers of Alex Pierce.

The collection, at times, is spotty, with some gaps in the board minutes, correspondence, and newsletters of the council. The records are most complete in the documentation of the Multnomah County outdoor signage ordinance debate in the mid-1970s and again in 1981-1983, and the City of Portland’s sign code revisions in the early 1980s. Pierce’s papers, especially his correspondence and position papers of the 1990s, are also significant to any research on the recent history of outdoor signage in the Portland metropolitan area.

Series 6 contains 39 photographic prints of billboards and murals in the Portland area in color and black-and-white. Some black-and-white prints are identified as to specific locations of illegal billboards and most other locations could be identified by landmarks.