Though she’s only 25, Colleen Watkins has an inquiring mind when it comes to history.

Her quest to find out the origins of the land owned by her parents on Tong Road in Damascus, where she grew up, has turned into a lesson in history taught by all the houses on the road, and the families who lived in them.

She has produced a several-thousand-word report on the road’s history and its connection to the Tong family.

Her research has also added a new dimension to the neighborhood and the growth of Damascus.

The Clackamas County town celebrates some of that heritage and growth Saturday during its daylong Day in Damascus Festival. The festival begins at 10 a.m. in Damascus Centennial Park, 20100 S.E. Highway 212.

Tong Road is a busy two-lane thoroughfare that runs north-south for about a mile; it has two access points: highways 212 on the north, and 224 on the south. Most people access the road from Highway 212, Watkins said, because there is a dangerous hairpin turn on the entrance to Highway 224.

The city of Damascus has considered plans to straighten the initial curve off Highway 212 and connect the street to Wyeast Avenue, she added.

One of the first things Watkins discovered was that the road was named after longtime resident Marion Tong’s family. Despite the common misconception that the Tongs were Asian, the family is Caucasian, she said.

Two generations of the Tong family, James and his 5-year-old son, John, traveled from Iowa to Missouri in 1852; then oxen pulled the Tongs’ wagon train along the Oregon Trail to a homestead not far from the Clackamas River, where they first lived in a log cabin.

John Tong married in 1868 and Marion Tong was his sixth child of seven; he was born on the land that is the site of Kaiser Permanente Medical Center.

In 1889, James Tong and his wife, Nancy, purchased about 160 acres in Damascus, and eventually the land was divided among the Tong children, Watkins said.

Around 1923, Marion constructed the house that sits on nearly three acres at 16151 S.E. Tong Road for his wife and two sons.

The residence is still there, with its distinctive red garage that sits close to the street. Marion built the garage using lumber from his father’s dismantled house on present-day Southeast Bel Air Drive, Watkins noted.

The garage at one time served as a temporary living quarters for workers and relatives, but now the structure leans and is sinking.

The current owners, Richard and Joyce Murk, have had to shave inches off the bottoms of its doors so that they will open and close, Watkins said.

Tong Road was officially dedicated in 1934.

“Marion was adamant about getting the road named and getting it paved,” Watkins said.

“He certainly kept after Clackamas County about the naming of his road. I think he probably had a real bug in his bonnet over that one,” Gayle Anderson, Marion’s granddaughter, told Watkins.

“There aren’t that many roads named after a pioneer family; if the family did not go to great lengths to get a road named, it became a number,” Watkins said.

Dynamiting a stump

Marion was a memorable character to his grandchildren and the other children in the neighborhood, Anderson said, partly because he walked with a pronounced limp.

“Children weren’t supposed to ask about the limp, so many people did not know that Marion had been injured in an accident involving a truck that his son, Clifford, was driving,” Watkins said.

Marion was riding in the truck bed, but when he got cold he tried to climb into the cab. He fell into the road and a rear wheel struck and broke his leg between the knee and hip, leaving his left leg shorter than his right.

He then wore a built-up shoe which fascinated the neighborhood children, Watkins said.

The limp did not keep Marion from being mobile, Watkins learned. He kept a close eye on his neighbors’ homes, and when they had visitors, he would often go there to chat. Another neighbor recalled that the Brill family had a cat that loved Marion, and the cat would sit in Marion’s lap while he rocked in his rocking chair.

Marion’s son, Wilbur, wrote a book about his family that Watkins has read many times. One anecdote that Wilber remembers clearly involved dynamite.

“At the close of World War I the government had a lot of powder that they made into dynamite,” Wilbur wrote. “Dad bought enough to blow the stumps on about one-and-a-half acres of our land. Dad didn’t know how powerful the dynamite was, and he put about 50 sticks under a stump that was about 48 inches across. It blew a quarter of that stump across the road, over the neighbor’s house. Boy, was he careful after that!”

Wilbur stopped to see the old family home, years ago, Watkins said, and the Murks, the current residents, invited him in to see the changes in the house where he grew up.

Then, shortly after Watkins began this project last April, Marion’s granddaughter, June, and her husband from Madras stopped by to look at the old house.

Hearing from the families

Watkins has been so consumed by the Tong Road project that she contacted more than 40 people and produced a document that is nearly 3,000 words long. She researched obituary databases, Clackamas County records and other sources, but feels she has been the luckiest in talking to people who knew the Tongs and other families in the area.

Marion Tong died in 1977, just one day short of his 92nd birthday, and is buried in the Damascus Pioneer Cemetery, along with his wife, Ada, and three of his siblings.

Obituary information allowed Watkins to locate Anderson, Marion’s granddaughter, in The Dalles.

“The biggest help to me was the family who currently lives in what was once the Mullenhoff house; they had 50 pages of land records for the house when they purchased it a few years ago,” Watkins said. “I was flabbergasted by how old the records look — they go back to when the land was purchased in 1876.”

The Mullenhoff house is on the same side of the street as the Tongs’ house; Watkins thinks Fletcher Tong, Marion’s brother, may have built and lived in it

before the early 1920s.

“Current owner Randy Weston, who owns the home with his wife, was truly trusting in letting me make copies of those remarkable old records. The Westons have an absolute gem in that paperwork, and I would guess it’s a rarity for a homeowner to buy a house and be given almost its complete history right off the bat. I used plastic gloves to handle them; I just thought it was appropriate to do so considering their age,” Watkins said.

Although she has not yet been able to track down where her own parents’ land came from, she said she is not finished with the project, and will continue to do research.

The one family that she thinks might have owned the land in the 1920s is proving difficult to find, since that family “moved from Damascus to Washington, leaving their Oregon history behind,” Watkins said.

“It’s not that many of these families don’t have an interest in their family heritage; it’s that they don’t have access to the resources, because they aren’t in the area. Some have no interest in doing the research, but others don’t have the opportunity,” she said.

Watkins will continue the project, with the idea that she will now be able to pass along information to many of the people she interviewed. 

“In the case of a few of these living relatives, the ancestors are their grandparents, and I am thrilled to be able to tell them the exact house where their grandparents were living when Tong Road was expanded in 1935,” Watkins said. “I started multiple private family trees on Ancestry.com for families who lived on Tong Road and Keller Road from the 1800s through the 1960s. I’ve tried to trace down the families to find survivors who I could locate and call or write. Having deed information and census information and dates is wonderful, but for me personally, hearing from those who remember the families and the houses brightens the story.”

Find out more

Read more of Colleen Watkins' history of Tong Road.

Visit the Damascus Pioneer Cemetery, 19428 S.E. Chitwood Road, in Clackamas.

The Day in Damascus Festival begins at 10 a.m. on Saturday, July 28, at Damascus Centennial Park, 20100 S.E. Highway 212.