John Tigard House Museum

A YouTube tour of the John Tigard House is available at this link since we have reduced in-person activities during Covid. We hope to reopen during 2022.

In 1852 Wilson McClendon Tigard, his wife Mary Ann and their young son, John, traveled across the plains from Arkansas on the Oregon Trail. They settled on a Donation Land Claim of 320 acres. The area in which they settled was called East Butte, then later Tigardville. When the name Tigardville became confused with the name Wilsonville, it was shortened to Tigard.

Wilson Tigard had the Queen Anne Carpenter Gothic home built for his son, John, in 1880. The house remained in the family until 1946 when it was sold. In 1979 the house was in danger of being demolished for new retail construction on Pacific Highway, where it was located. Concerned local citizens formed a group and raised the funds to move the home to its present location.

Once in its new site, the house needed extensive repairs and remodeling. Later additions to the house, such as indoor plumbing, were removed and it was brought back, as much as possible, to its original condition.

The home contains four rooms besides the entryway, a parlor, one bedroom, a kitchen and pantry. The John Tigard children slept in the attic. Today the home has been returned to its former glory. The parlor is furnished as it might have been when the Tigard s first lived there. The kitchen shows the manner in which early 1900's housewives prepared food, did their laundry and took care of their families. The bedroom on the main floor has been converted to a Media Room to showcase the many mementos of early Tigard which have been collected by the Tigard Historical Association.

We invite you to visit the house and enjoy the charms of yesteryear when parlors were furnished with velvet settees and food was cooked on a wood burning stove. We are open on five special occasions throughout the year: Curtis Tigard's Birthday, Old Fashioned Ice Cream Social, the Apple Harvest Festival, Victorian Christmas and the Annual Meeting of the Tigard Historical Association. We also open for group tours which can be arranged in advance by phoning 503 747-9856.