2. After reading! Spoiler Alert! True Facts about the Farm

After a long trek across the plains, Eli Stewart and his wife, Ann, arrived in Oregon Territory in October of 1850. By April 1851, they had filed and settled a donation land claim for 632 acres. The Stewarts sold off parts of their claim over the years and, by 1868, Multnomah County acquired 160 acres of the original claim to establish the Hillside Farm, a “Poor Farm”. Located off Canyon Road in the Tualatin Hills, the Poor Farm and sanatorium housed indigent and sick residents of Portland and the surrounding areas. The inmates tended stock and took care of an extensive orchard.

This 160 acre section is located in a portion of Washington Park currently occupied by the Oregon Zoo, Hoyt Arboretum and the World Forestry Center. The Hillside Farm closed after members of Portland charities inspected it in 1910. It revealed atrocious living conditions, and they dubbed the crumbling building deplorable. 

Their report spurred county commissioners to speed up work on the Multnomah County Poor Farm at Edgefield in Troutdale, which opened in 1911. The site is where McMenamins Edgefield sits today.

With no physical presence left, the original Hillside Poor Farm was quickly forgotten, and the reasons for its relocation have been obscured by the passage of time.

Human remains were first found in 2008 when construction began of the Predators of the Serengeti exhibit. Those remains were reburied near the spot they were found.

In August of 2013 excavation was in its first stage of construction on the new Elephant Lands habitat, due to open in 2015. While digging a trench, the construction crew uncovered a human skull. In the subsequent weeks the remains of nine unidentified people were discovered. The remains were found along the zoo's perimeter road.

This area had been disturbed during previous construction for utilities and an older road. They figured this time the crew, building a storm-water retention system, either dug a little deeper or they were paying closer attention than previous crews. Given the site's history, workers had been trained, before the project started, on what do if they uncovered any bones.

It's believed the remains are from long-dead residents of the Hillside Farm. Historical documents indicate there may have been three cemeteries at the southern perimeter of the zoo, on the southwest Portland hillsides. In addition to the Hillside Farm residents, the cemeteries were used as potter's fields, or burial grounds for unidentified or unclaimed bodies.

“Based on the information available, we believe these were residents of a poor farm operated by the county here more than a hundred years ago,” said Heidi Rahn, director of the Better Zoo Program, which oversees construction projects funded by the 2008 zoo bond. “We are treating these remains with the utmost dignity and respect, and we will return them to a resting place close to where they were found.”

Officials had hoped to re-inter the newly discovered remains at a nearby site on zoo grounds if possible, and to erect a marker somewhere on zoo grounds. 

*At the time of this posting, I can not find any mention on the internet that a marker was ever erected.