The Kamm Walnut

A fourteen-acre estate has been reduced to a single walnut on a school lawn. This is it. Jacob Kamm was a Swiss immigrant who engineered steamships and made a fortune moving freight on the Columbia River with the Oregon Steam and Navigation Company. He built a French Second Empire mansion out here when this was the edge of Portland. His wife Caroline Agusta Gray had grown up among the first missionary families living with the Nez Perce in Idaho. The planting date is genuinely unsettled. The tree's own plaque says the 1880s. The city's field guide, in its narrative, dates it to around 1871 and the building of the Kamm house. Nobody has reconciled the two, so the honest answer is somewhere inside that fifteen-year window. The Kamms sold up in 1910 and Lincoln High School took the site. When the current school building went up in 1952, architect Hollis Johnston drew his plan around the walnut rather than through it. It stands about 29 metres tall with a trunk 4.24 metres around, close enough to Interstate 405 to hear it. Ask anyone who went to Lincoln and you will usually get a story. The tree sits at the edge of school grounds. Look at it from the corner of SW Salmon and SW 14th rather than walking onto the property, particularly on a school day.