08/28/2026
Simon Benson arrived in America from Norway at seventeen years old with almost nothing, and he ended up reshaping the way Portland drinks water in public. 💧 Born in 1851 in the small community of Gansdal, Norway, he immigrated in 1868, worked his way into the timber industry, and by the 1890s controlled roughly 46,000 acres of forest along the lower Columbia River. He was one of the first operators in the region to swap ox teams for small logging railroads and steam donkey engines, and it made him one of the wealthiest men in the Pacific Northwest.
In 1912 he gave the city of Portland $10,000 to install twenty bronze drinking fountains downtown, each one running continuously, each one costing about $500 to cast. His reasoning was almost stubbornly practical, he wanted his own loggers to have a sober alternative to the saloons when they came into the city, so he paid to put clean water on nearly every corner instead. The first one went in at Southwest Washington and 5th in June of 1912, and all twenty were finished within the year. Portlanders still call them Benson Bubblers, and they still run on water from the same Bull Run reservoir the city has always used.
Benson did not stop at fountains. He financed early construction of the Columbia River Highway, donated roughly 1,000 acres around Multnomah and Wahkeena Falls to the public, sold his timber holdings for 4.5 million dollars to build the Benson Hotel in 1913, and gave $100,000 toward what became Benson Polytechnic School in 1916. A man who once had nothing spent the back half of his life making sure Portland had clean water, waterfalls, and a school, freely, on his own dime. 🏙️
The fountains he paid for are still running, more than a century later, on the same reservoir water they always used. What is one piece of everyday city infrastructure you never think to thank anybody for?
