Q – Who is Montavilla’s Vestal School named after?
A – Vestal School is named after John L. Vestal (1852-1925). In 1925, he bequeathed the vast majority of his estate to the Portland public school district. It was the largest donation ever given to the district, according to The American School Board Journal of May 1925. Vestal left assets then valued at $200,000—equivalent to nearly $3,700,000 today and twice the size of Simon Benson’s $100,000 gift to Benson Polytechnic School.
Vestal‘s will did not stipulate how the school board should use his donation. He trusted the board of directors to put it to its best use. Portland’s population had been expanding for several years, and schools had become overcrowded. Montavilla School on SE 76th Avenue was one of these schools. So, the board decided to allocate the bulk of Vestal’s bequest to building a new school in Montavilla that would be larger and more centrally located.
The board also decided to name the new school after Vestal, in gratitude for his generosity. But this may not have been to John Vestal’s liking. According to the Oregon Journal of March 22, 1925, he was a “modest and retiring” man and would not have wanted a school to be named for him. Nevertheless, his name—in large letters—was inscribed atop the school’s east facade.
Today, John L. Vestal’s name is still an everyday sight in Montavilla. But who was he? What is his story? And why did he give almost his entire fortune to benefit generations of Portland school children?
Little is actually written about John Vestal. And it requires a lot of digging to gather just a few verifiable facts.
John Vestal first appears in public records in the 1860 U. S. census. At that time, John was nine and living with his mother, Elizabeth M. Fowler Vestal (1826-1874), in Lafayette, Tippecanoe County, Indiana. John was attending school. His mother was a seamstress. Both were born in Indiana. John’s father, Benjamin Elwood Vestal (1820-1892), was absent from the household. No other children appear in the 1860 census or in other records. John was apparently an only child.
While John and his mother were living in Lafayette, an event occurred that probably lodged in John’s memories. On February 11, 1861, President-elect Abraham Lincoln stopped briefly in that town on his way to Washington, D. C. He gave a brief speech from the back of his railroad car before heading off to nearby Indianapolis. Maybe John and his mother were in the crowd — or, if not, surely heard about the exciting event. Later, when John registered to vote in Portland, he consistently identified as a Republican, then the party of Lincoln.
Digging deeper into John’s family history, I found that he descended from a long line of Quakers. His father probably told his son about how he and his siblings joined the multitude of Quaker farmers who left North Carolina in the 1830s in opposition to slavery. Most of the Vestal family settled in Indiana.
Whether John was a practicing Quaker, I could not determine. I found only a few hints of an association. One is John’s relationship with his cousin, James Vestal, and his family. They were among many Quakers who moved to Newberg, Oregon, in the late 19th century. The James Vestal family arrived in 1889. From 1891, notices in the Newberg Graphic newspaper indicate that John was a frequent visitor. The Newberg Quaker church records show that John also made several small donations. Perhaps on his visits to Newberg, he was impressed by the community’s commitment to education. On his first visit in 1891, he probably noticed the recently built Pacific College. That college was later renamed George Fox University, in honor of the founder of the Society of Friends.
For his time, John Vestal was a well-educated man. Neither of his parents had attended school, and most people only attended elementary school. John, however, went to both elementary and high school. He attended elementary school in Lafayette, Indiana, and—for some unknown reason—went to high school in Decatur, Illinois. In 1870, John was one of only eight to receive his high school diploma.
By 1873, John and his mother had reunited with John’s father in Portland. Benjamin Vestal had been working there as a butcher since around 1865.
In Portland, John discovered another source of mental stimulation: the newly formed Philomathean Society. The Oregon Journal of October 9, 1923, described it as “a serious group of young men bent on self-improvement.” They met weekly to discuss challenging subjects, such as parliamentary law and current issues. Sometimes they debated other serious-minded groups. John was one of the surviving members who gathered to celebrate their 50th Anniversary in 1923.
By 1875, John was working as a clerk in Portland’s oldest drugstore, S. G. Skidmore. He worked there until 1886, when he opened his own drugstore on First Street in downtown Portland.
I found out little about John’s life as a drugstore owner, just regular listings in Portland’s city directory. But I did come across his light-hearted contribution about a druggist’s life in The Spatula, a magazine for pharmacists. The February 1907 issue included six illustrations about an incident involving a bored pharmacist and a potential female customer. Readers were invited to provide appropriate captions. John sent in a few humorous, rhyming lines, and they appeared in the April issue.
The same year Vestal opened his drugstore, he married Ruth Almira Culver (1855-1889). Like John, she was a Decatur High School graduate. She received her diploma in 1873, but their attendance overlapped slightly since Decatur High required three years for a diploma in John’s time there and four years in Ruth’s.
After Ruth graduated, she taught third grade in Decatur for several years. Then, in 1882, she moved to Portland with her mother and brothers, where she taught at Failing and Couch elementary schools. Very likely, Ruth shared her teaching experiences and philosophy with her husband. Perhaps when she was teaching at the old Failing School, she described the school’s deplorable conditions, such as the dirt floor in the basement that served as a play area and the lack of ventilation requiring windows to be perpetually open to the elements.
Unfortunately, John and Ruth’s marriage was short-lived. Ruth died in childbirth on March 26, 1889, and John never remarried.
John experienced other close losses in Portland: his mother died in 1874 and his father in 1892. Perhaps John referred to these and other losses in his poem, “The First Violin.”
Vestal closed his drugstore in 1907, but he did not leave the pharmaceutical trade. He went on to build a fortune by operating a string of drugstores and augmenting his wealth by investing in real estate and tax-exempt securities.
John Vestal died at age 73 on March 18, 1925, in Portland’s Glen Haven Rest Home. He was buried next to his wife, his mother, and his father in Riverview Cemetery. As soon as his bequest to Portland’s public schools became known, it made headlines in the Portland press. The Oregon Journal of March 22, 1925, for example, declared that his magnanimous donation was likely to make his name “a perpetual landmark in Portland.”
Vestal had no immediate heirs. He left a few small donations to friends and relatives, but most of his wealth went to the public-school board.
Vestal’s generous gift to public schools did not go unchallenged. Three of his second cousins claimed to be his rightful heirs. They filed a lawsuit in 1926, alleging that Portland’s school board could not legally receive real or personal property. They lost their suit and appealed. On May 22, 1928, the Supreme Court of Oregon ruled against the plaintiffs. Now, the Portland school district board was free to allocate the Vestal donation.
In 1928, the board proposed building a new school to replace the old Montavilla School and decided to name it the John L. Vestal School. In 1929, the board hired architect George Howell Jones (1887-1950) to design the school building. It was ready for students in April 1930. On April 4, the cornerstone was dedicated, and some 800 children marched to the music of the school orchestra from Montavilla School to the new Vestal School.
Within months, the old Montavilla School was demolished and the salvage offered for sale in local newspaper want ads.
In February 1929, the school board authorized a monument commemorating John Vestal and his generosity. It was erected next to his grave in Riverview Cemetery. The monument is inscribed “He loved children and for their education gave his fortune to the public schools of his city.”
After the completion of Vestal School, John’s bequest was used for additional public-school needs. The school board set up an interest-bearing fund with the residuals of the original donation. This money was used periodically for other projects, such as the psychiatric clinic established in 1932 to assist school children.
One thing I never discovered in my research: what does the “L” in John L. Vestal’s name stand for?
This is part of Montavilla History Questions Answered, a series of history related articles. If you have questions about Montavilla’s past that you’d like answered, local historian Patricia Sanders will investigate your question. Please email your questions to history@montavilla.net and we may feature it alongside Patricia Sanders’ research in a future post on this page.