Cicero Hunt Lewis

Born in 1826 in Cranbury, New Jersey, Lewis moved with his parents at age 13 to Newburgh, New York. At age 20, he went to New York City to work in the dry-goods business of Chambers, Heiser & Company. ==Merchant-entrepreneur==

John DeWitt, a New York merchant, hired Lewis in 1851 to assist DeWitt's son-in-law, Lucius Allen, in running a wholesale supply house in Portland, a frontier settlement on the West Coast. Portland, with a population of about 800, was in good position to trade via the Willamette and Columbia rivers and the Pacific Ocean with San Francisco and other ports and by land with an increasing number of pioneer farmers in the Willamette Valley. Allen, a friend of Lewis, had tried and failed in 1850 to establish a Portland branch store, and DeWitt thought that the more experienced Lewis would be able to help. In 1883 after several setbacks, the two men opened their own business (independent of New York) in a rented store at Front and "B" (Burnside) streets. They specialized in dry goods and groceries, building customer loyalty by selling at a fixed price, extending credit to reliable customers, and offering free space in their safe for storage of their customers' gold. became "merchant princes of the Northwest". In 1891, Lewis was named to the original Port of Portland Commission, established by the Oregon Legislative Assembly to oversee the maritime commercial and shipping interests of the city. When railroads began replacing steamships as a shipping method in the 1870s, Lewis, Ladd, Corbett, Failing, and Simeon Reed (a Portland transportation executive), became the five largest stockholders, aside from Henry Villard, in Villard's Oregon Railway and Navigation Company (OR&N). In 1888, Lewis was part of a group that visited Villard in New York to negotiate favorable shipping rates on the Union Pacific and the Northern Pacific railroads, with which Villard and the OR&N had contracts affecting Portland. Lewis's interest in Portland railroads extended to the Portland & Willamette Valley Railroad, of which he became a local director in 1885, and which was controlled and formally taken over by the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1890. Lewis and the other three pioneer merchants were among those in 1864 who formed the Mercantile Library Association (later renamed the Library Association of Portland) to establish a local subscription library. Roughly 30 years later, after a public library opened in Portland in 1891, members of the Cicero Lewis family were among its largest donors. In 1885, Lewis was one of 15 men named to the Portland Water Committee, empowered by the state legislature to acquire and operate a municipal water system for the city. ==Family, other interests, death==

In 1857 Lewis married Clementine Couch, daughter of John H. Couch, a sea captain and early Portland settler. Unlike many of his friends, Lewis developed few interests beyond his business. His only form of recreation was walking to work, and although he was a charter member of the Arlington Club and could have dined there, he usually walked home for lunch. Historian E. Kimbark MacColl writes that Lewis "spent his life at his desk and never went out in the evening for entertainment or the theater... He was never known to have taken a pleasure trip, spending what remaining leisure time he had with his wife and 11 children." Lewis died of a stroke in 1897 while walking back to work on a Saturday afternoon. and a Mason. He was one of the largest supporters of Good Samaritan Hospital and Trinity Episcopal Church in Portland. The Lewis property, facing 19th Street, included stables, a greenhouse, and a sweeping drive leading to a carriage porch. Their very large house was built in a stick style that was "rather simple for its period", but its interior featured tall windows, a massive staircase, front and rear parlors, a reception room with a marble fireplace, and tall mirrors in elaborate frames, as well as "rare woods, marble mantels, brocaded walls [and] fine lighting fixtures" throughout. The four houses on the Couch tract were demolished in the 1960s. ==Notes and references==

Notes References ==Works cited==

• Gaston, Joseph (1911). Portland, Oregon, its history and builders: in connection with the Antecedent Explorations, Discoveries, and Movements of the Pioneers That Selected the Site for the Great City of the Pacific, vol. 2. Chicago, Illinois: The S.J. Clarke Publishing Company.. Retrieved March 6, 2010. • Marlitt, Richard. (1978) [1968]. Seventeenth Street, revised ed. Portland, Oregon: Oregon Historical Society. . • MacColl, E. Kimbark; Stein, Harry H. (1988). Merchants, Money, and Power: The Portland Establishment 1843–1913. Portland, Oregon: The Georgian Press. . • MacColl, E. Kimbark. (1976). The Shaping of a City: Business and Politics in Portland, Oregon, 1885 to 1915. Portland, Oregon: The Georgian Press. .