There is a particular kind of place where history doesn’t stay behind glass. Oregon City is that kind of place. Walk downtown for an afternoon and you’ll feel it; in the buildings that have been standing since before Oregon was a state, in the stories that surface when you ask the right questions, and in the businesses that line Main Street today. Many of them are run by women. That’s not a coincidence. That’s a pattern. And it goes back a very long way.