Touch Grass: Mill Ends Park
By Adrian Keller Feld
12.Feb.24
Photo Credit Adrian Keller Feld
Portland is known for its many green spaces, it is why this column exists. However, the sprawling grounds of places like Washington Park aren’t all it has on offer–there’s also Mill Ends Park, the world’s smallest park. Certified by the Guinness Book of World Records in 1976,, Mill Ends Park is a whopping 0.00007205784 acres, 452 square inches, or to put it more clearly, 2-feet across, according to its section on the Portland.gov website. Number 51 of 692 things to do in Portland on Tripadvisor, the park is named after journalist Dick Fagan’s Oregon Journal column Mill Ends, which are the “rough, irregular pieces of lumber left over at lumber mills,” according to Portland.gov. This, “like its namesake for leftover lumber — detailed odd and irregular tidbits of information and interesting stories,” per Travel Portland. While its namesake is not contested, much of the rest of the park’s history is more murky, with a few different origin stories floating around.
The Portland.gov website lists the origin of the park as being tied to the Mill Ends column, with Fagan using it to “describe the park and the various ‘events’ that occurred there. Fagan billed the space as the ‘World's Smallest Park.’ The park was dedicated on St. Patrick's Day in 1948, since Fagan was a good Irishman.” However per Travel Portland “legend says Fagan, who is of Irish descent, witnessed a leprechaun digging the hole. Intrigued by the promise of three wishes, Fagan reportedly captured the fellow and wished for a park before letting him free. Because Fagan did not distinguish the size of his desired park, the trickster erected a leprechaun-size park.” The Oregonian provides the most likely story, saying that “newspaper archives seem to point to the park’s founding in 1954. That year, the city of Portland was in a battle with the city of Columbus, Ohio, which claimed to have opened ‘the world’s largest municipal rose garden.’ Employees of the Oregon Journal helped drum up a publicity stunt for Portland to plant the ‘world’s smallest rose garden.’ They chose an empty hole in a median in front of the Journal offices, on what was then Front Street. It was a spot where a light pole had supposedly been planned but never installed.” These newspaper archives can be found on the PDXccentric website. The Oregon Encyclopedia also has a good record of the park, with a photo gallery of its past.
Nowadays, the park looks pretty different than it does in most photos online, in part due to recent renovation in the area. According to the Portland.gov website, in “December 2021, the substantial completion of the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) Better Naito Forever project resulted in a new and improved Mill Ends Park. The world-famous Mill Ends Park moved to a new location (a full six inches west from its previous location) as the City installed permanent bike sidewalk improvements nearby.” As well as that,“part of the improvements for Mill Ends Park also included a new cloverleaf park border (legend has it the park is home to a family of leprechauns) and a new park sign. The bureau is hopeful park visitors can find the park in its new location without a map.” The park sign is the same design as signs erected in most Portland parks, however it is a miniature version. The other difference is that most pictures show the park with a tree in its center, with its Guinness page even displaying the tree decorated for Christmas. More recently, The Oregonian wrote an article on the park’s reopening in January of 2022 saying it contained “a few tufts of grass and a single Plum Yew bush.” Unfortunately when the Quest visited, the park was home only to some moss and a plastic red bird, a far cry from the “small swimming pool and diving board for butterflies, many statues, a miniature Ferris wheel (which was brought in by a normal-sized crane), and the occasional flying saucer,” that Portland.gov claims it once had. Mill Ends Park has been the site of many St. Patrick’s Day festivities, especially as it “officially became a city park on St. Patrick’s Day in 1976” according to the Portland.gov website. The park is located in downtown Portland which means it is decently easy to access from Reed, though as the Portland.gov website wishes people to find it without a map, more information will not be given. It also stipulates that “all dogs must be leashed,” so do with that what you will. While a park trip may not take a long time, it's worth the visit if for nothing else than to have been there, to have touched grass in the smallest park in the world. The park is also in a state of disrepair at the moment, as the photo with this article shows, so giving it some extra love this Saint Patrick’s season may be in order. While this article covers the smallest park in the world, it is also – though not Guinness-certified – the longest Touch Grass to date! To learn more, visit its section on the Portland.gov website, or the many other sites mentioned in this article. So, go out and touch grass in Mill Ends Park!