Hemp, Hemp, Hurray!
Tuesday evening while other politicians watched returns and rehearsed election party speeches, Portland’s well-regarded former mayor Bud Clark was waxing eloquent on another subject: “Industrial hemp is not marijuana,” he declared. “You can’t smoke hemp. It’s like smoking rope… It’s a good thing and it can be made here in America.” Clark was enumerating the economic virtues of industrial hemp as co-emcee of the first annual Hemp History Week, marked by almost 200 events in 31 states and the nation’s capital.
Portland’s event kicked off in the historic Northwest industrial district at Bridgeport BrewPub, which happens to occupy the site of a former ropewalk, circa 1887. Bridgeport even named a brew Ropewalk to honor the heritage of the narrow building, perhaps a thousand feet long, where spun hemp was once twisted into rope. Nineteenth-century sailing ships sometimes used more than 20 miles of hemp rope. That and the prevalence of hemp paper in the early American republic naturally required a lot of hemp farming.
