North Pacific College
Private college in Portland, Oregon (1899–1945)
North Pacific College was a private, post-secondary educational institution located in Portland in the U.S. state of Oregon. A professional school, North Pacific had pharmacy, dental, and optometry programs. The dental program was purchased by the state of Oregon and merged into the University of Oregon School of Medicine and now exists as the Oregon Health & Science University School of Dentistry. The optometry school was merged into Pacific University and still exists as the Pacific University College of Optometry.
History
The foundations of the school started in the 1890s in Tacoma, Washington, when physicians in that city sought to compete with Seattle by opening a dental school before the University of Washington could establish their own school. Meanwhile, in Portland, Dr. Herbert C. Miller had been asked by the University of Oregon to lead a group to investigate adding a dental school to the School of Medicine in Portland. While Miller's group decided it was premature to start a school in Portland, the Tacoma group founded the Tacoma College of Dental Surgery in 1893. Soon after, the Tacoma school moved to Portland, while Dr. Miller and a group of Portland dentists founded the Oregon College of Dentistry in 1898.
“North Pacific College” enters the record as private college in Portland, Oregon (1899–1945). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what North, Pacific and College can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7056255. Authority coordinates are 45.529, -122.660. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1893 and 1898.
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This entry incorporates text from “North Pacific College” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.