A Sherwood site where dangerous leather tanning chemicals were dumped decades ago soon will be cleaned up thanks to a $5 million grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
On May 20, the EPA announced Sherwood would be one of six communities in Oregon to receive EPA Brownfields funding, a grant that focuses on cleaning up once-polluted, vacant and abandoned properties.
At issue are 25 acres of property on Oregon Street, which were part of the former Frontier Leather Tannery .
“The tannery began operations in 1947 using chromium oxide to tan cow and deer hides from local slaughterhouses and split them into halves. The less valuable halves were buried on site. Sludge was discharged into two lagoons on the property,” said a statement from the city.
A portion of the site is in a 100-year floodplain.
In addition to the buried tanned hides, from 1956 to 1972, Frontier Leather leased a building that was operated by lead‐acid battery manufacturers, according to the city. That resulted in the removal of 743 tons of lead-contaminated soil in the mid-1990s at that site.
“This grant will enable the city to clean up the tannery site that has been an ongoing environmental threat to the Tualatin River Wildlife Refuge,” Sherwood Mayor Tim Rosener said in a news release. “It has the added benefit of allowing us to relocate the public works facility and open up four acres for redevelopment in downtown Sherwood.”
In its later years, Frontier Leather Tannery had a fraught history in the city, with a fire nearly destroyed the facility in 1981. Portions of it were rebuilt.
The tannery remained in use until 1998 when Frontier Leather went bankrupt.
The site remained vacant until a March 24, 2005, fire destroyed a large portion of it with the expansive structure later razed. In August 2015, a massive nearby railroad trestle fire exposed some of those buried hides.
Washington County acquired the site through tax foreclosure between 2012 and 2014 before Sherwood purchased the site in 2023.
“This redevelopment also holds immense potential for job creation and much-needed middle housing, contributing to our community's economic growth and livability,” Rosener added. “It's a win-win-win situation for Sherwood — an environmental, housing and jobs trifecta.”
The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality added the site to its Orphan Site List in 2002. The Oregon DEQ lists those properties as ones that have been “contaminated by a release of hazardous substances that pose serious threats to human health or the environment, where the parties responsible for the contamination are unknown, unable or unwilling to pay for needed remedial actions.”
During initial assessments, chromium, lead and other heavy metals were identified in soil and sediment at concentrations exceeding human health standards and posing ecological risks, Sherwood officials said. That resulted in an EPA Brownfield assessment grant that resulted in a draft analysis of how to clean up the property.
Mark Pugh with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality’s Northwest Region said the federal EPA money will go to cleaning a portion of the five-parcel Oregon Street tannery property. Three parcels to the west of the city’s purchased land have already been cleaned up and sold to private companies, he said.
“The preferred remedial action includes excavation and off‐site transportation of contaminated soils and sediments with metals concentrations above cleanup levels from the Rock Creek floodplain,” according to the city’s news release.
Over the years, the former tannery site has caused problems not only near the footprint of its former Oregon Street location but beyond. That includes what’s known as the Ken Foster Farms site .
Foster, a former tannery employee, took some of the tanned hides from the facility and buried them on his property pasture land from 1962 to 1971, Oregon DEQ officials have previously said.
The 40-acre site is located about one-half mile south of the Oregon Street/Murdock Road roundabout on the east side of Murdock Road. Those hides contained hexavalent chromium in amounts above the human health risk-based concentration the Oregon DEQ has set for residential use. Those land parcels being in areas with houses, officials have previously said.
Pugh said three tax lots at the Ken Foster site have been cleaned or are in the final stages of being cleaned up. On one of those lots an estimated 600 tons of material containing remnants of tannery waste were removed and disposed of in a permitted landfill. Meanwhile, final cleanup of the other two sites is expected to be completed by late fall, according to the Oregon DEQ.
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