The Vancouver Public Schools board voted on April 8, 2025, to change the name Harney Elementary School to Edgewood Elementary. The decision came after the school community considered the violent acts of its historical namesake, General William S. Harney.
Erik Neumann / OPB
Editor’s note: This story contains descriptions of violence.
The Vancouver Public Schools board voted Tuesday to rename two elementary schools whose historical namesakes carried out racial violence and killings during the expansion of the American West.
The school board voted to rename Harney Elementary and Peter S. Ogden Elementary on Tuesday night. Going forward, they’ll be called Edgewood Elementary and Ogden Elementary respectively.
Officials began questioning whether to rename the schools during the 2023-24 academic year, according to letters from the district. In each case, school administrators said they evaluated the names after learning about the violent history and killings committed by their namesakes.
“There was concern about having our names of our schools reflecting that past,” said Andre Hargunani, the Vancouver Public Schools director of equity.
District leaders determined the names were outdated after they held multiple community listening sessions.
Several locations in Oregon, including Harney County, Harney Lake and Portland’s Harney Park, bear the name of General William S. Harney, a pioneering military leader in the mid-1800s during the expansion of the American West.
“A modern reexamination of Harney reveals a leader who disobeyed orders, committed acts of racist violence, and who used political connections to escape consequences for disobeying the chain of command and mistreating his soldiers,” reads a history of Harney from the National Park Service.
Harney’s actions include a record of him beating a young enslaved African American mother named Hannah with a rawhide strap until she died. “A coroner’s inquest, ruled on June 28, 1834 that Hannah ‘came to her death by wounds inflicted by William S. Harney,‘” reads the NPS history.
Harney fled from his home amid public outcry but “never suffered professionally or personally for his actions.”
He later led troops to take part in executions of Native Americans during the Seminole War in Florida.
Peter Skene Ogden is another prominent figure in American history. The Canadian explorer contributed to the geographic knowledge of the Great Basin and West Coast, including regions around California’s Mount Shasta and Klamath River, and the Rogue and Umpqua river drainages of Southwest Oregon.
Ogden was also known as a ruthless fur trader, who killed an Indigenous man outside of a Canadian trading post during a dispute in 1816.
With these histories in mind, the school board voted to change the elementary schools’ names.
In each case, board members voted between five names suggested by the school communities. Former Harney Elementary will now be called Edgewood Elementary.
“Edgewood emerged as the name that best represents our school’s identity, values and the beautiful neighborhood we call home,” the district wrote to parents following the vote.
Peter S. Ogden Elementary will simply be called Ogden Elementary next year.
Nick Davies, the assistant principal at the school, said keeping the name Ogden was an effort to acknowledge the challenges that students and the physical building faced over the years, including being burned down by arson in the 1940s and destroyed by a tornado in 1972.
“Our staff wanted to reiterate that the resiliency of the building matches the resiliency of our students and just everything that they’ve been through,” Davies said.
He said that last year the overwhelming majority of staff, students and community members involved wanted to keep the name Ogden, while removing “Peter S.” The school is also located in Vancouver’s Ogden neighborhood.
The Vancouver schools are not alone when it comes to embracing name changes in recent years.
In 2021, Northeast Portland’s Madison High School was renamed Leodis V. McDaniel High School. The change was a reaction to President James Madison’s enslavement of Black Americans. McDaniel was a beloved principal at the school who oversaw its desegregation.
The same year, Southwest Portland’s Woodrow Wilson High School was renamed Ida B. Wells High School. President Wilson supported the Ku Klux Klan and segregated federal offices. Ida B. Wells was a journalist, civil rights leader and women’s suffragist.