Civic Life in McMinnville - Wortman Family

Our project is centered on civic life in McMinnville, Oregon 100 years ago. Our focus was to uncover the media’s representation of this topic. We had the option to choose to cover the local McMinnville government, Linfield College itself, public schools, leading businesses, and/or important civic leaders. We decided to narrow our attention to a particularly prominent family in the McMinnville community at the time. The Wortman family is known for opening the first bank in McMinnville more than 100 years ago and was also influential in local politics and community development. After selling farm and boat interests in 1865, Mr. Wortman bought a small grocery and merchandise store in Oregon City that he ran for ten years. In 1875 he sold this interest and started a similar business in Benton County. With these years of practical experience and the knowledge of local demand, he came to McMinnville in 1883 and established the Bank of McMinnville. When it was incorporated in 1885 it became the first bank in Yamhill County. Today the Wortman’s bank is known as Key Bank and stands in the same location as it did 100 years ago. A large number of photographs and newspaper clippings exist that define the Wortman family and where they stood in the community then and now, which were used in this project

Investigation of Cyclic Liquefaction with Discrete Element Simulations

A discrete-element method (DEM) assembly of virtual particles is calibrated to approximate the behavior of a natural sand in undrained loading. The particles are octahedral, bumpy clusters of spheres that are compacted into assemblies of different densities. The contact modelis a Jäger generalization of the Hertz contact, which yields a small-strain shear modulus that is proportional to the square root of confining stress. Simulations made of triaxial extension and compression loading conditions and of simple shear produce behaviors that are similar to sand. Undrained cyclic shearing simulations are performed with nonuniform amplitudes of shearing pulses and with 24 irregular seismic shearing sequences. A methodology is proposed for quantifying the severities of such irregular shearing records, allowing the 24 sequences to be ranked in severity. The relative severities of the 24 seismic sequences show an anomalous dependence on sampling density. Four scalar measures are proposed for predicting the severity of a particular loading sequence. A stress-based scalar measure shows superior efficiency in predicting initial liquefaction and pore pressure rise