Archives West Finding Aid

William Bittle Wells was an editor, publisher, and insurance agent who lived most of his life in Portland, Oregon. Born in Floyd County, Virginia, in 1872, he was the son of George and Lucinda Phillips Goodwin Wells. His father was a physician who went on to become one of the founders of the University of Oregon Medical School (now Oregon Health & Science University). The family emigrated to California in 1874, and moved to Portland in 1881. William Bittle Wells attended Portland High School (where he founded the publication The Student) and Portland Academy. He attended Lawrenceville School in New Jersey from 1892-1893, and graduated from Stanford University with a degree in English in 1897.

In 1898, Wells helped to found The Pacific Monthly, an influential west coast review. He sold his interest in the magazine in 1906 and became the editor of the Pacific Monthly's successor, the Southern Pacific Company's Sunset Magazine, in 1907. While at Sunset, Wells organized the Bureau of Community Publicity, a subsidiary of the Harriman railroad system (which then included Southern Pacific and the Oregon-Washington Railroad and Navigation Company). The bureau worked with business groups in various localities and created elaborate advertising brochures designed to attract home seekers to each locale. Wells later established his own printing concern, Wells and Company, and founded Better Cooking magazine in 1912.

From 1917 to 1943, Wells worked as a special agent of the New York Life Insurance Company. He left the firm in 1943 to work with Willamette Iron and Steel Company in producing war materiel, and then returned to the insurance business in 1946.

Wells married Mabel Lavern Parker in 1905. Along with his other interests, he was an amateur violinist and composer and helped to found the Portland Symphony Orchestra, which became the Oregon Symphony. He died in 1965 at the age of 93, in a nursing home in Forest Grove.