City. There Pettygrove established the agreed-upon store in partnership with George Abernethy. After building a warehouse in Oregon City, Pettygrove began trading in fur and wheat. Oregon In 1843, Pettygrove paid $50 for of land owned by William Overton. The tract was along the Willamette River in a place known as The Clearing, downstream of Oregon City. Pettygrove and Asa Lovejoy, who owned adjoining land, decided to create a town on part of the site. Strongly encouraged by John Couch, a sea captain who considered The Clearing a good site for a river port, they hired Thomas A. Brown in 1845 to plat the town. Brown and his assistant, James Terwilliger, a blacksmith, laid the town out more compactly than usual on a grid of 16 square blocks, to a side. They allowed public rights-of-way for north–south streets, rights-of-way for east–west streets, and no alleys. The short blocks and small rights-of-way created more corner lots than usual and reduced the amount of stump removal needed to create streets. A proliferation of tree stumps on unbuilt lots prompted a derisive nickname for the place, Little Stump Town. Lovejoy and Pettygrove, who could not agree on a name for the town, held a best-two-of-three coin toss won by Pettygrove, who named the town after Portland, Maine. Had Lovejoy won, he would have named it after Boston, Massachusetts. The two men cleared trees and debris from the site. Pettygrove built a small log store near the river, hired a married couple to run it, and commissioned the building of a wharf. He also acquired a granary and boat landing at Champoeg, site of the Oregon Country's first provisional government. In late 1845, Lovejoy sold his half-interest in the townsite (and his half-interest in a cattle herd he owned jointly with Pettygrove) to Benjamin Stark, who was the agent in charge of merchandise being shipped from Benson & Company, Pettygrove's supplier in New York, to Pettygrove's warehouse in Portland. Stark, the supercargo (cargo supervisor), arrived in Portland on Captain Nathaniel Crosby's Toulon. The three men then arranged to have Stark act as Pettygrove's supercargo on the Toulon, trading lumber, wheat, salted fish, and other goods between San Francisco, Honolulu, and Portland. Adding a second ship, the Mariposa, for a short time they controlled much of the trade in and out of Oregon. The two men engaged in projects by land as well as sea.