Lincoln High School — Elliott Smith memorial plaque

Elliott Smith moved to Portland at age 14 to live with his father, a psychiatrist, and graduated from Lincoln High School in 1987. At Lincoln he found a creative community among musically inclined students in the school's arts programme — friendships and collaborations that shaped his artistic direction and introduced him to the environment of Portland indie music that he would work within for the following decade. Smith had grown up in Duncanville, Texas, a difficult experience he described in unflattering terms in interviews, and Portland represented a different kind of life: more accepting, more interested in music and art, more tolerant of the shy and strange.

His time at Lincoln overlapped with the formation of Heatmiser, the band he co-founded with Neil Gust, and the beginning of his serious engagement with songwriting. The school's music programme and the social world it opened gave Smith his first real collaborators and his first sense of what an audience for his music might look like. Portland in the late 1980s was developing the independent music infrastructure — labels, studios, venues, zine culture — that would make it one of the most important cities in American indie music in the 1990s, and Smith's high school years placed him at the beginning of that development.

Lincoln High School has honoured Smith with an official memorial plaque affixed to a wall on campus — Portland's only official public monument to the musician. The school sits in the Goose Hollow neighbourhood on the west side of the city, close to the park blocks. It remains an active public high school and the plaque makes it a point of pilgrimage for Smith's fans who are tracing his Portland geography.