Scott Swanson
Of The New Era
Farming is in Ag Marble’s blood.
Marble, who will be 76 in July, has been a nurse, a mother of six children and a politician, but she’s never been far from the soil.
She sat in the shade of a large tree in an Adirondack lounge chair at her Covered Bridge Nursery in Crawfordsville, an orderly enterprise that’s worth a stop for motorists who whiz by on Highway 20.
“Everybody around here calls me Ag,” said Marble, whose real name is Agnes. “I tell them it stands for ‘agriculture.’ ‘Aggie’ doesn’t go real well with ‘Marble,’ if you know anything about marbles.”
Her real name is Agnes and she grew up on a wheat and cattle ranch near Garrison, N.D. Later she studied nursing at the University of Washington and at Baylor. She worked as a registered nurse until she married Craig Marble, a dentist.
She had a zest for adventure and traveled widely.
“I went a lot of places when I was single,” she said. “I jumped around. I love traveling.”
She said she moved to Montana so she could learn to ski. She’s visited most U.S. states, China, Egypt and many Eastern European countries.
“I really enjoy looking at different cultures, finding similarities,” Marble said. “Family is very important to all people. Women’s status is very different in some countries. As far as enjoying life, I don’t see a lot of difference between people.”
Eventually, she and Craig settled down in Albany, where he practiced dentistry for 50 years. She started teaching her children about agriculture.
“When the children were small, we started small,” she said. “Our kids had animals. We developed through the years.”
When suburbia started to surround them in Albany, the Marbles moved in 1977 to a 230-acre ranch in Crawfordsville, which stretches between Courtney Creek and Brush Creek roads.
Marble became more active in agriculture, in the state livestock association for which she was named Man of the Year in 1973.
“My kids used to say, ‘There goes our mother, the Man of the Year,'” she said.
She served on the school board for seven years, after which she ran for county commissioner.
She also worked with 4-H for some 20 years.
“I was a drill sergeant,” she said, noting how she would dictate to the youngsters how she expected them to dress and act at the County Fair.
“The kids used to call me ‘Sarge,’ But I had a lot of winning clubs.”
Former 4-H’ers Bob and Cara Pascalar stopped in at the nursery on a recent morning while Marble was recollecting. Both, she said, had been in her clubs.
“Cara was one of my outstanding ones,” she said. “She was one of those fireball kids. The first time I saw her, I knew this kid was not going to stop.”
After running a cattle operation on the Crawfordsville ranch, Marble turned it over to her son John of Crawfordsville, one of her three surviving children. The others are Jay, who lives in Craig, Alaska, and Jim who lives in Newberg.
“They’re John’s now,” she said of the herd. “I’ve cut and bucked and fed a lot of hay in my day.”
She said she likes the new system her son is using, of planting grass and letting the cattle graze on it.
“This system, of letting the cattle do the harvesting, is a good change,” she said.
She said she still fills in when John is out of town, but mostly she just minds her nursery, which she and a friend, the late Dolly Muller, started about 10 years ago. She gets help with the place from manager Tiana White.
“I’m still farming,” said Marble, who planted her first flower garden when she was 8. “I’m just doing it under a roof. I can raise a lot of flowers in a small space.”
She said she grows, from seeds and cuttings, about 90 percent of the dozens of varieties of flowers and vegetables on sale at the nursery, which occupies a former horse pasture tucked between three residences.
Her specialty is hostas, a shade plant with large leaves, which she said she loves.
The nursery, which started as a bench by the side of the road near the Crawfordsville covered bridge — hence the name — has become part of life in the village, she said. Children from Crawfordsville School visit regularly, particularly during pumpkin season in the fall.
“The neighbors take care of it if I have to leave,” Marble said. “They don’t think of it as my nursery. They think of it as our nursery.”
It’s her way of life.
“I’m just a farmer,” Marble said. “I like to grow things – kids, dogs, people. I’m just a farmer.”