Despite family tragedy, mill owners played large role in community

Roberta McKern

In last month’s column I wrote about time’s alteration of a one-mile stretch of Highway 228 running west from the Crawfordsville Bridge and taking in a popular swimming hole sometimes called locally “the Crawfordsville Dam.”

Many can associate it with McKercher Park, just above the swimming hole.

The swimming hole is formed by a basalt dike crossing the Calapooia River followed by a pool below with a gravel bottom. Above the pool a series of rough rapids runs over chunks of basalt. Those not knowing better might believe the basalt is the dam, but no.

A real dam constructed of wooden pilings once obstructed the river on behalf of an early grist mill.

Built by Richard C. Finley in 1847, as the first part of this article told, the grist mill was likely the first one south of Oregon City. It served early settlers who no longer had to haul their grain to Oregon City to be ground into flour, a trip which might take weeks since oxen drawn wagons were used.

In 1895 the mill became the property of John W. McKercher at the loss of his brother, Daniel, commonly called Dan. At the East Linn Museum, knowledge of Dan’s death relies mainly on a Brownsville Times article summarized here.

Dan’s unfortunate death greatly affected his family who called it senseless.

Poor Dan just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, the luckless witness to patricide when Loyd Montgomery shot his father, John Montgomery, and his mother, Elizabeth, at the family farm downstream from the McKer-cher Mill on road running from Crawfordsville to Brownsville.

“Dead men tell no tales” may have entered Loyd’s mind when he turned on Dan McKer- cher who, along with Loyd’s mother, was trying to flee the lethal Montgomery offspring.

It happened in November, around the 20th. The Times writer set the scene by recounting his trip down a dark and muddy road, his buggy being led by boys on horseback carrying lanterns to give light to the rutted way.

The scene of the crime was an ordinary farm house, but two bodies lay inside, Elizabeth Montgomery and Dan McKercher. Dan’s faithful shepherd stayed by his side, and the rifle used in the shootings lay across Dan’s legs.

In the damp of the yard, John Montgomery’s body sprawled near a picket fence. He’d been whittling a stick and so there were shavings. A picket on the fence had been broken as if the dying man grasped it as he fell.

All three victims were dead of gunshot wounds to the back of the head, although Elizabeth had a second one in her upper body. The shot to her head was likely to ensure her death. The tale told by the bodies and their positions indicated that while Dan McKercher and Elizabeth Montgomery tried to flee from the assailant, John Montgomery had no expectation of harm, meaning he likely was shot first.

Because the coroner – the local doctor – and the hastily convened coroner’s jury had to examine the horrible scene, the bodies remained where they fell overnight, and the testimonies given at the inquest and heard by the six-man jury gave further knowledge of the crime.

In the article it is 1905 and hops were a major crop for the area. A hop buyer passing through, as well as neighbors, had heard shots, three to six they claimed, being fired and hollering.

Afraid he couldn’t control his team, the hop buyer did not investigate. These witnesses judged the time to be around 4 p.m.

The Montgomery children, returning home from school, officially discovered the bodies.

In his testimony, Loyd said he was out near where his brother Orvie (Orville) ploughed. Loyd claimed he treed a squirrel and threw rocks at it. A cousin testified Loyd followed the kids home, and did not go into the house when his brother, Bobby, came out of it after seeing, he said, a dead man.

Immediately, Loyd jumped on Daniel McKercher’s horse and carried word of his parent’s deaths.

“Hurry up,” he cried to a neighbor, “Father, Mother and another man is killed!” The cousin identified the rifle, “That was Uncle John’s gun.” It was a weapon used by Loyd when he’d been out hunting earlier.

At first Loyd tried to imply Dan McKercher might have committed the crime of shooting his parents, but when it came to the gun he crossed himself up, even saying he might have lifted it and had dropped it across Dan McKercher’s body, but he didn’t know so. He’d been too upset.

He also had a testimony full of contradictions, and the squirrel did not come down from the tree to be a witness in his favor, if Loyd had chased a squirrel.

The jury, after all, was made up of six local men. They likely knew Loyd.

Having decided the victims had been shot by someone other than themselves, the jurors indicted the most likely individual, the Montgomerys’ oldest son, Loyd.

Sheriff McFerron arrested him. So ends the Times story. Loyd was tried, convicted, and hanged. This was the last public hanging in Linn County and the noose was given to the McKercher family as a souvenir. Justice had been done.

Meanwhile, under the succeeding McKercher brother, John, the mill continued in operation and even won a gold medal for producing the best flour in the world to John McKercher’s surprise.

Like Polly Ann Finley’s pokes of gold dust sent by Richard while he mined in California, the medal arrived in the mail. Mrs. McKercher had supplied the entry samples.

The East Linn Museum does have a souvenir from the McKer-cher Flour Mill – its old wooden cash box, battered and worn, perhaps dating back to the Finley Mill, which was briefly known as the Oxford Mill and lastly as the McKercher one.

The mill did not lose its connection to Richard C. Finley since the logs painted on its side claimed, “Built in 1847 by R.C. Uncle Dick Finley. Present owner, John McKercher.”

As noted, a mill was established at the spot in 1847, but the McKercher one was a second building. Fed by a flume carrying water built up behind the wooden dam across the river, the mill no longer used stone burrs for grinding after McKercher replaced the burrs, the round mill stones, with rollers.

The millstones had their own histories, some being locally produced in the area between Lebanon and Quartzville. Others came from back east or even from Germany and France. Those earliest ones traveled by ship around the Horn and up the Willamette by steamboat and then to the mill by horse or ox drawn wagons before trains were established in the valley.

One example discovered in the Calapooia River consisted of quartz pieces trimmed, fitted together and held in place by a steel band. It was thought to have been made in Germany.

The museum does have a box of wooden cogs which were set into the gears of mill machinery. These are described as having come from an early Lebanon paper mill, but it is known that the Boston Mill near Shedd, built by R.C. Finley and his partners, also used such cogs.

The paper mill interspersed them between metal ones to keep down the noise.

When R.C. Finley constructed his earliest mills, iron cost 78 cents a pound, too dear for an impecunious entrepreneur, and likely wooden cogs did the job. At any rate, the museum’s cogs came from both New England and the Midwest and are factory-made, so their usage was common. Hardwoods like apple, pear, and hornbeam were preferred, but a hardwood such as oak would work, too.

John McKercher died in 1928, but the mill continued operating for awhile, focusing on animal feed. Its demise came in 1948. By then it was an abandoned building with its windows shot out.

One day it simply collapsed, sending some fishermen on the river scrambling. The mill dam, probably the wood dam, only remained as part of the popular swimming hole known as the Crawfordsville Dam. For years, swimmers could see a stack of weathered boards near the old mill site, but with the passage of time, the boards disappeared and so did the memory of a flour mill having been there.

The two-story McKercher house that stood across Highway 228 held on longer, but it also was left empty, open to the wind and the rain. Now a replacement home occupies that space.

Time and change.

For a spell, one other remnant of Richard Finley’s passage through the area remained, aside from the flouring mill. This was a barn, or at least a large building, where he’d been a partner in the sash mill, a type of lumber mill.

This building sat where the grove of young firs stands today as you travel west from the Crawfordsville Bridge.

When the wind sighs through the dense trees it should bring forth the faint roar of the crowd and the “yip, yip, yip” of cowboys plus the fractious noise of a rowdy dance hall. Here was the rodeo arena of the Calapooia Roundup, often held around the Fourth of July.

The barn actually was modified to stable horses and other stock on its ground floor while the upper story became a dance hall; at least that’s what a brochure from the 1948 event claims. In 1947, however, that structure burned. There isn’t much more about the Round Up, founded in 1920, at the museum other than the brochure, unless some chaps in the back room were worn there.

They are of long, orange and brown mohair and look as if they belong in a rodeo.

However, Lucille Rapp, the museum’s 101-year-old volunteer emeritus, remembers the Roundup as does a current volunteer, Lorraine Wright.

The charge at the gate was 25 cents, both recall, but Lorraine says children got in free.

When Lucille was young, this meant sitting in the hot sun in bleachers of rough and splintery lumber while watching primarily horse shows.

In particular, she mentions a prancer driven around the ring by its owner so everyone could admire its beauty and gait. Probably the buggy was like those used for trotters.

When Lorraine went, the event had expanded in importance with chariot racing, trick riders, and Warm Springs Indians demonstrating their ability to maneuver around in attack positions while riding bareback. For bronc riding she remembered actual mustangs challenged a rider’s skills, not horses used to the arena and blasé about the crowd.

The 1948 brochure lists the usual rodeo events, too – calf roping, bucking bronco riding, and bull riding, among others. The Roundup was a big event, involving not only Linn County but surrounding ones, with an influx of contestants and members of the crowd.

Crawfordsville sported a hotel then.

Lucille recollects a tavern where things got rowdy with fisticuffs on Friday and Saturday nights.

Somewhere in the 1950’s the Roundup became a thing of the past like the old flour mill. Still, the names Finley and Mc-Kercher live on for that one mile stretch of highway as you leave Crawfordsville.

Florence McKercher, one of the surviving members of the family, tended a store in Crawfordsville for many years and in her will she deeded to the county the four acres which form the McKercher Park located just above the old dam site.

And, of course, there still is the Finley Cemetery where Richard Chism Finley rests between Polly Ann Kirk Finley, his first wife, and Elenor Y. Finley, less well-known, but whom he married after Polly Ann’s passing.

Also nearby are some of the Finley children who died young. A flat, rain etched, marble slab covers part of Polly Ann’s grave, her initial headstone perhaps. Her name and the dates of her birth and death also appear on the tall four-sided obelisk containing those of other family members with hers on the front while Richard Finley’s is on the north side facing Elenor’s grave.

The cemetery doesn’t really hold many marked graves and a placard on the gate will remind you space is still available. You, too, can lie there.

Time and change.

At least at the East Linn Museum there are some clues to the past for that one mile west of Crawfordsville on Highway 228.

That does not exclude information from other sources, but it is something available. Often, what we know of the past comes in small, scattered pieces. The whole can never be completed, but the museum remains a very good place to start looking for pieces.

And if you go to the dam site, now the swimming hole, when sun bathers and swimmers are not there, you can look down on the waters of the Calapooia cascading over the basalt rocks and imagine hearing the steady grind of a grist mill in action.

Even on a Sunday Uncle Dick Finley made flour for farmers who had traveled from as far away as the Rogue River Valley so they would not have to postpone their return for an extra day.

You won’t be reminded how the spot had ties to claim jumping, murder, death, and the rousing cheers of rodeoing. Clues aren’t there.

If time is the essence of the past and of change, it also wipes them off the record.

Time grinds small.

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