Scott Swanson
Of The New Era
Richard “Dick” Rice spent 45 years working in sawmills by day and keeping his family’s farm running on Upper Calapooia Road, often at night.
“It was hard at night when he’d go to work, then farm on the bottom until 2 in the morning,” Rice’s wife Carroll recalled. “Then he’d get up at 5 and go back to work.”
Rice’s dedication to his land will be recognized Feb. 14 when he is honored as one of 12 recipients of the inaugural Sesquicentennial Award presented by the Oregon Century Farm and Ranch Program. The award will be given to 14 Oregon families who have continuously farmed portions of their original family acreage for 150 years or more.
Four other Linn County farmers will also be honored: Donald and Dona Coon, whose farm is on Peoria Road in Shedd; Frank E. Herrling of the Brock Farm in Shedd; Joyce Jackson Martinak and Art J. Martinak, whose farm is on Seven Mile Lane in Tangent.
The families will be honored in a special ceremony to be held at the Capitol campus in Salem on Thursday, Feb. 14, Oregon’s Statehood Day. The public is invited. A special joint resolution by Oregon’s 74th Legislature will be read in the Senate that day.
The award ceremony will be in the Veteran’s Services Administration Building at 700 Summer St., N.E. at 12:30 p.m., with a reception following at 1:30 p.m. in the Oregon Department of Agriculture Building, 635 Capitol St. N.E., which is adjacent to the Veteran’s Building.
The Rices’ son Mark sent in an application to the program after seeing an article in a local newspaper about the program.
The Rices’ 160-acre farm, at 40670 Upper Calapooia Road, is part of 640 acres that were settled by Rice’s grandfather, James Norval Rice, in 1853. James Rice, originally from Campbell County, Tenn., had been living on his own father’s farm in the Brownsville area since his family arrived in a covered wagon after crossing the plains in 1850.
He filed on half a section, 320 acres, along the Calapooia River, and then bought 320 adjoining acres from a neighbor to put together a section of land.
He and his wife, Nancy Ann Robnet Rice, built the house that Dick and Carroll live in, and when James Rice died, the property was divided up among their eight surviving children (of 14).
“My dad got this place with the original house,” Dick said. “The rest got cut up in small chunks.”
Rice, 82, was born in the house and has lived there all but a few years of his life, he said. He served two years in the military during World War II and, when he and Carroll first married in 1951, they rented a house down the road.
They moved in after his father died, in 1953, when Mark was 6 months old. The house still occupies its original footprint (outside walls), Mark said, but it has been remodeled inside. According to the Rices, it is one of only two homes left in the area that were constructed by the double box method, which did not use studs in the walls. Instead, the boards are set vertically, with a second layer covering the cracks, creating a solid wall of boards.
“It was quite something to get electricity in,” Carroll said. “(Dick) had to chisel out (grooves) in the wall for the wiring.”
“Where there wasn’t a crack, I made one,” Dick Rice said, dryly.
He said that before they got electricity, in 1936, the house was lit with carbide gas and, before that, with oil lamps.
The farm stretches from the Calapooia River, across Upper Calapooia Road, and up the slopes behind the Rices’ home. The other buildings are more recent, the barn constructed in 1952, Rice said.
When Rice was a child, he said, they raised a variety of livestock, chickens and turkeys, and raised feed for the animals.
The orchard and vegetable garden still exist, but all he raises now are 18 head of beef cattle – cows and calves – and the feed for them. About half the land is now a tree farm, planted in 1948 after a clear cut, from which they harvest “a few loads every year,” Rice said. “We’re not doing that (clear-cutting).”
Rice is largely retired now, after heart surgery and now recovering from two knee-replacement surgeries. Carroll just had a hip replaced, she said, so she’s running about half-speed too. So Mark, who has a home in Eugene and did construction in Portland, has taken time off to help them out on the farm.
Their other son, Calvin, lives in New Orleans with his wife and three children. They spent part of the fall of 2005 with the Rices after their home was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.
Dick Rice said that when he was discharged from the Army Air Force in 1946, he intended to go to college.
“I thought I’d go to Oregon State and be a farmer,” he said. “Next thing I know, I’m married and working two or three jobs. I guess that’s the way life goes.”
He worked for 35 years at Clear Lumber, doing everything from green chain to mill foreman over that time.
Over the years he’s developed an interest in working with rawhide and has a large collection of tack items, some of which he made himself, though the Rices have not kept horses after they switched to tractors when he was a boy.
He has made a variety of rawhide basels, used by Mexicans to break horses before they put the bits in, and has made chair seats and other items of rawhide.
He also enjoys metal working and has a fairly extensive metal shop in which he likes to make curiosity items as well as keeping the farm machinery running for himself and neighbors, for whom he has made parts for years, his son said.