By Roberta McKern
Even at the East Linn Museum, with spring comes optimism.
A spate of visitors will arrive to appreciate a collection of goods from the past reflecting the times and interests of those who formed the museum’s history.
As volunteers will tell them, the objects on display reflect for the most part the possessions and interests of those who provided our early history. Without the formation of the museum, many pieces would have been consigned to oblivion.
As it is, the museum has been compared to a grandfather’s basement or garage if the grandfather were a saver. The foundation of the museum’s collections was once stored in Lois Rice’s basement. Such description has the ring of truth, although the oldest artifacts dating back to the 1850s reflect eight generations or so of those who lived here.
As the often-repeated legend of the museum goes, Lois Rice lived in a big house with a basement in the Holley-Crawfordsville area where the ground was too soggy for many to want a basement. Lois voluntarily offered storage room in hers.
Eventually, this led to the museum’s growing collection. When the museum was founded around 1976, others contributed, including Don Menear, the Weddles, Mosses, Hamiltons, Robinetts, and more Rices. These “make-do” contributions allowed more expansion of the museum.
The East Linn Museum will celebrate its 75th anniversary this year!
As we stroll through the buildings, we come across the cherished and the discarded. That’s what happens with history. Some times are good enough to be remembered, but there are others everyone would like to forget.
Whether actual objects have been collected and hoarded or whether they’ve come from junk heaps washed over by rivers, they inspire speculation.
A “make-do” saw in the logging section represents the latter category. Found, we’re reminded, on a gravel bar, iIt was made from a broken length of crosscut saw with a large horseshoe welded at the broader end to make an ingenious handle.
It serves as a reminder of Justin Philpott’s claim that if an object was broken, he could fix it at his blacksmith’s shop in Holley. And if he couldn’t fix it, he could make a new one.
On the other hand, the daguerreotypes of some who came here by way of the Oregon Trail, including Zealey Blufield Moss as a teenager, cannot be “made again” nor can the large photographs of other early family members displayed on the walls of the main room.
We like the Zealey Blufield Moss depiction because he can be seen as a young man who acted as a scout when coming West with a wagon train, in a tintype in a display case and nearby, on the back wall, as an older gentleman in a photo reading a newspaper through heavy spectacles.
We all know well that all living things have a limited lifespan. But the obsolescence we‘re looking at rare objects left behind like daguerreotypes and changing technologies of photography opening other ways of seeing the past.
Which brings to mind one museum icon: the linotype machine in the back annex. It is big, too big to have been brought in through the back door, a block of dark metal with a keypad.
Both it and the cast iron logging camp stove across the way were built into the annex when the museum had a chance to expand in the days of local popularity. The back door wall entraps them.
Most volunteers ignore the name of the Linotype which translates to “line of type,” the apt description. Some volunteers call it a press as if it is the only way information was printed. It is a fantastic machine, but it is not a printer.
Its purpose in Sweet Home was to assist in the production of the local The New Era newspaper, still a much appreciated one. This very intricate machine is a marvel that actually casts lines of type from a lead alloy in its system. Linotypes replaced printer’s devils, who were usually young men setting type by hand and backwards, regarding legibility so letters would appear correct in the printed form.
Linotypes dominated newspaper production from the late 1800s but faded by the 21st century when, according to Wikipedia. By 2023 they were no longer manufactured. By then, the New Era machine had come to rest in the museum. The Linotype machine’s work stopped with typesetting and newspaper production processes today are very different technologies.
Some of us may recall visiting a local newspaper decades ago as the member of a Girl Scout group and watching the woman who operated the Linotype give a demonstration, her pudgy fingers with flashing rings playing rapidly over the keys. Then we saw the single lines of type the machines produced. Actually, it was a technological wonder and one of the most complicated machines we were likely to run into before computers took center stage, but we did not know to be impressed.
The museum has many objects which have become dead in usefulness, like various electric light bulbs, the car wrench collection, as well as one of car jacks, and an assemblage of axes, crosscut saws, and other pieces used in logging.
Its often-mentioned collection of chainsaws also hangs from the ceiling there, and considering changes in logging, we looked at Wikipedia. Actually, for years we wondered about chainsaws, and at last a question has been answered.
In the United States one-man chainsaws became increasingly used in the woods after 1950. We were once told by a logger how he started falling trees in the woods by working with his father on a two-man chainsaw when he was in his teens.
As he got older and stronger, his father left him to use the saw on his own. A couple of two-man saws can be discovered half-hidden under backroom shelves, saws for use in virgin timber to fall extra big trees even after the arrival of one-man saws.
According to Wikipedia, the earliest chainsaws used jewelry style chain links and were diminutive, designed to be used by medical surgeons to cut through bone in amputation of limbs in the late 18th century.
Permutations later, chain saws for use in the woods were developed in Germany prior to World War II, the Stihl Company being a producer.
Although the museum has its examples of two-man saws, it was the one-man chainsaws with bars about a yard long, like those hanging from the ceiling, which changed logging and sped up the harvesting of old-growth timber here during the second half of the 20th century when logging dominated the East Linn area.
Times have changed; so have chainsaws, as their use in creating the sculpture or the two loggers in front of the museum indicate. True, loggers used a crosscut saw and stood on springboards, reflecting the museum’s collection of tools before chainsaws became dominant and were cannily used to carve such statuary.
In association with memories of the East Linn area’s past, two ghostly recordings can be heard. A brief tape in the logging area has sounds of work in the woods involving chainsaws, voices of loggers, and the toots from the whistle punk, one, two, three and all clear following the whump of a felled tree.
The other, in the main room, has the late Joe Fallon explaining how the whistle from a midwestern river’s steamboat ended up summoning the workers to the old Santiam Sawmill. It includes the sound of the whistle itself.
We value these obsolete examples of the past, which give us something more to respect what once was. If we tend to mention certain things often like chainsaws and the “Terrascone’s steamboat whistle, it is because they are impressive.
Each visitor can find his or her own objects of praise in the museum.
Volunteers are needed, which also allows a viewer to find his or her own amusement. So visiting a few hours of speculation once a month can stimulate the mind and will help keep the museum as a valuable source of creative thought alive.