Roberta McKern
The East Linn Museum is now closed for the winter until February.
In the meantime, we ponder the ghostly sounds we imagine rising in its darkened recesses.
We know the main room once served as a school for the Sunnyside district. After the construction of the dams and flooding of the reservoirs upstream on the South Santiam River, the school faced demolition. But, when moved and rebuilt, it served two churches before becoming the museum.
Therefore, if we could hear voices raised in song from the past, would one side of the room feature young voices singing “AB-C-D-E-F-G” and verging with a choir of worshipers performing “Lead Kindly Light”? And what about instrumental accompaniment?
Although these schoolchildren and parishioners have all moved on, in their place is a collection of instruments, some of which can still make music. What would we have the potential (far-fetched) of hearing?
How about a fanfare for the museum with two bugles, a fife and bass drum?
The fife and small, drab bugle both have military pasts. Found among other instruments, the inconspicuous fife went through much of the Civil War played by William Southerland in time with marching Yankee troops.
At the age of 15, he ran away from home to join the Union Army. Deemed too young to carry a gun, he instead was issued a fife, which he played until the war’s end. No doubt different tunes signaled varying messages, something we certainly associate with bugles.
Jeffery William Fields of Crawfordsville possessed the World War I bugle. He played it on the European front “Over There,” possibly in France or Belgium. In a photograph, the blonde youth doesn’t look much older than William Southerland was when first assigned to the fife.
We are aware of bugles directing troop activities, from reveille to lights-out. The World War I model is a reminder of Irving Berlin’s “Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning” (1918), in which a beleaguered draftee does in the bugler, seizes the instrument and stomps on it, then gets the pup who wakes the bugler up and spends the rest of his life in bed. It’s a recruit’s dream. His “You gotta get up / you gotta get up in the morning” follows the notes of reveille. According to a descendant of Jeffery William Fields, the dull, dented instrument was kept in a closet accessible to grandchildren and, upon request, when it was donated, performed a demonstration blast.
The second bugle of the fanfare had its own history of troops: the Boy Scouts. Bigger, shinier and grander than its World War I counterpart, it rests among scouting memorabilia from the days of Sam Cairnes, a well-respected former educator of the area.
As for the bass drum, a red legend on its side tells us it was played by a father, Everett Smith, in 1913, then by his son, Blair, 30 years later. Sweet Home’s band members of 1913 had to supply their own instruments, and the drum was passed through the family.
The bugles, fife and drum have histories to share. However, not all instruments do, as in the case of a clarinet we can include in the fanfare.
If we prefer to throw a concerto together, stringed instruments in the same display case as the fife and clarinet might fit the mood. First are two violins we’ve mentioned before: the Sears Roebuck Guarnarius and a Stradivarius (replica) from the late 19th to early 20th centuries.
To those we can include a nearly demolished banjo that in imagination can still be used with “Oh! Susanna” and coming from Louisiana with a banjo on the knee, a guitar and a mandolin.
For more complex melodious concoctions, we can add two parlor organs and Maud Sportsman’s piano. The organs no longer play, and the piano is out of tune, but out-of-tune music seems appropriate among the museum’s sometimes battered and used-looking artifacts.
A concerto sounds rather grand and not a little pretentious for these instruments, which served the true enjoyment of their possessors. One organ belonged to Nancy and Orville Rice, who are featured in a photograph atop it. The music on view: a hymn, “Sweet Hour of Prayer.”
Maud Sportsman’s piano has its own history of travel. It went from Kansas City to Oklahoma Territory before arriving here. Maud and Arthur Sportsman were well-known members of Sweet Home, and the Sportsman’s Holiday commemorates their community contributions. Did Maud play some of the music now sitting on the piano: “Sweet Genevieve,” “I Hear You Callin’ Caroline,” or even Paul Zastron’s “Where the Santiam Flows”?
Two other instruments in the same location are a 16-inch harmonica owned by Clarence Cady and a shorter, stouter model belonging to Samuel Nothiger. We know Cady played hymns in specials at the old Holley Church, based on what our late centenarian volunteer, Lucille Rapp, has told us. He would rise, perform a hymn, then say, “Now that I’m up here, I might as well play another.”
Cady lived on Fern Ridge, taught school at Holley, helped discover Holley blue agates and now lies in the Liberty Cemetery. You can’t get much more local than that.
Nothiger, on the other hand, emigrated from Switzerland in the early 1880s. We might wonder if his music had a German ring to it, since the Sunnyside-area Swiss spoke primarily that language for general usage, but English in school for many years.
The trunk he brought from Switzerland now holds part of Walter Munts’ quarter-mile hand-carved chain that festoons the upper walls of the instruments’ room. Perhaps Nothiger played that favorite German carol we know as “Silent Night.”
The museum’s harmonicas and other musical instruments could be ordered in similar forms from the Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward catalogs. We have discovered this to be true of the Guarnarius- and Stradivarius-style violins.
Sometimes when we read the few pieces of history we can find about early Sweet Home, the area sounds like a musical desert. We might come across the fiddler who could play but one tune mightily at dances, or the fellow with an early phonograph and its six-foot high morning-glory-shaped horn, also popular at dance parties. But this seems to be some tongue-in-cheek exaggeration to underscore a backwoods area. Sweet Home, after all, acquired its name from a song: “Home, Sweet Home,” supposedly. If singing was permitted at church services, and some churches did not allow it, congregation members brought their own remembered renditions of hymns, variable as they might be.
To some, music was very important, as we can observe from the reminiscences of Rita Mae Morris, who recalled growing up on the banks of the South Santiam. She gave us this story about the wonderful soap that frothed and foamed for the salesman at a medicine show but never for those who bought it.
As a child, she yearned for music. She would dress her brother in her clothes and beat on an empty five-gallon can, singing “Sweet Bunch of Daisies” and other songs while he danced.
Sometimes her uncles took in the shows, called the children “little fools” and maybe contributed a dime for the entertainment. Pretending she could play the organ, she built herself what she called the “miss organ,” an arrangement of boxes covered in moss with the five-gallon can as its source of rhythm and music. Her brother, Aron, fashioned a fiddle from boards and horsehair strings, and together they played imaginary duets.
For two years, Rita Mae saved her nickels and dimes in hopes of acquiring a secondhand accordion. (Checking an old Montgomery Ward catalog, we can see accordions advertised for as low as $6. How-to-play books and music were also available.) Finally, the time came when her mother traveled to Portland with Rita Mae’s nickels and dimes, entrusted with an order for a secondhand accordion. While she awaited her mother’s return, Rita Mae built a small table upon which to rest the instrument. But she faced disappointment. Her mother, weighed down by a baby boy, had a frenetic time and did not buy an accordion.
As Rita Mae recalled, the table remained in use by various family members for many years.
We might wonder if Rita Mae and her brother whistled while performing their imagined music. An old book of music at the museum leads us to two songs. In one, Grandma Gruff spells out the adage, “Whistling girls and crowing hens / Both will come to no good ends.” And in another, a boy asks his father why he can whistle but girls can’t. The answer comes at the end of three verses: girls are sing-u-lar, with an emphasis on “sing.”
This 1904 book, “America School Sings,” shows the varied nature of songs available for singing and playing, from Grandma Gruff’s opinions to Johannes Brahms’ “Lullaby” to Stephen Foster’s romantic visions of the old South (some now politically incorrect because slavery plays a part) to familiar hymns and patriotic songs like Francis Scott Key’s “The Star-Spangled Banner.” When we consider the instruments and their phantom fanfare, we recognize how important music was to the people who lived here.
Today we can be swamped with it in stores while we buy celery or nuts and bolts — so available we don’t have to imagine making music like Rita Mae did. And even though music is easily obtained, people still feel creative urges to whistle, sing and play musical instruments.
But those instruments in the museum must remain silent. Signs on the Rice family organ and Maud Sportsman’s piano read “Do not touch.”
Other instruments lie primarily in display cases. A super phonoharp above the violins begs to be heard because we wonder how it’s played. This relative of the autoharp looks like a zither/guitar hybrid. Irregularly shaped with innumerable strings, it has on one side a row of miniature drumsticks aligned like oars along a Roman galley ship. Colored battleshipgrey with no ornamentation, it could not be plainer.
How does it work? Looking up autoharp, we learn that the right hand plucks the strings with a pick while the left hand makes the chords.
Since it’s a harp, maybe its sounds are celestial, in keeping with the museum’s history of having served two denominations. Like a fanfare for the East Linn Museum, we will imagine the sounds of this strange instrument.
Returning to that fantasy fanfare and the versatile use of the bugle in relaying military orders like “Boots and Saddles” or “To Horse” as well as reveilles, we can recall what is now likely the most famous bugle call of all, “Taps.” Daniel Butterfield, a Civil War general helped give us the form we are most familiar with from its use to salute old soldiers who had died.
As we leave the museum, we will think of its last three lines: “All is well / Safely rest / God is nigh.” It’s a wish the living can certainly hold to, and while we remember “Auld Lang Syne,” may we all have a happy New Year.