Roberta McKern
If we want to be impressed by the transitory nature of history at the East Linn Museum, we can examine notes and newspaper clippings about our area compiled by Lois Rice about 50 years ago.
Rice, of course, was a key founder of the museum in the 1970s. As a descendant of pioneers married to another descendant of pioneers, she had a strong interest in local history. Plus, for many years, she sheltered objects from the pioneer past for others both in her basement in Holley and later in her house on Fern Ridge. She had her own museum and meant for this area to have a bigger, more inclusive one.
The notebook we’re looking at includes obituaries, miscellaneous items and a focus on the mining districts up the Calapooia River and Quartz Creek. Much can be learned. However, we’re only seeking minor flashes of interest at this point.
Many of these appeared as touches of human interest in old newspapers, like the Albany Democrat-Herald (initially separate productions), the Brownsville Times, the Lebanon Express-Advance and Sweet Home’s The New Era.
Looked for are scraps of information fitted together like odds of fabric in a scrap quilt. Some pieces are familiar and used, some embellished and embroidered and others might need extra feather stitching to hold them into place. At the end, this is not a history, but a compilation of little flecks of interest.
We can begin with Bill Mealey, the Poet of the Santiam. He often attacked serious subject matters unexpected in a miner, logger and sawmill operator for people forgetting the intelligence needed to survive in those jobs.
However, the samples included in Lois Rice’s notebook were to show Mealey’s sense of humor. For instance, when asked why he lived so far away up the Santiam River near Quartz Creek east of Foster, he replied, “It makes no difference whether you are five or 75 miles from town with the mud too deep to go anywhere.”
This point was made many times about the roads in the area and explains the raised wooden sidewalks in photographs of early Sweet Home. With enough rain, mud abounded. One of Bill Mealey’s little rhymes:
Just of late I’ve been a wishing
That I’d like to go a-fishing
The water’s getting right
And I think the fish will bite
This afternoon
Ironically, where his house once stood is now under the waters of a dam, and fish are plentiful unless we want to catch them.
With mud in mind, we can look at a quote from E.S. Oliver. He was talking about Dr. Luther, a one time physician in Sweet Home who autopsied the peddler murdered near the Narrows north of town near some springs once called Peddler’s Springs or Deadman’s Springs. Two bullets killed the peddler, and Dr. Luther appears to have done an adequate job that time, but E.S. Oliver declared neither his father nor his grandfather had a high opinion of the doctor. All that he knew, they claimed, was to prescribe calomel. If you broke a leg, he gave you calomel.
What Oliver recalled from his young boyhood was the doctor’s talking parrot. It had two favorite phrases, one the standard “Polly wants a cracker,” and the other, “pretty muddy,” being locally accurate.
And now, speaking of critters, a Holley correspondent described the hogs of 1850 as weighing between 200 and 300 pounds, much less than the 1907 ones, which weighed up to 1,200 pounds. However, those slim fellows of earlier years “would dig potatoes out of the third row from the fence.” Like the first settlers, hogs had to be tough and enterprising.
Some settlers, also, were more enterprising than others. We think of the early donation land claims as being generous. The first in Oregon in the 1850s allowed 320 acres to a man over the age of 21 and an additional 320 if he had a wife. Later, the claims dropped down to quarter sections of 160 acres. Of course, claimants had to fulfill certain requirements and pay $1.25 an acre to really own the claims.
Often a settler would find a reason to sell all or part of a claim or even his “squatters rights.” In our area, Joshua Paddock exchanged a meerschaum pipe and a buckskin for 120 acres south of Sweet Home. It adjoined property owned by his father, a pioneer of 1852. This property was first owned by the Ames family who had also settled on most of the land upon which Sweet Home stands. The price? One Schulfer wagon and $300 in gold.
For many years, the Paddocks worked the land using oxen. One team, Turk and Tyler, ran away at every opportunity. Multiple teams powered the thresher. We wonder if the buckskin Joshua Paddock traded for 120 acres was a buckskin pony or deer hide, tan ponies often being called buckskins.
Either way, the price was a bargain.
Horses were prevalent and horse raising became quite popular. Sweet Home had a race track east of town toward the Gilliland cemetery where Dr. Langmack had his airport in later times. Crawfordsville possessed a race track and so did Berlin in our immediate vicinity. Many picnics were held not far from Sweet Home’s race track on the Pickens place. Along with the Ames, Gillilands and Wileys, the Pickenses had been among the first to settle in the Sweet Home valley.
One Fourth of July, the picnic scene became quite lively, according to one note Lois Rice kept. George Pickens, perhaps known as George the Ornery, arrived on the scene with a hazel bush he had cut down. The bush contained a large occupied hornet’s nest, a disagreeable intrusion for those hoping for fried chicken and potato salad, pies and lemonade. (By the way, the East Linn Museum displays a very large, vacated paper hornet’s nest in its blacksmith section.)
A happier Fourth of July incursion took place in 1912. The Howes of Brownsville arrived on the scene in their Ford touring car. A forerunner to the disappearance of the horse and buggy, at that time here a car was quite unusual. Each “jitney” ride could be had at five cents and perhaps the car reached five miles an hour or even more. The Howes took the vehicle to various picnics and festivities in the county, good advertising for their automotive shop.
In the meantime, Sweet Home’s local blacksmith, Henry Slavens, practiced a different kind of advertising. He fulfilled a second role in the community as the town’s undertaker. He kept Sweet Home citizens informed of his status by displaying a coffin in the front window of his blacksmith shop. His wife, Rhett, served as a licensed mortician, also, as well as being a milliner. Were hats and the coffin on display at the same time? The little note in Lois Rice’s collection doesn’t say so.
An epitaph in the Ames cemetery, too, appeared unusual enough to be remarked upon and saved. A variation of an old theme, it reads, “Come all young men that passes by/ As you are now once was I./As I am now so you must be/Prepare for death and follow me.”
Alas, Amos Knable was born July 25, 1866 and he died Feb. 20, 1890 so he only made it to about 24. We can wonder why this epitaph was chosen with no mention of “beloved son” or “loving anyone.”
Naturally, Sweet Home experienced times of discord. For example, Mack Moss arrested a man for shooting out the street lights. At the time, Sweet Home had no jail. The fellow spent the night at the Moss family home before he could be delivered to Albany’s jail.
Newspapers had to scrape up stories where they could, especially when we think of Sweet Home as having only 100 or 200 people in the town until timber became the big focus in the 1930s.
Boys will be boys, and Tom Burgett and Artie Fletcher disagreed as to who was the fastest. Pocket knives backed their bets against one another. The pair streaked down the dusty main street, no doubt raising the interest of those standing before the post office and appreciating the dry season when the street was not full of mud. Tom Burgett walked away with Artie Fletcher’s knife.
Mud came into play again involving Sam Nothiger. He was a peaceable industrious man, one of the Swiss immigrants settled at Sunnyside east of Foster. Fearing she’d never see him again, his mother wept when he left the family home in Switzerland for America in 1883. He must have written glowing descriptions of the new world home, because two years later his mother, father, two brothers and a sister joined him, as did others from that country.
Sam Nothiger had two encounters which put him in local lore. One involved the Evangelical Church. At first the one here was independent, but some parishioners wanted to join it with the United Evangelicals, which Sam and others did not want. Disagreements followed. Those for being united occupied the church and locked the dissenters out.
Sam Nothiger and other men found a suitable rail. They threatened to ram the doors down, a warning came from within. Stop or they would be shot. Sam uttered memorable words: “Come mit your shoot.”
No one was shot.
Building a second church helped settle things for the moment after a judge told those for unification to give the first church back to Sam Nothiger and the independents. Nothiger had called the bluff of the would-be-shooters and it had worked. The second time when the possible bluff involved mud, he didn’t go so far. This involved a large mud puddle nearly swamping a narrow passage way on a road.
When two wagons met in such a circumstance, someone had to give. Nothiger was on one side of the puddle and Red Harry (the only name given), a man whose temperament matched the color of his hair, was on the other. “Take the other side,” Nothiger said, choosing the road’s better side.
Red Harry, the account says, tied the reins of his team to the wagon brake, removed his jacket and stepped down. If Red Harry were bluffing, Sam Nothiger offered no challenge. “Well, well,” he said, “I will take the other side of the road.” Mud was better than conflict. The excerpts included in the notebook came from Roy Elliott’s “Profiles of Progress.” If Sam Nothiger told this story on himself, it shows his strong sense of humor.
One of the trunks used by the Nothigers to ship family possessions from Switzerland to America is in the East Linn Museum. It was said of the Swiss families at Sunnyside for a while that the only person speaking English and not German was the school teacher, and during World War I a husband calling home to his wife was overheard talking German and was fined $5 for the offense in Sweet Home.
That now seems like carried-away patriotism, but some get carried away over a variety of things. For instance, some elderly Albany pioneers noted in one newspaper clipping proposed to have a banquet for remaining settlers from the first years of taking up land in the 1840s to 1850s. This would include people here who had survived the 50 years or more since they’d crossed the plains.
To reflect those very early days, a proposed menu was boiled wheat for the first course and parched pea coffee for the second.
To them and to Lois Rice and her determination, we can be thankful for what we have now. If some of the scraps of information used here seem familiar, we can think of them as being pieces of old jeans or less faded calico dresses cut up and reused in our scrap quilt. New material is always appreciated but we’ll likely continue to search for any pieces of information in the museum’s “scrap bag,” the research room.
In the meantime, let us continue to be thankful for what we have now. The museum will be closed both December and January as has been the practice for the past several years and will open again the first Thursday in February barring any unforeseen circumstances. And so to all: Happy Holidays!