By Roberta McKern
For The New Era
Is the East Linn Museum a place of refuge from current history?
Yes. It contains examples of social history which focuses on the common lives of ordinary people – for the most part.
Artifacts displayed show us a past we have survived as a community. Was the last part of the 1800s and the early years of the 1900s really a golden age? Maybe our fascination with AI can answer the question while providing graphs to back up the assertion.
Many nations have claimed to have had a “golden age.” The ancient Greeks filled their legends with nymphs flitting around among fauns and centaurs.
Other people have looked for lands of milk and honey while in this country the desire was once for a chicken in every pot on Sunday. That may mean now is our golden era because carry-out fried chicken can be had at every meal along as plastic credit cards are viable.
While we wander through the museum, we can decide if the earlier years were so golden although we know the answer – likely not?
We might, however, envision a man guiding a plow pulled by a large spotted ox through a field of green spring grass and wild yellow mustard flowers with the Santiam River chuckling along the edges of a flood plain. How bucolic, we might think, overlooking how hard the work of planting and harvesting wheat or rye might be.
But were oxen so commonly used in farming once the land was settled by pioneers?
No. Horses took over for oxen when mustangs from the Deschutes bunch grass prairies began to be traded west over the Santiam Pass and its toll road.
Oxen were still used in logging and farming, partly as a matter of choice, at least according to what one man said, our imagined man with the ox and plow, Jake Menear. He claimed he used an ox instead of a horse because he felt ploughing was below a horse’s dignity.
That seems to be a fair and sympathetic assessment.
Jake Menear settled on the Santiam River in the latter part of the 19th century at what is now called “Menear’s Bend”. His descendant, Don Menear, donated part of the family’s history to the East Linn Museum when he was involved in its founding in the 1970s, the times of the nation’s second hundred anniversary. This July the museum will be 50 years old.
Regarding Jake Menear, we know he was a Pennsylvanian who started moving west
following service in Abraham Lincoln’s blue-clad Army of the Potomac toward the end of
America’s Civil War.
As a young infantryman, Menear served during the final attacks leading to the fall of Richmond, Va., the Confederate capitol. The war had become one of attrition, meaning the rebels being starved out from their trenches.
This was a type of warfare that expanded with the terrible trenches of World War I. The
museum has Jake Menear’s discharge papers from 1865 which, frankly, we regard with
awe.
After the Civil War, while he was westward-bound, Menear and his growing family paused for a while in Nebraska. It is possible, then, that Oregon, with its plenty of wood and water, did look like golden land to him, as it has to many former midwesterners.
History is nebulous and would and water in good supply has long been a determining factor.
As long as people have been settling down, they’ve frequently done so beside rivers with groves of trees on their banks. In the East Linn vicinity, this has been in the Santiam and Calapooia river valleys.
Yet as we view the museum’s displays, we can sense wood has taken precedence over water in that logging became very important around the start of the 20th century. In the 1930s, after the train came to Sweet Home with a spur track up the Calapooia to Dollar Camp, work in the timber industry expanded rapidly, especially when Europe began to prepare for World War II. The museum features a collection of cross-cut saws, the cookstove from Dollar Camp on the
Calapooia, the Denby truck used in logging, and various other relics, including the paraphernalia used by a tree topper to prepare a carefully selected fir as a spar pole for getting the logs out of the forest.
The war years of 1939 when war began in Europe to 1945 when it ended, saw a growth of the timber industry here which continued during the conflagration’s aftermath. Jobs in the timber industry included logging, sawmills, plywood mills, and eventually a paper mill and were plentiful in the general vicinity.
This has been called the “good times,” when cars were big enough to seat six 6-footers (men) and many families began to have two cars, one so Dad could commute to work and the other, the big one with fins, for the family.
Mom would have to learn to drive if she didn’t already know how. Now, she could take the kids to the dentist or doctor.
Too, as prosperity grew, avenues of education increased, especially when the Russians launched Sputnik at the end of the 1950s, setting off a rocket science race between the Communist and American worlds.
Considering the late 1940s to about the 1970s when the timber industry began to drop off, those of us who can just remember the end of World War II likely lived through the “golden era” here.
It involved rising expectations. Like the museum, each of us carries a trove of social history memories. Children building their own mental files can make connections as a 4-year-old did who once tried to climb into a highchair displayed accessibly. The boy was too big to fit into the chair, but he understood its meaning.
He was also adventurous and not interested in seeing himself reflected in the glass in the
lower display cabinets twice as tall as he was. In truth, we take refuge in the past frequently. There is the quote about history
attributed to Winston Churchill: “Those who fail to learn from history, are doomed to repeat it”. That seems to happen politically all the time or failures of politics might not contribute to our many wars or conflicts or armed excursions always taking place somewhere and, it seems, around the globe.
Many nations depend on inflated historical pasts to explain competition with their neighbors for lands each claim.
The museum’s little military room, plus the sabers and guns displayed in the main room emphasize this.
But, the bulk of the museum’s goods reflect the mundane facts of life including furniture, crockery, cooking stoves, rocking chairs, carpenter’s tools, and much more.
We can think of Jake Menear and his use of an ox to plow with because of respect for the dignity of a horse and we humans should be able to spare consideration for each other and treat each other with courtesy. If we can stack facts of history to promote bad results, we can also take refuge in what is good enough to outweigh the bad.
In truth, most people do behave well. They just need to visit the East Linn Museum and wonder how the past continues to contribute to the present in material form.
A picture of Jake Menear can be found along with logging and other gear from timber’s heyday, but we lack a photograph of a particularly dignified horse.