Roberta McKern
If we want to exercise our speculating and surmising abilities, the East Linn Museum’s the perfect place to visit. Why?
Because it’s filled by objects with obscure pasts. Some were possessions cherished and saved by owners no longer available for comment. Others were serendipitously found after having been discarded and abandoned. And still others were sent with complete histories, but not always the correct ones.
Here we’ll examine a few such items from the museum’s back room and one from the connected enclosure that holds the prized early logging truck, the Denby truck.
To begin, we warn that we need not be overly imaginative. For example, we recently received a heavy, cast-iron tool with a long handle that operated a sharp four-inch blade for cutting through substances on a plate beneath. We might think, “Oh, a guillotine for unwanted rodents,” but rats and mice likely wouldn’t volunteer for a French Revolution-style execution. (It would be untidy, anyway.) The tool could possibly chop carrots, onions and potatoes for an Irish stew.
However, if you set a plug of tobacco under the blade and place a spittoon nearby, the tool’s purpose becomes clear: It’s a cutter, used for many years at Gilbert’s Central Market, according to its accompanying limited history. Later it was traded, along with a large logging block (pulley), for a load of gravel. We might wonder how much tobacco was cut for loggers passing through, but we’re certainly grateful for the available snatches of history.
The museum’s back room proves a good place for speculation, because many unidentified mechanical pieces end up in its shadowy depths like flotsam in a big eddy – if cast-iron and steel can become flotsam. This part of the building also houses the huge Dollar Camp cook stove and a lot of logging equipment, plus the linotype machine once used by The New Era, until 1971.
Much of the flotsam awaits at the building’s south end, as we enter the little mining room set off to one side. A cluster of cast-iron, steel and wooden objects has collected there, some with hints of brass. It’s arranged to prevent tripping. Other pieces line the south wall and help fill the glassed-in shelves above. For people without particular mechanical skills, it’s a place of mystery fit for conjecture.
Not long ago, when retired geologist Steve Munts visited, one of the cluster’s unlabeled pieces became better known. Low and squat, it resembled some kind of cast-iron stove, big enough to trip over, with openings on all four sides. After his visit, a label appeared on the object: an assayer’s furnace minus its doors.
As its donor, Munts knew what it was. He’s writing a book about Quartzville, and like others coming to the East Linn Museum in search of the town and its mining history, he knew more about it than we did. When a volunteer wanted to point out some of the room’s choice pieces – like George Whitcomb’s homemade assayer’s kit using tooth-powder bottles and a couple of ca.-1898 Indian head pennies scarred from possible use as tools – she was brushed aside. Munts had donated the majority of Quartzville artifacts and knew what he was looking for. His interest was in photographing what he knew we had for his book. The museum is grateful to him and looks forward to learning more about the search for gold.
He generously left another artifact during his visit: a length of flume from the Great Northern Mine, near the Lucky Boy in the Blue River Mining District. Having been reminded of how we’d like to know how the flume worked, he gave us a description, adding some information on the mining district from various sources.
When we look at the furnace, we can only wonder how many hopeful miners wandered off dismayed at the assaying information they received. According to the reports on the Blue River Mining District, the Lucky Boy came closest to actually being lucky.
Not so for the Great Northern, which showed enough promise to have a four-stamp mill, with the flume delivering water from a creek or spring. The water carried pulverized ore across a conveyor belt covered with mercury-coated amalgamation plates. The gold bonded with the mercury to form amalgamation. When that was heated, the mercury evaporated to be recaptured, and a button of gold remained in the retort. (That was a very simplified explanation.) Water drove the entire shebang because it was also used as steam to provide the necessary power.
Hence, the roughly 11-foot-long flume ended up in the wilderness. Now it rests along the back wall not far from the assayer’s furnace. A wooden pipe bound by heavy wire, its crumpled, rusting nozzle is attached at the far end by bands of rubber. This is what’s known as a barrel stave pipe, its construction formed by lengths of wood fitted together like staves in a barrel.
Such pipes, which came in toward the middle of the 19th century, were often used in cities and towns. In fact, the flume sits next to a smaller version, a barrel stave length of pipe alleged to have been used by the tannery that occupied Ames Creek not far south from the museum’s location. By the mid-20th century, most such pipes had been replaced.
We wondered, “How would the Great Northern Mine come by such a pipe?” It was likely ordered from a catalog of mining equipment, Munts replied. This reminded us of how we often underestimated the levels of sophistication once reached in the past from technology to catalogs. Take water power, whether from a fast-flowing or atomically heated steam. It’s been such a part of history that a “Water Power Day,” set aside each year for celebration, seems appropriate – probably in April, when it rains.
Not far from the assayer’s furnace, beneath the south wall shelves, sits a cast-iron piece that may have had to do with water power. However, we’ve discovered very little about it. Close to the size of a nearby early automobile wheel, this heavy iron object looks like a Ferris wheel for mice. Eighteen cups line the edge of its circular form. Up close we realize they’re actually double cups; we just don’t see the second row from a distance.
A label tells us it’s a water wheel. But for what? Our guess has been a turbine, but we’ve found no confirmation. We wonder if some mechanically inclined person set up his own electricity source in a local creek.
The Wodtli mill, which sold power on a limited scale to customers in the Foster and Sweet Home area, used turbines in the early 20th century. But for Fern Ridge and other vicinities, rural electrification didn’t become general until the 1940s.
While pondering power and the Great Northern flume, we are reminded of a possible flume-operated grist mill at Holley, perhaps developed in conjunction with the gold run up the Calapooia and Blue rivers at the end of the 1800s.
So far, taking rumors of its existence to mind, we only speculate about that mill. Was, for instance, the flume a barrel stave pipe one? Or was it more similar to an open trough, like we’ve heard were used in sliding logs down steep hills toward mill sites? (Actually, an example of such a flume once existed at a long-gone logging site.)
So now we meander to the truck shed, where a set of small millstones have piqued our curiosity. If someone knows about them, please tell us. Volunteers mentioned mining as a possible use. The wheels are scored outward from their central holes, where pieces of shafting remain. Reinforced by encircling steel bands, they’re made of a hard rock, something like a coarse granite with black inclusions. Even cement has been considered.
Others have suggested that they ground ore – which is perhaps not likely, because the hardness of gold ore-bearing rocks might be too close to that of the millstones. But could they be millstones from the briefly operated flume-powered grist mill on the Calapooia?
Could they have come from the McKercher mill farther downstream, at Crawfordsville?
If we had an early-20th-century mining supply catalog, maybe we’d learn if the mill wheels ground grist or gold ore.
The East Linn Museum does have old catalogs to answer questions about artifacts with little documentation.
It’s gratifying to receive knowledge about what we have, but if we can’t get two birds in the bushes, it’s more than gratifying to have one – the thing – on hand (unless we’ve been listening to a birdie duet).
Here are two brief examples of when speculations and catalogs meet. Actually, we know what we’re encountering: a magneto from a 1914 Ford Model T and a box churn, both from the back room.
At first glance, the magneto somewhat resembles the aforementioned water wheel. It’s circular and wreathlike, flat with round raised forms along the edges resembling long-pressed dried flowers, except everything is black, grimy metal.
Knowing the Ford Motor Company and Sears Roebuck catalogs had a fulsome connection in the 1920s, we turned to a 1923 Sears edition we had on hand. It featured nothing on the magneto itself, but a customer could order a horn to fit under the hood of a car. It was operated by a magneto, thus acquiring the ability to scare pedestrians too close to the edge of the road.
On the other hand, a Western Auto Company supply catalog offered magnetos made for Fords manufactured from 1915 to 1927 for $5.95. So much so far for magnetos.
There’s more payoff on the box churn, advertised in a 1902 Sears Roebuck catalog, where “the Curtis Improved box churn” is one of two offered in various sizes, from one that could hold three gallons of cream up to one that could take 80 gallons for a dairy business. Prices ranged accordingly from $3.50 to $19.50.
But our churn doesn’t seem to have been ordered from Sears. According to its identification, it’s handmade and cow-powered.
Here we can begin to surmise about the item, which was donated by the Henshaws. George Henshaw operated a blacksmith shop on Seven Mile Lane between Brownsville and Albany.
It now rests practically in its entirety on the eastern edge of the museum’s big expanse of lawn. The thought has been to turn the shop into a display, but that thought outlasted those involved in acquiring it. We hope someone will come forth and help us out on that one.
George Henshaw, we suspect, could have easily copied the “Curtis Improved Box Churn.” Our square version is moderate in size, 17 inches along each side. But, well, we might ask a passing Guernsey cow, “How now, brown cow? How cow-powered?”
Sears’ versions of the churns could be purchased with the addition of a gudgeon for $6 extra, so those extremely large models could be modeled to use a different power source than a hand crank.
We went to a dictionary to learn what a gudgeon was, becoming curmudgeonly upon discovering it to be a small European fish. Another dictionary offered a second definition: a shaft and attachments allowing a big, bigger or biggest churn to be attached to an alternate source of power. But, we repeat, “How cow power? Where did Bossy fit into the scheme?” Aside from providing the cream, that is?
If anyone speculating about this finds out, please let us know. We’d appreciate your company.