Finding Grace and Bilyeu

I biked out west yesterday to enjoy the kestrels, egrets, herons, hawks, geese, what I think was a pair of green-winged teal, mergansers, cormorants, and of course mallards in the wetlands. As much as I am disliking development right now, I love that bike path out to Greenhill and Royal. I swung by Lane Memorial Gardens although I hope I never try to bike on West 11th again: terrifying.

Grace and Frank were there, in the Garden of the Good Shepherd, Grace sinking a bit into the soggy ground. They have the exact same type of grave marker as Bilyeu and Estella, who are in the Garden of Meditation. I don't get the charm of putting caskets into the cold wet ground but I am glad there is a place to go to find out more about people who are gone. The birth date I had for Bilyeu was wrong (unless the grave marker is wrong) and outside of that I didn't really learn a lot. Their markers are metal (bronze?) with roses on them, and they say "Together forever." Bilyeu died in 1961 and Frank in 1965 and their wives outlived them, so I picture them going together to the husbands' funerals, picking out their markers, and so on, as tight sisters-in-law, but that is just more fiction I am writing about them.

Bilyeu did have two daughters I haven't found yet, Mildred and Margaret, and he didn't get married until he was 38, so there's still a story there if I feel like continuing to read all of the Register Guards way back. I read some of the early years, skimmed them enough to see how they were structured, and will continue that. Farming people don't make the news that often.
Will definitely go out to Coburg as there is a good chance that any of those five mystery children of F.G.'s could be out there.

I also went across the street and chatted with Mae, my neighbor who has lived on the corner for a long time. She was born in 1920, and in 1933 her family moved from Irving, where her father lost his railroad job in the Depression. That used to be a town but is now absorbed by the River Road developments. She said they were going down the asphalt road that was 13th at the time and saw an unused "shack" on the corner of the unimproved Van Buren, and her father sent her to ask the neighbors who owned it. It was a man named Rogers I think, and he agreed to rent it to them for $5 a month. It had no windows, nothing, so was probably some kind of farm outbuilding left from the Huddlestons (she says they were farmers, as most people here were then.) She and her brother would get fruit crates from Guthrie's, the little store on 11th and Tyler (which is still there in a very different form) and her father used them to line the inside walls. He installed windows (probably scrounged or hand-built) and her mother planted flowers, and the landlord came back and raised their rent to $10. When the house was torn down they found the statue of St. Joseph that her father had put in the rafters to watch over them.

Mae's family was from El Paso and her mother was apparently a fantastic maker of enchiladas and tortillas, and Mae told me a lot of stories about her life then. She didn't remember the Vaughan Dairy, so it must have been gone by then, but she remembered Willow who owned the house on the SE corner, and someone named Nashom who owned the big house on the NW corner, which I believe was the dairy farm house. I looked around in it when Pat Albertson owned it. Mae said Pat really put a lot of work into saving that one, and it is now owned by someone (in)famous for having the only leaf blower in our part of the neighborhood. It still retains its grand character and some of the plantings.

Mae and her husband Red bought the property on the NE corner of 13th and Van Buren for $800 in 1946, and Red built their house, eventually expanding it to move in her mother who still lived in the improved shack. When the sidewalks and repaving was done in the fifties, it cost them $3500 for each property (at some point they had bought her parents' lot too) and because she volunteered as a translator for the courts and worked for a lawyer, they were allowed to "Bancroft" them, which was basically a payment plan I guess. That was a lot of money to be assessed. Mae has always been a really hard worker, and a favorite at Bi-Mart. During WWII she worked in Great Falls MT as an airplane mechanic, on B-17s. She says it annoys her when people limit the discussion of women working to Rosie the Riveter, because riveting was nothing compared to working on the engines. She wired their own house, Red drilling the holes in the studs, and Mae running the wiring. No wonder they responded so well to me working on my house. She says Red used to stand at the window and say that if he could he would go and help that young lady (I was in my forties) who was working so hard. I didn't know, but all of the neighbors watched me for the twelve years it took to rebuild that house. I remember being awed when Fred from across the street brought me over some ring-shanked finishing nails when I was nailing on porch flooring. I didn't know there were that kind of nails.

Anyway, Mae told me that the duplex next to me and my house were there in 1933, and the duplex used to be a single-family home. When I look at it I realize that the only thing that makes it look different from mine is the pop-out in the front that makes it a duplex, and all the stuff in back added since I have lived here, so I am itching to look at the structure. I have a little theory going that our houses and the shack on the corner were built for the workers for the farms, Huddleston's and then Vaughan's. So I just went outside and asked my neighbors if I could have a look in their basement, and sure enough, inside a beadboard cabinet and under some partial siding, there were the 1x12s. The house next door is a twin to mine. It's all so thrilling to me. I think they were raised up for the foundations, got new siding, and in a series of renovations became what they are today. I am going to have to research the whole neighborhood.

That would be a worthy project. I got a fabulous book in my huge library stack called "Landscape Change in South Eugene, Oregon," by Alvin W. Urquhart. It has a map by a real professional, Koch, from 1892, that just has a tantalizing piece of the head of my street where it hits the fairgrounds, with the name Vaughan on it. There was also some important work done by Jon Pincus (someone I actually know) for the city, the Eugene Downtown Core Area Historic Context Statement (1991) which shows the land claims and dates of ownership. My property was definitely Huddleston, acquired in 1903 to add to his original 640 acre Donation Land Claim on the other side of Van Buren. They got that land free from the US government in 1889.

So I think they farmed the land before they actually owned it, because no one had claimed right up to their line, and I think they built these houses between 1880 and 1900, possibly just after 1903 at the outside. That would explain the construction and the similarities. So thrilling.

Also, on one of my doors that old lockset, called a Rim Lock Keeper, dates from the mid-1800s, and is original to the five-panel door. I believe it was the closet, which is why the lock didn't get updated to be more functional. I even had a six-panel door, though I forget where it was. Maybe it was the back door. I'm glad I took so many pictures. It looks like the front door of the little house, which was probably a garage built later, still had a while porcelain knob on it, with another underneath. I will have to see if I still have that one in the wood storage. Wow. I'm just way too excited about all this.

Doors are portable so they don't really tell their complete stories, but I'm sure they were made here during the wood years, when there were countless small mills. Mae said when Red wanted to build in 1946, he couldn't buy wood, had to go to Portland for it. There was so much building going on then, they used up all the wood. I also read that between 1893 and 1898 there was almost no building going on, because of a financial panic in 1893. Somebody got overextended.

But the farmers just kept doing what they were doing, I'm guessing. If they couldn't buy new, they recycled what they had. That most likely explains the board with the names, which probably came from Elmer Van Orden, salvaged from another project. That could explain many things.

Though, of course, some things will never be explained, like how we got so lucky to have this sunny day which I really need to get out in. I'll be back when the rain starts.