A Few Winter Days

 Two weeks of icy fog kept me indoors and waiting for sun, but my cat Jake appreciated my presence. He had moved onto my bathroom counter next to the sink in his instinctually helpful way...it was not his first desire, which was to hide out someplace dark, but it was good to have a way to pet him every few minutes, to check in with him while I tried to figure out when to make the call to the vet. He wasn't going to improve, though he still had lots of good days. He nestled in towels and slept. I combed him and helped him keep clean, and he had his mixed feelings about me, for sure. I tried as hard as I could to honor him.

I started this post while waiting for the vet to arrive to help me figure out if Jake needed to be set to run one of his other lives...I was being all clinical and coldish about it, because I have been on this edge of a decision for two years now. He had a tumor...but he still purred, he still ate. He obviously had a headache, at least, but he would still jump up on the counter. These God-decisions are really hard, as you probably know.

The previous day was my son's 23rd birthday, a day of many memories for me, a mark on the calendar, but a quiet day. I do so remember being that age and so bent on my own life that not many other people mattered very much. They did on an emotional level, but that had to get pushed aside to make my way forward into the work I had to do. So the two days, the birth day and the death day, connected for me in deep  emotion, the kind that is mostly set aside while we do the work of separation and putting our lives in order.

I sent him the $23 check in a ritual my mother used to follow, a dollar for every year. I like it, even though I know checks are annoying to him, demanding a trip to a bank and all. I like the marking of the passing of time, just a little more each year, just a bit of a raise. I think when I hit 50 the increasing stopped, or jumped to a bigger round number. Of course at this age I don't want to take money from my mom (she's 87, or will be tomorrow) but somehow birthdays are still important. I like passing a ritual down from Mom.

Spent another day at the County Deeds and Records office yesterday running down details about my property. It's a satisfying mystery that holds onto its details tightly, and I may never pin some of them down. I did discover the exciting fact that my property was connected to the one on the corner for a long time, leading me to speculate about the builder of that one too. Wish I could take it apart and look inside the walls....

But I can't. You can't go back in time, either, and I spend a lot of time wishing I were really witnessing the farming era in this neighborhood, the cows, the horses and sheep. When the Lane County Fair is here I sometimes wake up to lowing in the morning...I like the sounds of cows. My Mom's family were farmers and homesteaders in Nebraska, and in that way have some in common with these people I am researching.

The Vaughans and Huddlestons farmed partly because that was the main work available in the early years of settlement of this area. Many of them no doubt came here for the free land and the opportunity to make a living with their skills. Perhaps some were not even skilled as farmers, but just had the broad range of handy abilities that people used to gain as a matter of course: the use of tools, working with wood, using nature to one's advantage. They had to farm to feed themselves and their children and hired laborers, as there were no cities nearby at all in the beginning. 

And they had a lot of kids, out of necessity and preference, and needed land to set their sons up, and their daughter's husbands, (the daughters by default) and in the case of the families I am studying, the widows needed homes too. Most of the men in these families died rather young, but the widows all reached advanced ages, spending decades living with their daughters and sons.

One of the theories I'm exploring is that one of those widows lived here, and put up that Greek or Gothic Revival wallpaper I'm so fond of. She probably bought it here, or ordered it through San Francisco. I doubt they brought rolls of wallpaper in the covered wagons, though they might have brought doors or at least door hardware. There were lumber mills here right away and sash and door manufacturers, so most likely all the woodwork was milled here. There was a glass factory in Coburg at one time, but the quality was reportedly weak and they closed, and likely they didn't make window glass. The one-over-one windows I have are not as old as the original construction, I don't think, and I read that large glass panes weren't available until the mid-1800's, so I think the windows may have been replaced. I kept them when I remodeled, so I may be able to glean a little more information from them. I know the "horns" that projected down from the top sash are still found on lots of houses in Eugene. These were to strengthen the glass, and as windy and stormy as it gets here, it makes sense that so many would have been used. Some sash and door manufacturer probably dominated the market here during the main bulding era of the early 20th century, but a lot of the glass had to be imported, in some cases around Cape Horn. Mine looks pretty old, but that's pretty darn imprecise.

Huddleston's first work here was a trading post he opened in part of Skinner's cabin, which later became a bigger store that he located right on the east bank landing by the first (Skinner's) ferry. That is likely where he got the money to buy so many parcels of land, that and some gold mining he did in Yreka shortly after he arrived here in 1850 . Lots of men got caught up  in gold fever and left their families to try mining, though he was single, not marrying until 1853. At any rate he was rather wealthy, and his widow Samantha made her living selling off the many properties they accumulated when the price was cheap or free. She paid a lot of taxes. Her house was first the Mims house at 330 High (built in 1867), which was in the fashionable district at the time, and then they moved to the northern part of their DLC, at around 8th and Madison. Yesterday I found a big Black Cottonwood almost identical to the one that was cut down on Tyler, right on Madison near 8th. Now they are Huddleston trees for me, for sure. Their house down there is probably gone, though I may get around to investgating that. I don't believe they ever lived on the Fairgrounds part of their property, but it is entirely possible that one of the widows did, for a time, Samantha, or her mother, Catherine Davis. Most likely it was Miranda Vaughan, some other member of the Vaughans, or just some hired help.

This little strip my house sits on was in between some of the DLCs, (called Meets and Bounds) and was probably just absorbed by Huddleston. I know he sold it to Vaughan. Most of the sales of my property were for $10. It was only $23,000 when I bought it in 1988. Most of the sales were to relatives. Yesterday I found another relationship by searching the records, and that's one reason things are hard to trace. When you gave your son or daughter a house, or some pasture, you might not record it right away, or at all. If you were a farmer, you certainly might use or lease grazing land or hay fields if they were available, and many of the recorded arrangements sound like just a step up from a handshake. 

I'm quite sure Bilyeu Vaughan was named after Lark Bilyeu, or his family. Mr. Bilyeu was a lawyer and notary who signed most of the transactions recorded by the Vaughans. He owned a strip of land just to the south of Huddleston's DLC. Perhaps Miranda Vaughan just liked the name, as a variant of William, but I'm guessing some honoring or gratitude was mixed in there. Quite likely Lark Bilyeu gave Vaughan a lot of advice or help in his own quest to amass land for his family when they moved from Willamette Forks (Coburg) to west Eugene.

And it seems quite possible that Bilyeu did build this house, and maybe the one next door. His name is on my board. He and his brother-in-law, Grace's husband Frank Bowers, are both there, with the 1916 date. I'm as certain as I can be that he remodeled it in 1916, changing the look from Gothic Revival to Victorian, paneling the interior of the back part with the tongue-in-groove, and covering the wallpaper with Victorian florals. Miranda and Grace picked out the wallpaper, in my fantasy. And Miranda Vaughan could have certainly lived here.

But each new detail brings another little mystery. Good thing I'm enjoying the research, and the weather isn't making me feel compelled to prune my little fruit orchard. There seems to be an almost endless search out there, and it seems important to do it.

Truthfully, I see my control patterns in my desire to pin down and document every tiny detail, in the hope that it will fill out the full picture. It's better than a 5000-piece jigsaw puzzle, with some of the pieces lost under the piano. While living in the past is feeding my sense of loss and regret for things unrecorded and forgotten, it's grounding me in what's important in the present, and increasing exponentially my love for this piece of land. 

Family relationships, vital. Writing things down, essential. Continuing relationships through the generations, more important than you might think. And I did put down my cat, sadly, and added his grave to the other pet graves on  my little homestead. They're unmarked, except for stones, the foundation stones I took out of this house. Unlike ancestors, cats aren't that important, and their lives are brief, but learning comes from many directions, and my cat taught me about patience and suffering and the farmers' way of thinking. You nurture as well as you can, and then you let go, providing if you are able, and being provided for if you aren't. 

And little old ladies, living alone, feature strongly in my house drama. I'm just the latest one, and ironically the one who did the most damage to the legacy of the house, notwithstanding the fact that I gave it another fifty years or so of life. Writing the book about these people in all their insignificance will project us all a little farther into the next generations, though not much. Not many people will care like I do. 

But I'm glad I do care. Thanks, Jake, for your responsiveness, even the bitey kind. Thanks Mom, for the little growing checks on my birthday, and thanks, son, for being the best part of my life by far. And thank you everyone who wrote something down, most especially those guys who put that board in my wall. Someday someone will take the boards down and find my name, perhaps, and maybe then when they google me (though it will be called something else) they will find something interesting. I'll try.

And by the time my son pays me $10 for this property, he will own something of great relative value, thanks to all the countless other dead and living people who invested their own lives in their real estate surrounding mine. So thanks, Mike, for picking out this property and planting the seeds of revival. It wasn't the property I wanted, but now I see how perfect it is for me. 

Everybody needs a place to bury their cat, and to dig up old treasures. Sometime in the last 25 years here, I found a horseshoe. In my fantasy it was from the horse of Catharine Davis, a horse reputedly the fastest in Lane County in the 1860s. That's right. It's a priceless horseshoe.