I'll try to keep this short, but there are a lot of barely-related thoughts going through my mind today. It's going to be a production day; several of my custom accounts need things printed right now, which is going to mean next week for most of them, but some today. Thanksgiving takes a lot of time, though of course it is rewarding to give thanks and I hope I remember to fit that in amidst the pie crumbs and dirty dishes.
I don't have to cook a turkey, as Tom and Pamela do that, in a finely orchestrated duet which provides many delicious traditional and unexpected treats. I bring the cranberries, both cooked sauce and raw relish, and the pies. I usually make four for them and one or two to put in my refrigerator for breakfasts and snacks during the next week as I grow increasingly exhausted. I feel like my part is a lot of work but it's nothing compared to getting the potatoes mashed and still warm and the gravy just right. Pamela makes a lot of gravy, and at least three perfectly cooked vegetables, all hot and ready at the same time, and her dinner rolls are famous. I realized my pie crust recipe is one of my oldest, from the 1970's, and I might just switch it up this year and use a different one. I'd like a flakier texture. It's an example of how I am, stuck in tradition so deep I don't even see it, and longing a little for change if the risk level isn't too high. People will eat the pies even if the crust fails completely, because pie. And no one would care if all the sides were not hot and perfectly cooked and the projected time rather precisely met, or the cranberries too tart or sweet, but we like to work hard and do our best when we can.
My choices are so very low risk, as are most of my challenges on the world scale. I'm out of cinnamon, but I have three stores within a short walk. I have pears and apples in many varieties from the farmers, and a perfect squash all ready for the spices. I have my set of pie plates that is different from the set I ruined with drying Jell-O. I have the time to make everything without feeling pressured, my inventory is pretty dense so I don't have to print much for the next few weeks, and I have so many delightful choices of things to do in my spare time that I just wish I had more of it. I feel quite lucky, though perhaps not as smart as I sometimes do.
My gridwall of hats almost fell down on Saturday. I thought I reinforced it in a sturdy way so it would be rigid but the hats are really heavy so it was very out of plumb when I noticed it at 10:30 or so on opening day. I had a couple of stop-gap measures I could take, so I propped it up but had terrible thoughts of it collapsing. That would have been really bad for business. It tickles me some that after 40 years of retailing I still don't know how to construct a display properly. I tried something new to open up the doorway to seem more inviting, and it did work to do that, except for the leaning part. My solution was to go home and cut a 6-foot grid in half lengthwise and prop the wall up with one half of it. Worked like a charm, and it was fun to get out my Bosch reciprocating saw and apply it to cutting metal. So much better than the hippie way of digging out the free-box hacksaw and doing them by hand. So glad I learned how to use power tools.
I remember buying that Sawzall after most of the work it would have done had been done the hippie way, when I was remodeling my house years ago. The salvaging phase would have been much more efficient and I'd have saved more boards if I had not been too timid to get one then, but I had to do the project to learn how to do the project and that worked out in the long run. This explains the 15-year duration of the project (which of course is not exactly *finished*) but the skills and confidence have lasted and like most things, I am a work in progress. I still get a kick out of doing the non-traditional, putting on the ear protection and taking a breath and making a lot of noise and dust. I feel like I feel when I ride my trailer full of tubs across the Fairgrounds, with my grey hair poking out from underneath my helmet. Yes, I am an old lady, but not that kind of old lady. I'm the tough old bird type, and proud of it.
I've gotten back into my house research as my free time increases a little and the outdoor work is less appealing (tough luck, leaf pile). I asked the city for Cultural Resource Surveys on some of the houses surrounding the corner north of my house. I am going to be able to document the sequences of ownership and improvement of quite a few of them and prove that the same family owned or built most of them, I hope. The one on the corner of 12th and Van Buren that I call the dairy house is called the Miranda house by the city. They have a lot of the details wrong, and I'm not sure if I will be able to actually correct the records, but I might when I get the whole thing together. Miranda was F.G. Vaughan's second wife and the mother of all of his children (who lived) but the first one, Richey (who farmed down at 8th and Van Buren somewhere.) She did outlive her husband and they probably did call it her house, but there was no Miranda family so no wonder they couldn't find them in the records. I don't know a lot about her except her vital statistics, but there are other threads to follow still. She had a lot of children and some met rather colorful fates, and the Vaughan family is quite well documented and I hope to find descendants. After Floyd's death she moved into a neighboring house or two built by her daughter Grace and her husband Frank Bowers, whose name is all over my house. I'll be able to pin down a lot of details from the building permit records and census records and hope to find out more about her in the process. I'm also fascinated with Samantha Davis Huddleston and her mother Catherine and hope to find out a lot more about them. I identify so strongly with these women and their lives. I think about them all the time as I pass their houses and the trees they planted and I walk on the land they farmed and ate from.
We had a little neighbor party last night and I learned a few details from the occupants of some of the houses. History fascinates most people and a couple of them actually met Grace Bowers and other people in my study. Grace died in 1988 at 103, which is coincidentally the same year we bought this property. All of these people seem just out of my reach, but so close. I know more will come to light as I search, and my theories keep getting more firm and less speculative as I add little facts. It was also great just to know the neighbors and their interests which dovetail with mine. One is a bit of a historian and is researching the Civil War era here, and another restored his house after it was cut up as a duplex and I remember meeting the old woman who did that when a friend of mine lived upstairs. It's fun to have lived in a place for almost 40 years. My whole time in Eugene (since 1975) has been in this neighborhood, on the Huddleston DLC.
I love how things fit together. Like my propped up wall I like to make them neat and sturdy. I can't wait to write the book that documents the ordinary history of my neighborhood, which is also the neighborhood of so many, including the Lane County Historical Museum. So alive. I can't wait to strengthen the ties from the past to the present and future. It connects people just like selling at the Market connects people.
It's a bit overwhelming how many people I am connected to already, how many times at the Hol this weekend someone said to me "Since you're the person who knows everything, what about _______?" I do not know everything but I have been paying attention for a long time, so I certainly have my observations. My booth there is a little bit of a power spot right there by the door, a gathering place of its own. At least three fairly major people-issues occurred there this weekend...things that could have gone rapidly rancid but didn't. Kimberly was fabulous and really earned her stripes handling things with grace and diplomacy. I appreciated being consulted but really, she knew what to do and how to do it. She checks with people to make sure, but her instincts are sound and her ethics are right there where I want them to be, at the top of the scale. I'm so thankful for her leadership, and the collaborative style of it. Saturday Market is solid and thriving, and this will be a wonderful holiday season. We do have to stay calm and be kind, move slowly and be thoughtful. It's not going to be easy as pie, but as I know and you know, pie isn't all that easy either. Plus it makes a mess all over the floor (just like Jell-O art.)
Okay, I'm late to the shop and have to go get that cinnamon. I wish happy and warm times for all of you. If you need me I'll be right there at the Fairgrounds every weekend for what seems a very long time but will pass in a flash. Hope you can keep up. More to come....
Showing posts with label Eugene pioneers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Eugene pioneers. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
Saturday, February 8, 2014
Silver Thaw
The skylight has been covered for days and the dim light is different...we had about a foot of snow complicated by several layers of icy drizzle. I shoveled the walks the first few times until the ice coated the bottom layer and made it easier just to walk on the snow. It just kept coming down. Seems like the drizzle last night finished it off but it may continue today.
Got out my cross country skiis and cruised around the neighborhood a bit; the powder was perfect for it on the first day, but it might be too slippery this morning. I may go try again anyway. It's so rare to be able to ski off the back porch, and pretty darned fun. What I really should do is get the snow off the shop roof before it starts to leak but that would be far too dangerous. Every little thing, including my ladder, is covered with a sheet of ice that will remain until it melts.
Eugene is barely moving this morning, everything cancelled and everyone snowed in. I've been so immersed in the time of the pioneers this seems normal, except being able to walk down to the library and store yesterday before it got too bad. You wouldn't walk far in snow in pioneer days, without knowing a forecast, without the kind of snow gear we now have, unless you had to, or unless you got used to it. I know my Mom walked and rode horses to school in snow in Nebraska, many times, even though one of her actual relatives was lost in a blizzard in 1888. You would certainly rely on the weather knowledge of the old folks, who would know what stage of a storm you were in, and what was likely to come. My young relative and his parents apparently were too new to the country to understand that balminess and sunny weather often foretell a productive storm approaching from the south.
So maybe this thaw we are having means more snow. And this, friends of the Market, is why we don't sell in the winter months. The Fairgrounds has been closed up (tried to ski over there, but no) so not the mess of slipping vehicles and joyriders we had in December. Presumably most of them have tried heading up the mountains.
The pioneers would likely have been more worried about what will happen when all of this snow thaws. The rivers and creeks often overflowed and carried away bridges, houses, livestock, and people, who had of course settled down right next to the waterways for transportation and water supply. It took awhile to get used to the patterns of the landscape. The Davises took claims right along the Willamette, between it and the River Road, which was one of the few trails that were well-used then. That and the County Road, which is now 8th St and heads off on Blair to the northwest, which Huddleston settled on. His property went from the County Road to the Amazon canal, so he had transport on one side and water on the other. Ideal piece of land. One wonders if he knew how valuable it would become as the town was settled. Probably that was what he hoped. I don't think he was really a farmer at heart.
F.G. Vaughan was a farmer though. One of the only newspaper mentions I can find of him is that he brought some watermelons to the newspaper office one day in 1880, and one of them weighed 39 pounds. That's some good farming. James Huddleston was famous for his shooting, though. He was a member of the Eugene Sportsmen Club and they had matches with each other and the Creswell club fairly often. He shot a hawk and some ducks in one. You got points for each type of game you killed, from eagles to cougars to swans, and most animals were fair game. He was later interested in a bill passed by the legislature establishing hunting seasons, according to a letter in his file. Hard to say whether he was a conservationist or interested in it because it might restrict his activities.
There were quite a few mentions of Huddleston in the paper. I think we have some class differences in these people I'm studying, and still more to find out about the stories behind their mentions. Samantha Davis Huddleston left her fortune to the WCTU Children's Home in Corvallis, and it amounted to somewhere between $20-70,000. One of the Evans kid contested her will, so there may have been some public embarrassment surrounding her death. I think she was one of the oldest original pioneers in 1927, and I don't know who was helping her at the end, if anyone. Her son died a year before she did, so that must have been a hard year for her.
F.G. Vaughan died the same year as she did. Instead of my original thought that these people did not know each other, because of their political and class differences, I now think they all knew each other, at least nominally. When Huddleston ran the trading post in the early 1850's, everyone in the area would have stopped in there, including the Vaughans, who were out in Coburg then. I think nearly all of the first transactions of my property were between contemporaries who knew each other, and were sometimes connected by family ties.
And why not? Land transfers were mostly handled within families if possible, to keep the wealth close. I think the Vaughans used the gold they brought back from California to buy land, and that was how they got these west-side properties, farms for the sons who couldn't make it on the one section the father claimed. The Vaughans and the Davises took up adjacent claims with their brothers and sons. They also would have followed the population and the resources. The original Vaughan claims were on land that is now being mined for sand and gravel, and they were farmers, so they would have traded up for better farmland. When F.G. started the dairy, he may not have expected the town to grow up around it so quickly. I haven't yet pinned down the years of his dairy farm at 12th and Van Buren, but by the time my piece was purchased, in 1908, it was probably looking like farming was over in this part of town. Even though streets weren't paved here, it must have been apparent that streets would be coming soon as people flocked to Eugene City to make money. Between 1900 and 1910 the population tripled.
I think both Floyd's dairy farm and Henry Huddleston's bike shop (around 1902) were part of this transition period, when the early residents were trying to keep their footing in the rapid growth of the town, trying to stay alive surrounded by later opportunists, keen to catch some of the riches divided up by the earlier opportunists.
But class issues, racism, and carpet-bagging are probably not going to be themes I will be able to explore in my book. Framing things from our perspective isn't really that fair, which is one reason I'm trying to read a lot of newspapers and primary source material from the time. I think the "characters" did evolve over time (they are characters to me, since they have been gone so long) and I think the combination of Samantha, coming from her Quaker parents Benjamin and Catherine, who seemed to be revered, and James, who came from Virginia, seemed to be comfortable with wealth, and was probably an early racist, is intriguing. I'm fascinated with the items that survived from their lives, each one with some reason for being saved from the scrap pile. Now I wonder if her nephew Evans could have been the person who saved and donated the items. More research!
I didn't get the grant I applied for, which is okay, since I am not that close to publication and it wasn't a polished application with solid theories yet. I am enjoying the research so much I don't care about the eventual publication of it. I stumbled on the concepts of my target audience and the relevance of the research to local history. There could be reasons these folks were somewhat forgotten--maybe I am digging up things that shouldn't see that much light. However, I am persistent, and will keep digging. I have begun looking back at my many journals on the building project, and that is some historical research too.
So let it snow. I have plenty to keep me occupied until I can get back over to the UO to look at the newspapers that aren't online. Have some great books to read on other subjects, too. The stories in The Moth (from the radio program) and in the book We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler are wonderfully compelling. Juggling that great writing with the scrawlings of the diaries from the Meek cutoff wagon train and the letters in the Huddleston file makes me glad I live in a time of excellent writing. I think I would have made a terrible Victorian.
However, I think I would have made a fantastic pioneer. I probably would have been one of those who dressed as a man and kept my secret until they went to bury me. Call me Dan.
Got out my cross country skiis and cruised around the neighborhood a bit; the powder was perfect for it on the first day, but it might be too slippery this morning. I may go try again anyway. It's so rare to be able to ski off the back porch, and pretty darned fun. What I really should do is get the snow off the shop roof before it starts to leak but that would be far too dangerous. Every little thing, including my ladder, is covered with a sheet of ice that will remain until it melts.
Eugene is barely moving this morning, everything cancelled and everyone snowed in. I've been so immersed in the time of the pioneers this seems normal, except being able to walk down to the library and store yesterday before it got too bad. You wouldn't walk far in snow in pioneer days, without knowing a forecast, without the kind of snow gear we now have, unless you had to, or unless you got used to it. I know my Mom walked and rode horses to school in snow in Nebraska, many times, even though one of her actual relatives was lost in a blizzard in 1888. You would certainly rely on the weather knowledge of the old folks, who would know what stage of a storm you were in, and what was likely to come. My young relative and his parents apparently were too new to the country to understand that balminess and sunny weather often foretell a productive storm approaching from the south.
So maybe this thaw we are having means more snow. And this, friends of the Market, is why we don't sell in the winter months. The Fairgrounds has been closed up (tried to ski over there, but no) so not the mess of slipping vehicles and joyriders we had in December. Presumably most of them have tried heading up the mountains.
The pioneers would likely have been more worried about what will happen when all of this snow thaws. The rivers and creeks often overflowed and carried away bridges, houses, livestock, and people, who had of course settled down right next to the waterways for transportation and water supply. It took awhile to get used to the patterns of the landscape. The Davises took claims right along the Willamette, between it and the River Road, which was one of the few trails that were well-used then. That and the County Road, which is now 8th St and heads off on Blair to the northwest, which Huddleston settled on. His property went from the County Road to the Amazon canal, so he had transport on one side and water on the other. Ideal piece of land. One wonders if he knew how valuable it would become as the town was settled. Probably that was what he hoped. I don't think he was really a farmer at heart.
F.G. Vaughan was a farmer though. One of the only newspaper mentions I can find of him is that he brought some watermelons to the newspaper office one day in 1880, and one of them weighed 39 pounds. That's some good farming. James Huddleston was famous for his shooting, though. He was a member of the Eugene Sportsmen Club and they had matches with each other and the Creswell club fairly often. He shot a hawk and some ducks in one. You got points for each type of game you killed, from eagles to cougars to swans, and most animals were fair game. He was later interested in a bill passed by the legislature establishing hunting seasons, according to a letter in his file. Hard to say whether he was a conservationist or interested in it because it might restrict his activities.
There were quite a few mentions of Huddleston in the paper. I think we have some class differences in these people I'm studying, and still more to find out about the stories behind their mentions. Samantha Davis Huddleston left her fortune to the WCTU Children's Home in Corvallis, and it amounted to somewhere between $20-70,000. One of the Evans kid contested her will, so there may have been some public embarrassment surrounding her death. I think she was one of the oldest original pioneers in 1927, and I don't know who was helping her at the end, if anyone. Her son died a year before she did, so that must have been a hard year for her.
F.G. Vaughan died the same year as she did. Instead of my original thought that these people did not know each other, because of their political and class differences, I now think they all knew each other, at least nominally. When Huddleston ran the trading post in the early 1850's, everyone in the area would have stopped in there, including the Vaughans, who were out in Coburg then. I think nearly all of the first transactions of my property were between contemporaries who knew each other, and were sometimes connected by family ties.
And why not? Land transfers were mostly handled within families if possible, to keep the wealth close. I think the Vaughans used the gold they brought back from California to buy land, and that was how they got these west-side properties, farms for the sons who couldn't make it on the one section the father claimed. The Vaughans and the Davises took up adjacent claims with their brothers and sons. They also would have followed the population and the resources. The original Vaughan claims were on land that is now being mined for sand and gravel, and they were farmers, so they would have traded up for better farmland. When F.G. started the dairy, he may not have expected the town to grow up around it so quickly. I haven't yet pinned down the years of his dairy farm at 12th and Van Buren, but by the time my piece was purchased, in 1908, it was probably looking like farming was over in this part of town. Even though streets weren't paved here, it must have been apparent that streets would be coming soon as people flocked to Eugene City to make money. Between 1900 and 1910 the population tripled.
I think both Floyd's dairy farm and Henry Huddleston's bike shop (around 1902) were part of this transition period, when the early residents were trying to keep their footing in the rapid growth of the town, trying to stay alive surrounded by later opportunists, keen to catch some of the riches divided up by the earlier opportunists.
But class issues, racism, and carpet-bagging are probably not going to be themes I will be able to explore in my book. Framing things from our perspective isn't really that fair, which is one reason I'm trying to read a lot of newspapers and primary source material from the time. I think the "characters" did evolve over time (they are characters to me, since they have been gone so long) and I think the combination of Samantha, coming from her Quaker parents Benjamin and Catherine, who seemed to be revered, and James, who came from Virginia, seemed to be comfortable with wealth, and was probably an early racist, is intriguing. I'm fascinated with the items that survived from their lives, each one with some reason for being saved from the scrap pile. Now I wonder if her nephew Evans could have been the person who saved and donated the items. More research!
I didn't get the grant I applied for, which is okay, since I am not that close to publication and it wasn't a polished application with solid theories yet. I am enjoying the research so much I don't care about the eventual publication of it. I stumbled on the concepts of my target audience and the relevance of the research to local history. There could be reasons these folks were somewhat forgotten--maybe I am digging up things that shouldn't see that much light. However, I am persistent, and will keep digging. I have begun looking back at my many journals on the building project, and that is some historical research too.
So let it snow. I have plenty to keep me occupied until I can get back over to the UO to look at the newspapers that aren't online. Have some great books to read on other subjects, too. The stories in The Moth (from the radio program) and in the book We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler are wonderfully compelling. Juggling that great writing with the scrawlings of the diaries from the Meek cutoff wagon train and the letters in the Huddleston file makes me glad I live in a time of excellent writing. I think I would have made a terrible Victorian.
However, I think I would have made a fantastic pioneer. I probably would have been one of those who dressed as a man and kept my secret until they went to bury me. Call me Dan.
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
Imagining Myself as a Pioneer
Finally got some rain again, and of course today was the day I had set aside for errands, so I had to suit up and do them in the wet, but that wasn't so bad. Have to remember not to let my pant legs hang out below the rain pants...but thank goodness for rain gear. Those pioneers just got wet.
I spent the entire last three days cleaning and painting the bathroom. It hadn't really been painted properly when we moved in what must be ten years ago now, or almost. I even did a little sanding, though never enough. It was a year ago when I had to finally put down my cat after a messy illness with which he finally ended up in the bathroom, liking the cool of the tile or the warmth of the water heater, not sure which. I had to clean every surface, and I thought I had cleaned them all, but I'm talking door frames, behind the water heater, all of it. I was happy to do it in service to Jake, whom I miss. Hard to believe a year went by, but they do. Fresh white paint on everything is a treat.
The tile floor is particularly satisfying because I scrubbed the grout with cleanser and thought it would never look clean, but it does. I sealed the tile again just in case. It's like having a new bathroom, and I haven't cluttered it up yet with all of my favorite pictures and things. Small pleasures.
I took a break from my research to do that. Reading the Huddleston stuff in the UO Special Collections was just amazing and I made lots of copies of pages and letters and got a few ideas for further research. It was poignant, thinking what Samantha would have thought worthy of saving, and whether she did it shortly after her husband's death or many years later. She outlived him by over thirty years, even outliving her son at the end.
My writing group gave me some good feedback and suggested that I imagine myself as these women (and men) I'm writing about and get some details like the weather on certain days, and I have been reading a lot of context for the settlement and early town era in Eugene and the frontier in general. It's not too hard to imagine their lives but I think they were tougher and more spare than I can even surmise. The journal books James Huddleston left are filled with transactions for the items he sold in his store, and he probably sold just about everything that was available to sell. His future father-in-law, Benjamin Davis, paid in wheat. They had no money, but wheat grew well here so it was the first crop everyone got in, since you could live on it if you had to. You could even feed your animals boiled wheat if you had no hay. As a storekeeper I had assumed Huddleston was relatively wealthy but I don't think he was immediately.
When the gold started to come back with the miners who left their families here while they went off to strike it rich, he must have taken a fair amount of gold dust in trade, but maybe there was a bank for that. I'll have to do a lot more searching, now that I found these lively, amazing details. There was a letter from Catherine Davis to her children, in her own hand. That was thrilling. I can't quite figure out what Samantha's handwriting looks like, but now I know her husband's and her mother's, so I might be able to separate hers out too. Her son Henry has a few items in the files, seemingly from his childhood, which makes me think she put the collection together rather than Henry. He had used some of the space in the journal books (which were tiny, about 4x6 and smaller) to practice writing signatures, his and his father's I think.
The most compelling item is a page from Jim Huddleston's diary, one which notes Benjamin Davis's death and burial "in the garden." Although the Huddlestons were living on 8th Ave at the time, I think the garden they buried him in was most likely his own, out on River Road where the Davis DLC's were located. He is apparently buried in the Masonic Cemetery now, but was likely moved there when the cemetery was formed. Davis died in 1858, at only 50 years old, and his wife Catherine outlived him for a very long time, too.
I could go on, but I'm hungry. I've fallen in love with the multigrain sourdough from Eugene City Bakery, and I have a fresh loaf just calling my name. Bread and cheese is my go-to comfort food but I'm trying hard to eat vegetables more than bread and nuts more than cheese, and succeeding somewhat. Just the little bit of biking I did today reminds me that I love it and don't even care if it's raining.Riding the stationary bike and looking out the windows is just not as good- I really don't have to make the kind of effort I do outside- I get lazy. I even read while I'm on it. Oh well, scrubbing the floor and painting the ceiling were exercise. Maybe I should start on another room.
Or sit on the exercise ball when I am typing. Too wet to prune any trees today. Saw the bushtits all lined up under the eaves on the clothesline I put up when I had the broken foot, so cute. I know we're not allowed to complain about the rain yet, we have to just enjoy it.
I spent the entire last three days cleaning and painting the bathroom. It hadn't really been painted properly when we moved in what must be ten years ago now, or almost. I even did a little sanding, though never enough. It was a year ago when I had to finally put down my cat after a messy illness with which he finally ended up in the bathroom, liking the cool of the tile or the warmth of the water heater, not sure which. I had to clean every surface, and I thought I had cleaned them all, but I'm talking door frames, behind the water heater, all of it. I was happy to do it in service to Jake, whom I miss. Hard to believe a year went by, but they do. Fresh white paint on everything is a treat.
The tile floor is particularly satisfying because I scrubbed the grout with cleanser and thought it would never look clean, but it does. I sealed the tile again just in case. It's like having a new bathroom, and I haven't cluttered it up yet with all of my favorite pictures and things. Small pleasures.
I took a break from my research to do that. Reading the Huddleston stuff in the UO Special Collections was just amazing and I made lots of copies of pages and letters and got a few ideas for further research. It was poignant, thinking what Samantha would have thought worthy of saving, and whether she did it shortly after her husband's death or many years later. She outlived him by over thirty years, even outliving her son at the end.
My writing group gave me some good feedback and suggested that I imagine myself as these women (and men) I'm writing about and get some details like the weather on certain days, and I have been reading a lot of context for the settlement and early town era in Eugene and the frontier in general. It's not too hard to imagine their lives but I think they were tougher and more spare than I can even surmise. The journal books James Huddleston left are filled with transactions for the items he sold in his store, and he probably sold just about everything that was available to sell. His future father-in-law, Benjamin Davis, paid in wheat. They had no money, but wheat grew well here so it was the first crop everyone got in, since you could live on it if you had to. You could even feed your animals boiled wheat if you had no hay. As a storekeeper I had assumed Huddleston was relatively wealthy but I don't think he was immediately.
When the gold started to come back with the miners who left their families here while they went off to strike it rich, he must have taken a fair amount of gold dust in trade, but maybe there was a bank for that. I'll have to do a lot more searching, now that I found these lively, amazing details. There was a letter from Catherine Davis to her children, in her own hand. That was thrilling. I can't quite figure out what Samantha's handwriting looks like, but now I know her husband's and her mother's, so I might be able to separate hers out too. Her son Henry has a few items in the files, seemingly from his childhood, which makes me think she put the collection together rather than Henry. He had used some of the space in the journal books (which were tiny, about 4x6 and smaller) to practice writing signatures, his and his father's I think.
The most compelling item is a page from Jim Huddleston's diary, one which notes Benjamin Davis's death and burial "in the garden." Although the Huddlestons were living on 8th Ave at the time, I think the garden they buried him in was most likely his own, out on River Road where the Davis DLC's were located. He is apparently buried in the Masonic Cemetery now, but was likely moved there when the cemetery was formed. Davis died in 1858, at only 50 years old, and his wife Catherine outlived him for a very long time, too.
I could go on, but I'm hungry. I've fallen in love with the multigrain sourdough from Eugene City Bakery, and I have a fresh loaf just calling my name. Bread and cheese is my go-to comfort food but I'm trying hard to eat vegetables more than bread and nuts more than cheese, and succeeding somewhat. Just the little bit of biking I did today reminds me that I love it and don't even care if it's raining.Riding the stationary bike and looking out the windows is just not as good- I really don't have to make the kind of effort I do outside- I get lazy. I even read while I'm on it. Oh well, scrubbing the floor and painting the ceiling were exercise. Maybe I should start on another room.
Or sit on the exercise ball when I am typing. Too wet to prune any trees today. Saw the bushtits all lined up under the eaves on the clothesline I put up when I had the broken foot, so cute. I know we're not allowed to complain about the rain yet, we have to just enjoy it.
Saturday, January 11, 2014
Saturday, Saturday...
Yes, I was singing the song when I got up. I listened to that hard, gusty rain early this morning fully aware of how lucky I felt that I did not have to drag myself out of bed, suit up, and go down to the Park Blocks for the day. I so love the sensible people who decided we would not sell during the winter months. I know some of the farmers do (starting in February) but weather is tough on people. It definitely puts the lie to the concept of "homeless by choice" in Oregon. That's just the way some people try to make themselves more comfortable about the overwhelming abundance of their lives. It is not a fun adventure to live outside permanently.
That cute little Yellow-rumped warbler was the first bird I saw this morning on the suet, and I saw the Bewick's Wren yesterday. I love my simple life of watching birds, reading about the pioneers, and looking around online to see what directions I can take my research. Yesterday I was cruising through the online listings for the Special Collections at UO, and I see that they have three folders of James Huddleston's papers!!! This got me so excited there are not enough exclamation points. I will rush over there early next week and see what they have. It may be disappointing (I counsel myself) as they think his wife's name is Jane, and I know better. There may be little trace of Samantha, who interests me much more than her husband, but considering that he died in 1890, these relics will be thrilling no matter the content. Apparently there is a ledger book from his storekeeping (he had the first couple of trading-post stores in Eugene City in the early 1850's) and some letters, presumably hand-written. I want to see Samantha's handwriting. I thought I had her signature but as it turns out, most of the county records were written and signed by the clerks, not the principals in the transactions. Maybe she put some notes on Jim's letters.
I don't know what else I will find there. I spent the day looking through the photos in their digital collection and they are wonderful. John Baugess's collection of the donut shop and tavern that were urban-renewed from next to the Smeede Hotel in the 70's are cool, reminding me how long some of us have known some of the rest of us. There are many photos of important houses during restoration, including the Daniel Christian house which is one of the oldest. I found more evidence of my theories about this place. I didn't even get halfway through the archive. Is it arrogant to think I can add to the research on Eugene's early days?
I applied for a grant from the Historical Society to publish my book, to finish the research and write at least one book of it. I am actually thinking that two might be necessary to avoid the one being too personal and not relevant enough. To quell my self-doubt as I wait a month to hear if I got the grant, I have thrown myself into pinning down details and gathering a lot of background knowledge so I don't say too many stupid things in print. The grant money doesn't really matter so much, it's more the motivation of it, as it is so easy to put the project aside to focus on one of my other projects, of which I have far too many, all a bit too large. I am so passionate about this research, and I know passion fades, so I am trying to really get something on paper and make some tangible progress. I have been filling out the family group sheets for the families I am studying, and it's fun, kind of takes the place of crosswords or sudoku in keeping my brain pliable.
Meanwhile I am getting no physical exercise and have to bring that one higher on the priority list. I couldn't sleep after a day online, started doing that self-recrimination of the late night, which I got out of my brain by thinking about the yellow-rumped and the Bewick's. I love birds, and plants, so that makes things all right in the world. It worked last night, anyway.
So if we get some breaks in the rain today I will get out and look at something, some buildings or some trees. I constantly speculate about what plants Samantha, Miranda, and Grace might have put in this neighborhood. I know Catherine Davis so loved a couple of large firs she insisted they be saved, and I wonder if they could possibly still be there, only 150 years down the road. They were in the River Road area, just off the road, apparently. They'd be huge, so they ought to be visible in the skyline. I could bike out there and try again to pinpoint the boundaries of the Davis land and see. I also have to go to the Creswell cemetery and find Tillie Van Harkin. I realized that she is the person who divided the property into three (or four, depending on where 200 feet from the corner is) so I have to learn more about her. She may get the credit for a lot of the improvements. She lived here (or owned it) for 18 years, until she died in 1942, but she was old, and she certainly didn't do the work herself. It's another effort to check directories and figure out who actually lived in the places, and I want (obsessively) to fully document every year of this place. I want to know exactly where all my people of interest lived, and I even want to know all of the first owners of the Huddleston lots.
I have plenty of directions to keep going, and plenty of ways to distract myself from the main points. The digressions are fascinating. I discovered three of the Vaughan brothers had married women with the last name of Briggs, and it turns out that two were mother and daughter, and the mother's previous husband had been killed for his gold after selling some cattle to the miners, near the Barlow trail. We had a murderous past, Oregon, as most people may know. There's a tombstone in the Coburg cemetery that says "hung by mistake." I think the notorious criminal Hank Vaughan was related to the Vaughans I'm studying...his problem was mostly alcohol. Probably lots of the problems were alcohol. But dead is dead and everyone had rifles, and six guns, and big pieces of wood to club each other with. Not to mention winter fever (pneumonia), cholera, snakebite, and all those other things in that game you maybe played in school. You could trade a set of clothes for food, if there was food. Mules, horses or oxen? I found one person who was maybe the first child buried in our area, Jesse Haskett, son of Jesse Haskett and Miranda Vaughan, who died from a rattlesnake bite, and a report of a time when 7000 rattlers were killed on Rattlesnake Hill (so they could build an early-day subdivision and name it for what they covered up with houses. That went on then just as now. No, most likely they were just trying to protect lives, still an excuse for lots of crimes though.)
There was also a huge problem with racism, and I seem to be uncovering some. The Davises were Quakers, who were often persecuted for their anti-slavery stance, which may be one of the reasons they came here, but I don't know if I will be able to write about it. The attitude toward the native people and any people who were not white was abhorrent, more than criminal, but it's pretty hard to pin attitude down in dead people, unless they wrote about it. I can quote them if they did, so maybe James had some tidbits in his papers. I know there was some scandal with one of Samantha's sisters, and maybe they will shed some light on that. Who knows how many scandals I can uncover? I can link Vaughans to known racists, but I can't call them out from here. It turns out both of the families did have descendants, and it may not be too late to contact them, though people don't always want to talk about charged family secrets. Clearly the history of Oregon was shaped by the issues of slavery and human rights.
So, yes, I am loving the Saturdays off, don't miss Market a bit, and am working hard on the things that make me smile. I mixed up some gelatin, though I didn't make anything from it yet. Maybe that is today's big project. It beats cleaning the bathroom by a long shot. But saying *long shot* makes me want to pick up that book about pioneer women...
I don't know what else I will find there. I spent the day looking through the photos in their digital collection and they are wonderful. John Baugess's collection of the donut shop and tavern that were urban-renewed from next to the Smeede Hotel in the 70's are cool, reminding me how long some of us have known some of the rest of us. There are many photos of important houses during restoration, including the Daniel Christian house which is one of the oldest. I found more evidence of my theories about this place. I didn't even get halfway through the archive. Is it arrogant to think I can add to the research on Eugene's early days?
I applied for a grant from the Historical Society to publish my book, to finish the research and write at least one book of it. I am actually thinking that two might be necessary to avoid the one being too personal and not relevant enough. To quell my self-doubt as I wait a month to hear if I got the grant, I have thrown myself into pinning down details and gathering a lot of background knowledge so I don't say too many stupid things in print. The grant money doesn't really matter so much, it's more the motivation of it, as it is so easy to put the project aside to focus on one of my other projects, of which I have far too many, all a bit too large. I am so passionate about this research, and I know passion fades, so I am trying to really get something on paper and make some tangible progress. I have been filling out the family group sheets for the families I am studying, and it's fun, kind of takes the place of crosswords or sudoku in keeping my brain pliable.
Meanwhile I am getting no physical exercise and have to bring that one higher on the priority list. I couldn't sleep after a day online, started doing that self-recrimination of the late night, which I got out of my brain by thinking about the yellow-rumped and the Bewick's. I love birds, and plants, so that makes things all right in the world. It worked last night, anyway.
So if we get some breaks in the rain today I will get out and look at something, some buildings or some trees. I constantly speculate about what plants Samantha, Miranda, and Grace might have put in this neighborhood. I know Catherine Davis so loved a couple of large firs she insisted they be saved, and I wonder if they could possibly still be there, only 150 years down the road. They were in the River Road area, just off the road, apparently. They'd be huge, so they ought to be visible in the skyline. I could bike out there and try again to pinpoint the boundaries of the Davis land and see. I also have to go to the Creswell cemetery and find Tillie Van Harkin. I realized that she is the person who divided the property into three (or four, depending on where 200 feet from the corner is) so I have to learn more about her. She may get the credit for a lot of the improvements. She lived here (or owned it) for 18 years, until she died in 1942, but she was old, and she certainly didn't do the work herself. It's another effort to check directories and figure out who actually lived in the places, and I want (obsessively) to fully document every year of this place. I want to know exactly where all my people of interest lived, and I even want to know all of the first owners of the Huddleston lots.
I have plenty of directions to keep going, and plenty of ways to distract myself from the main points. The digressions are fascinating. I discovered three of the Vaughan brothers had married women with the last name of Briggs, and it turns out that two were mother and daughter, and the mother's previous husband had been killed for his gold after selling some cattle to the miners, near the Barlow trail. We had a murderous past, Oregon, as most people may know. There's a tombstone in the Coburg cemetery that says "hung by mistake." I think the notorious criminal Hank Vaughan was related to the Vaughans I'm studying...his problem was mostly alcohol. Probably lots of the problems were alcohol. But dead is dead and everyone had rifles, and six guns, and big pieces of wood to club each other with. Not to mention winter fever (pneumonia), cholera, snakebite, and all those other things in that game you maybe played in school. You could trade a set of clothes for food, if there was food. Mules, horses or oxen? I found one person who was maybe the first child buried in our area, Jesse Haskett, son of Jesse Haskett and Miranda Vaughan, who died from a rattlesnake bite, and a report of a time when 7000 rattlers were killed on Rattlesnake Hill (so they could build an early-day subdivision and name it for what they covered up with houses. That went on then just as now. No, most likely they were just trying to protect lives, still an excuse for lots of crimes though.)
So, yes, I am loving the Saturdays off, don't miss Market a bit, and am working hard on the things that make me smile. I mixed up some gelatin, though I didn't make anything from it yet. Maybe that is today's big project. It beats cleaning the bathroom by a long shot. But saying *long shot* makes me want to pick up that book about pioneer women...
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