Mulkey Findings

Took a hike up Hawkins Heights today to see Mulkey cemetery, which is not too hard to find and is indeed on the top of a small hill which used to be a pear and apple orchard. F.G. Vaughan is buried there, with his second wife, Miranda, and some of their descendants. The original settlers, William and Phoebe, are buried in Coburg, with William's brother Thomas and Floyd's poor first wife Angeline. Two of F.G.'s sons, Floyd B. and Richard (Richey) are up there too, in the two Mulkey plots.

Angeline was killed by falling from a wagon at 47 and I searched through old newspapers to find the article in 1882 describing the incident. It said they had five children at the time, which is fascinating, because three of the four children that I knew about were all born to F.G.'s second wife, who reportedly was his housekeeper, Miranda Freeze Haskett. They married in the same year, 1882, because of the five children I suppose, and they proceeded to have some more. I know about one, Richey.

There are various Vaughans buried there who have no information with them so far, including several children who died young: Casper, Bonnie, and Leta. They were also born after 1882, so might have been cousins or something, though they are buried with F.G. and Miranda. I wonder if some of the five might have been Miranda's, and because she was the housekeeper, they were living in the household, and the reporter didn't know the difference. A couple who lie here were named Mack and O.H. Haskett, and they were two and five at the time of their mother's step up. Her earlier husband isn't identified yet, though.

It was easy to be killed in those days; the papers are filled with children's deaths from falling in vats of boiling water, being kicked and stepped on by livestock, and being bitten by rattlesnakes. The first recorded white burial in our area, in 1853, was Jesse Haskett who was bitten. He was 32 at the time, so could have been Miranda's father maybe...she was born in 1854. But her maiden name is Freeze, so maybe it's Haskett Freeze Vaughan, and maybe she was adopted by the Freeze family after her father died. The young children could also have been fathered by the man who employed her...wouldn't be the first time that happened. That would account for three of the five, maybe.

But Richey Vaughan was 21 in the year of the accident, so it's likely he was already gone and not a child. Of his three children, the longest-living was Elnora, who died at sixteen. Poor Alta May died at three, and none of them were born then. I think all the descendants came through the Bilyeu Vaughan line, through his two daughters. There are some unused grave sites behind Floyd B, who died about the time I was born, and unless I find more records I might never unravel it all.

The records are really only available if some descendant figures the stuff out before everyone forgets. There are so many forlorn grave markers in the old cemeteries, with the stories buried too. It's a bit sad, so I've been skimming the newspapers to see if I can find anything that will add to the knowledge for some unknown reason.

These people are not even my relatives. My grandparents on my mother's side, whom I was lucky enough to know, were born in the 1890's. My grandma emigrated to Nebraska and lived in a soddy. They were farmers who took that "free" land near the sandhills that is now coveted by the big oil sands pipeline. They were good people, and I think of them often when I look around for traces of these Oregon farmers. My Mom, 86 now, was born after most of these people were adults, though she and Grace are only forty years apart.

I had to make a family tree for these Vaughans and will do more research to see if I can pin down a few more facts about them and embellish my imaginings. I want to find out who all the children were. It has gone a bit beyond my house, though I'm still on that trail.

I will have to see the other graves now, because there are people buried nearby that aren't recorded. I expect the Coburg cemetery will be full of mysteries. I expect Grace's memorial to be a little dry and unsatisfying now that I have imagined so much about her life. I picture her growing up on that dairy farm, just like my mother did. Mom was lonely even in a family of ten kids, and she wanted to see the world (which she has, and good for her!) I see little girls in dresses wandering grassy pastures dreaming big dreams.

I don't know how big Grace's dreams were. Maybe she didn't have kids because of the number of children who failed to thrive in her ancestry. I wonder if they were poor and malnourished, in the years before the farmers learned how to work this land. It was rich, but like the land they came from, floody. It's a theory that the cemetery is up on top of that hill because of the Missouri Floods of the 1840's, which may have driven those folks west. Maybe anyone who made that trip weakened themselves irrevocably with all that suffering. Heaven knows childbirth was not easy in those days without much medical care, and injuries usually resulted in death unless the person could heal himself.

To tell you the truth, I don't think I would have even liked these people all that much. The newspapers I've been scanning for details show that Eugene settlers were racist, sexist, elitist men without many scruples when it came to treating anyone who fit their definition of "other." They waltzed in here and took the land that was best and exploited it. They felt that the natives' time had passed and destiny was in their own favor, as well as their God.. Even Grace was a member of some secretive "societies" like Easter Star, the women's branch of the Masons. I know when my father joined the Masons they were still pretty anti-Catholic, though the Job's Daughters let me in after some discussion because only my mother was Catholic, plus I could play the piano. I didn't stay with it long enough to learn any of the secrets, because my piano skills were humiliating and I kept messing up the processions with my stumbling playing. Besides the fact that intolerance never did sit too well with me, as a child of the sixties.

And of course just because the paper spouted bigotry, that doesn't mean the ordinary people were bigots. They were just farmers. They probably just wanted to farm and feed their families and love their land. (Maybe they loved it, maybe they just exploited it.) I doubt the dairy farm was really the farm part, since it was only two or three acres in this location. F.G. probably still grew alfalfa and corn on his other lands. I suppose the cows could have grazed all the way up to the orchards on Hawkins then, though, before people built all these damned houses and fences. It feels like there is not an open square inch left, and people like me keep putting more structures on that too.

I'll go to Mulkey again now that I know it's walkable (though it did take three hours.) I want to see if there are orchard trees left; I didn't see any. There are a few oaks, the kind that keep their brown leaves until spring, and Doug firs and cedars that are probably volunteer. I want to remove those cotoneasters from the Vaughan's plot. Grace wouldn't like knowing they are pushing on the stones. I wonder if she was the one who chose to have callas on her parents' gravestones, when they were buried in 1926 and 1932. I'll also have to study gravestone design now I guess. Not many men up there have the calla design...now I think F.G. loved flowers too and taught that to Grace.

Mulkey was apparently the first preacher to have a church here, and he and Hawkins donated the land for the cemetery. Hawkins had a big orchard, and a big beautiful house with a wrap-around porch that is lower on the hill. I've been in it; Nan Lester told me she bought it from the family, as I recall. Nan is sadly no longer alive, so I can't ask her, but I remember quizzing her thoroughly on it when I visited. It's a gorgeous house, hardly touched, just exquisitely maintained. Hawkins made some money off of his apples, or more likely by selling off the land he claimed.

The last of the orchard used to be next to their house, but now there are two new fancy Craftsmans packed in there. The entire Hawkins Heights is packed with big houses, not quite the McMansions like higher up, but big and expensive. I tried to find a Mulkey house, and there is one good candidate with a little piece of original work left, but really they all looked kind of the same to me. I want to see old, classic houses, exquisitely maintained, not new ostentatious status-declaring boxes. But of course the ones I like were ostentatious at the time. Not mine. I'm pretty sure it was once built for workers to live in, with no second story, just the basics. Frank and Grace made it nice. I made it valuable again. Kinda valuable. Loved, anyway.

You either have to have a lot of money, though, or a lot of time, or maybe a lot of relatives so you can have a carpenter and a plasterer in the family. It's pretty hard to keep up with all the things that need work. When we bought this place, nothing substantial had been done since the plaster went on, except the addition of the flooring. Some of the original green paint was still there, on the back of the house, and all the signs pointed to landlords using it as a rental. If Grace and Frank lived here, it might have been the last time an owner lived in the place, and they sold it in 1924, if my records are correct.

Of course it is also possible that many people did things to it that are not evident. The boards with Frank's name could have been moved, or taken off and put back after the improvement. There was one section of some later ugly wallpaper that I didn't save, put on where the stove was removed I think. There was a brick chimney still partially there where all the ants lived. There was probably some kind of back porch with a view of the pastures (and what I think was the original farmhouse on the corner) and all that open space that used to be here instead of all of us.

I almost wish I could do the remodel over with more care. I broke a lot of the wide baseboards trying to pry them out, as the hardwood (fir) flooring was put in after they were...they extended down an inch below the floor, which took me some time to figure out. There is probably something under the hardwood that could provide a clue, though I have no reason to remove it. There was some awful asbestos tile under the grubby kitchen linoleum, which was glued down to some really long fir flooring that was then ruined, though I saved enough to floor the porch. Definitely when this house was built and rebuilt there was plenty of good wood to use for it.

And definitely the person who built the place was not the same one who built the cabinets. Those were finish work, by someone who had done it before. They were painted red over green and had terrible plastic covering on them that wouldn't be removed. I guess they had to go, like someday my wonderful maroon, dark green and dark turquoise tile will get sledged by someone who thinks it looks dated. Time marches on, oh yes, it certainly does. We think we are putting down roots, but sometimes things are harder than we expected.

Sometimes our legacy rots and isn't fixed back up. Weeds crack and hide our work; our epitaphs go unread. I will not even have a grave, so my words will have to last. Thank goodness there will be plenty of them.

More of the Mystery

After I spent another day in research which required an additional day to get the virus out of my laptop that I picked up by being online too much, I found out some thrilling things!

Death records are mostly what is available with the people I found in my walls. It turns out that Grace Bowers and her husband Frank have a lovely little stone together in Lane Memorial Gardens. Ironically she died in 1989, when we were just beginning to fix up her old house. She was 103!!! And because they had no children (as far as I know anyway) she didn't seem to have an obituary. Her husband, Henry Frank, did have one and it said they were living around the corner on 12th Street when he died in 1965.

Her full name was Grace Edna Vaughan Bowers. That's right, she was Floyd Governor (or Gouvenir) Vaughan's daughter. He also had three sons, Richard by his first wife, Floyd B., and Bilyeu. Grace and Frank were married in 1911, so one theory is that they all built her a house.

I can't tell if the name on the board is Floyd B. or Floyd G. Old F.G. was born in 1932, and came to Oregon in 1847. That was quite early in Oregon settlement, so they came by wagon. In fact, I found a little blip of information that says F.G. Vaughan's first wife was killed in a fall from a wagon he was driving in 1882, when he was fifty, and had one son, Richard, who was 15. Floyd married his housekeeper and had the other three children with her. So he was quite old when Grace married in 1911. That makes me think that Frank worked with his brother-in-law Bilyeu and their friend Elmer Irwin Van Orden, from Marcola, to put up that board. Maybe one or all of them were carpenters (someone built some really nice cabinets and counters) or maybe Elmer had nothing to do with it and they got the board from him somehow, since the dates on the board are three years apart. And I think Frank did the upgrades, the trim with his name so proudly, himself. I picture Grace doing the wallpaper, especially the florals. But Floyd the elder could have built the original house, or bought it from whomever did build it in the late 1800's. Somebody with adventurous taste put in that turquoise stuff, I think. Back to Deeds and Records for more. I have to find out how many lots they had back then, and I might be able to find out who built my neighbors house where they lived when Frank died. I might be able to find out their professions and other details from censuses, or by paying to join Ancestry.com.

I could find out what all the Huddlestons did with the properties before they started selling them. I could find out the ages of all of the houses on the street and some of their histories. All of which would be what is called backstory in fiction and would fascinate the fiction writer in me. I wonder if Richard's mother dying had anything to do with Grace's life, if that was why she didn't have children. Grace herself has a "delayed birth" record, which means either her birth was difficult or her record wasn't entered when she was born. I'll have to look that up too. Or write a short story about it all.

But the construction of the two sections of the house were so different, I'm thinking that they just remodeled it. They would have been in their twenties when she was married, and her husband was even younger, just 21. If the house was built in 1916 he was 25. Certainly you could build a house at that age and with minimal skills back then before codes and contractors licenses and all that. You can still get some slack for being the homeowner/builder.

But the mystery of when the original two rooms were built deepens. I plan to research the building methods and do even more research on the wallpaper, since I found very little real information there. I steamed some of it apart and discovered that both the turquoise and the brown had the same border, that rather crude block-printed geometric pattern. It's possible that it was locally or regionally made, I suppose.

F.G. Vaughan was a farmer, and I think Bilyeu and his wife Estella were too. There was one purchase of sheep recorded in the county records under Bilyeu. I suppose most people did some farming back then, if they wanted to eat. Eugene wasn't even surveyed by Skinner until 1851. There's a good bit of history in a book I have called Market Days, published by the Lane Pomona Grange, and it's amusing. Apparently "dog fennel" was a hugely problematic weed back in those days and I still have quite a bit of it next to the house. Some things don't change much I guess.

There was a lot happening here, though. In 1867 when there were only 800 inhabitants in Eugene City, there were 13 dry goods, hardware and grocery stores, two photographic galleries, two tailor shops and a milliner, among other commercial businesses. People were working and creative. By 1910 there were paved streets and electric streetcars. Even before the turn of the century there was milled lumber and moldings available from Midgley's Mill. Farmers sold produce by peddler's wagons all over town, and the first filberts were planted by George Dorris in 1900. Hops and mint began around that time too to replace the wheat which was the first cash crop around here. All of those plants volunteer in my gardens and persist in my neighborhood's margins.

I found some interesting moldings over the boards in the back wall, so the original outside surface of my house could well have been those long boards with the molding as battens over the substantial cracks between them. They might be cedar, and are now on the outside of my sauna covering cracks there. The house could have been built much earlier than 1916, and I'm inclined to think it was. Even the front porch, which has a bungalow appearance, could have been added, and the original house could have just been those two rooms. Certainly the back door was much newer than the five-panel ones indoors, some with their old locksets intact. I will continue to research and speculate. I'm having a blast.

This is My Beautiful House

I spent a crazy amount of time yesterday researching antique wallpaper while fielding emails and ignoring Valentine's Day as well as I could. The wallpaper came from inside the walls of the house I remodeled, under the lath and plaster I removed, literally pasted to the boards that the house is built from. This is the house I've been living in since about 2007 after working on it for twelve years.

It's fascinating trying to imagine the process the previous builders and decorators of my dwelling went through. It was similar (but probably not very) to mine, but there were so many variables and conditions that have changed since then, and so few clues left behind. It makes me wish I had put more evidence inside the walls myself, and also determined to write about some of it for the next owners.

That's one cool thing about working on a house, the idea that some of it will remain when I am gone. Some of it has been here awhile. This house was probably built in the early years of the twentieth century. I searched Deeds and Records way back in the beginning and the land was first recorded as the property of Samantha (Davis) Huddleston, who was Eugene and Mary Skinner's babysitter. This makes the history of Eugene seem very short and personal.

She began selling off the lots in 1906. It has been through about a dozen owners, and it took us a year to clear the title and get the land sales contract in place. We paid $23,000 for it, in 1988, and it was a dump. The yard was total blackberries, puddles, and leaking water and sewage from the inadequate plumbing. I started working on the yard even before we signed the papers, mostly because the filberts and climbing roses had overgrown the sidewalk. It was without a doubt the worst house on the block, and neighbors were very excited when we started working on it.

There are two little houses, a bit bigger now, but neither even a thousand square feet. My ex-partner Mike did most of the work on the "little house" that is my shop now, and I did almost all of the work on the bigger one where I live. I started in 1995 and am not technically finished since I still haven't managed to get the baseboards on. I've even done a few things two or three times already. Mine is a life that responds to my house.

It's a good value, worth maybe ten times what we initially paid, though of course by now I have bought it a few times over and the value is almost all equity. It still has a few problems, some created by me, some fixed, some just maintained enough to be handed over to the next owner.

I've been trying to write the book of it for most of this time also, going through my various crises of faith and trying to get an angle on it that will work and make me want to write. I enjoy the research, and this week I made a list of topics that reflect the things I like most about it, which might work to make a framework for the writing.

So the wallpaper is one. The walls themselves were made with big nine-foot-long 1x12 boards, planed but still rough, probably fir, mostly clear. One layer went vertically on the outside, and one horizontally on the inside. They are separated by a flat 2x4, but no insulation was put into the 2" space. The outside was covered with narrow clapboards, though when it was first built it could have been covered with asphalt paper or shingles. Hard to say.

The inside was covered with a thick kraft paper and some crude, straw-flecked plain paper, dark turquoise in one room, brown in the other. At the top was a printed geometric border, and my research shows it was woodblock printed, probably in the Twenties, as it is Art Deco in style. This was covered with a pale striped damask-type paper with floral borders at the top, Victorian in style but most likely newer than what was underneath, so not really Victorian. But who knows? Where did people buy wallpaper at that time? Did they order it through Quackenbush's hardware? Did a traveling salesman bring around the sample books?

I'm speculating all sorts of things about it. The front door is most likely in the same place it was, because the big porch seems to be the same age as the rest. The more ornate flower print is in the livingroom, but the prettier turquoise was in the bedroom. Maybe the original front room-parlor was in the room without the door, and the one with the door was more of a kitchen/dining room. Or maybe the person who picked out the wallpaper just put the one they liked better in the bedroom. The bedroom paper has less fading and wear, but that room is on the north side. And it has a closet, but of course that could have been added later. Was there wallpaper in the closet? I wish I could remember. I can go on and on like this.

I get an excitement when I think of the huge upgrade the owners made when they put in the lath and plaster over those two (possibly three) paper layers of decorative improvements. The plaster wasn't particularly masterful in style, but it wasn't such a lost skill in those days so the homeowners may have done it themselves. The trim boards were all put on over it, of course, and on the back of the transom boards (need more research, are they called that? Head casings?) Frank Bowers signed his name with a flourish. His signature is big and proud. I put mine under his on most of them.

Grace Bowers was the owner of the lot in 1914, and I think she was married to H.F. Bowers. This could be Frank, or maybe Frank was another of their relatives, maybe their son. Payments of amounts like $100 and $500 were made over the next ten years between the Bowers family and F.G. Vaughan, who bought 2 1/2 acres for $700 from Samantha Huddleston on my birthday in 1908 (only 42 years before I was born). The property was south of 11th St, and west of Van Buren, so it was probably my land, though the records are spotty. But it does say that Vaughan paid the city and county $100 to have 11th extended west.

Can you imagine that West 11th wasn't even paved then? My neighbor May told me that when she was little, her dad built a little tarpaper house where hers is now at the end of our street (ends at the Fairgrounds, which was given to the county by Huddleston I think, at which point it stopped being a racetrack for horses). She's 91 I think, so that would have been 1925 or 30, and she remembers being completely surrounded by a lake of rainwater in the winters...this was just a big pasture/wetlands then.

Anyway I think the Bowers family sold the place in 1924 so they may not have done the plastering. Maybe some future owners took off the trim and put it back on like I did. The windows and doors are cased with beautiful clear fir with the crown molding details that are found on Victorian-style interiors. They are often found on the outside, though. My windows were all plainly cased on the outside, but the casings were sunk flush to the siding rather than proud of it (I love these technical terms) which could mean the clapboards were put on later to cover the cheaper covering of the original house.

It's a fun tangle to unravel, and I will have to go back to Deeds and Records and do it again so I am sure I have all of the information I can gather. I hope you can still go view those. When I did it in 1995 you could still see the spidery handwriting of the clerk who recorded it all.

The single most exciting thing about taking apart and putting this house together was the board I almost missed, but found in a pile of the tongue-and-groove siding I salvaged from the walls and ceiling of the kitchen and bathroom, which was a kind of shed-like thing tacked onto the back side of the original two rooms. Spaced about a foot apart on the back of the clear fir are three names and dates: Elmer Jouvin Van Orden, Marcola Oregon, April 23, 1915; what looks like Howard Bowers, Jan 10, 1916; and Bilyeu or Bilyer Vaughan, Eugene, Ore Jan. 10, 1916.

So Mr. Van Orden from Marcola put this siding up in April 1915, and then Mr. Bowers (maybe H.F., or maybe Frank is the same person) and Mr. Vaughan put it up again in January of 1916.
My feeling is that the 1915 house was recycled into my house in part. It isn't a clapboard, so it may have always been inside, because maybe it was common practice before sheetrock to line your walls with t&g boards. The entire kitchen and bathroom ceiling and walls were lined with this wonderful material, which is now partly on the back of my house where I ran out of clapboards that matched, and partly in my bathroom as wainscoting (and that is another story.)

So I think F.G. Vaughan or his relative Bilyeu and Frank Bowers or his relative H.F. finished building my house in 1916. That would make it just coming up on it's hundredth birthday in a few years. My work at the end of the twentieth century probably bought the house another fifty years, though in this neighborhood in this century, it might go to the dump well before its useful life is over. All of the things I labored over so diligently were done for my own purposes, the kitchen the way I want it, the clawfoot put in without a shower because I am a bath person, the old foundation shored up but not replaced because I didn't decide to put on a second story as we originally thought we might. It's a perfect one-person house, though it could have two bedrooms if you weren't a person who liked to have a whole room full of Jell-O art and silk scarves waiting to be painted. People like bigger houses now, though that trend might be eroding, and once I am gone or can't keep the house, I will have no say, or even awareness possibly, of what happens to "my" property.

I still enjoy working on my houses, but major building projects are most likely not in my future, since the owner-built experience is not quite as easy as it was in 1995 when I started. At some point the little shop will need to be remodeled back into a rental house, I'm guessing. Both could be torn down for a McMansion or some ugly apartment complex. The duplex next to me could doom our whole block, as it is not being maintained and will most likely be sold and demolished. I don't know how many of my neighbors will remain in place as we age. The future is all about as many questions and speculations as the past is.

But starting with the wallpaper I am going to write the story of my life in this house. This is the next stage of my ownership. When I read back in my journals, I remember that this wasn't even the house I wanted. I wanted one a few blocks south but since $32,500 was out of our price range, we passed on that larger yard and cuter place. Maybe we made the right decision.

But I am as thoroughly amused at this stage of my occupation as I have been all along as I have just spent the larger part of two days on the old wallpaper I saved from the dumpster, and I still don't know much at all about it. Writing the book may just take as long as building the house did.

At least we have the internet. Anyone know any of those old dead guys? Floyd G. Vaughan died in 1927, and is buried in Mulkey cemetary, which I am not sure you can even get to anymore, somewhere up past 18th. I'll have to go see if I can learn anything from his gravestone. There's nothing more to take apart on this house; I've had my fingers on every inch except the inside of the bearing wall in the middle. I could still unearth something from the yard, or something more from the Historical Museum or the library. Someone planted the huge Gravenstein right behind the house, and I will study its rings if it ever falls down, which surely it will someday, because it is just a tree.

At the meeting last night someone quickly explained the concept of Thich Nat Hahn about "inter-is," (yes, more research is indicated), when they pointed to a sheet of paper and said within the paper is the tree, and the logger, and the logger's family, and what they ate for breakfast and who fed the pig that fed them, and the oak that provided the acorns eaten by the pig, and so on. We can never, and waste time trying to, separate ourselves from all that is. Inside the house, I live, and I eat the kale that grows where a Vaughan may have grazed a sheep, and the rocks I found under the house came from a river or a glacier or a truck that hauled them from a mountain, which was driven by a relative of Grace, or the wallpaper was screenprinted by an artist in England just as I now am trying to figure out a way to screenprint on Jell-O.

What a wild and fascinating existence. I wish I could be this alive every minute, because right now I feel like my life is very, very short and tiny, and at the same time touches everything. Leaving a book behind sounds like a pretty good idea if I can just narrow things down.