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.

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.

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.