Coast Research and Fun Trip!

I took Saturday off to go to the coast, as I was really in need of a real day off, one with actual escape from responsibility and the super kind of relaxation that comes from leaving town. It was cold and foggy but divine, with the thoughts of how hot and smoky it was in the valley we had left behind. Seems like we enjoyed it! A huge thanks to Beth and Cathy for giving me such a fun day off.

One of the best parts was how easily dreams were fulfilled. I happened to mention my book project and the fact that there was a graveyard somewhere up by Newport with some of "my people" in it. Lemuel Eli Davis (5 Sept. 1832-22 March 1917) was the eldest son of Benjamin and Catherine Davis. He married Mary Jane Ogle Webster (25 July 1831-24 Jan 1913) in 1853, shortly after arrival in Oregon, and presumably lived on Lemuel's DLC next to his parents. I'll have to dig up and review all of the details of their lives but in 1866  they moved to the Yaquina Bay where they were among the earliest white settlers. They established a fishery there and ran a ferry across the bay. I have a couple of letters with more details. Cathy and Beth seemed to think it was a simple thing to drive on up to find it. I hadn't even brought a camera or any of my research but had enough in my memory to look it up on their phones.


We had a fairly good description of the place from an online posting 15 years ago, but that said the graveyard was derelict then, and it wasn't all that easy to find. The first wrong turn fortunately led us to a man who knew the place and pointed us to the correct hill in the distance. Following his directions, it was easy to get to the right hill and up some stone steps we found it! I was thrilled and tried to take pictures and write down all of the details. There were quite a few people buried there who weren't from the Davis family, but they were probably known to them or had some other connection to the old settlement. Unfortunately I wasn't as diligent as I could have been but it appeared that the oldest family stone was Mary's original one, and some had been replaced with newer ones, or the graves were finally permanently marked later. Mary's had been repaired. There were several fragments and I can make a few guesses about them. Lemuel's stone is a replacement, as is Zenas's, I think. I looked up the graveyard and there are about 30 people buried there, mostly early residents of Yaquina Bay. Another of the very old ones turned out to be their grandchild, Mary E. Copeland, (daughter of Catherine Winant,) who died just before turning three in 1881.


According to my records Lemuel and Mary had four children: Rebecca Catherine (1854-1936) Tracy W. (1857-1936) Zenas C. (1861-1907) and Fanny, who lived only three years from 1867-1871. The fragments might have been from her grave, as they were small, but totally unreadable. She is there and was probably the first burial. The other three children were there.

Tracy Davis and Catherine Winant had graves marked with identical stones set at the feet of their parents in the fenced family enclosure, and Zenas was to the side of his parents. I think Mary and Lemuel's stones had been replaced in a reversed position facing away from the graves, as they were right up against the metal fence and didn't face in the same direction as Tracy and Catherine. In fact an older photo of Lemuel's shows the fence behind it as it should have been I think. The children both died in 1936 and the stones were fairly modern-looking. I can't believe it but apparently we didn't get photos of them, although I have some from the internet. You can see one of them standing at the left of this photo, Catherine's. It is facing away from her parents. Tracy's was closer to us, even with Catherine's and in line with his father's.

 The shot with the view is from above them looking downhill. The graveyard was near the top of the hill, and the graves scattered around at the feet of tall trees or tucked into the woods. The metal fence seems the same age as the ones at the Masonic cemetery in Eugene, from the 1930's maybe. Further research is always needed for the details.

But here we have the Lemuel Eli Davis family buried so long ago. It was a satisfying search and set the mood for our later stop down the coast at the scene of the drowning of our young friend Jack Harsongkram only a few years ago. I hadn't been to the scene yet and it was heart-wrenching as I had expected it to be. Still, life and death are a part of our emotional landscape and they are not as easily escaped as valley weather. They stay with us as we walk through our lives and when we stop to mark them, it is gratifying to have a time and place set aside to do this. I am grateful to those members of the Davis family who made this little place and to those who documented it for me to find. It renewed my excitement about my research and I want to dive back into it and fill in the details of their stories.

Mary's obituary and her photo were essential details for me as she changed little in appearance over the decades. I have had a photo of the "Davis women" that I have been working for years to identify and she is clearly the person standing behind the other two. With my subsequent discovery of photos of Iantha Davis (thanks to Peter Steelquist!) I am now completely certain that the person on the left is indeed a young Samantha Davis Huddleston, and by carefully dating the details of their clothing I have convinced myself that the photo was taken on the occasion of their father's death in 1858, making it a historically significant photo and the only one I have of Samantha. As soon as I can I will take up the quest again to find more photos of Samantha and fill in more details of her life.She was one of the most long-lived of the early Eugene pioneers and arrived here when she was still a child in 1847.Putting together some kind of story of her life seems really important to me, although her direct connection with my house is a slim one. She did own the land, and sold it off eventually, but whether or not she even set foot on my little spot is a big speculation. Still, I know enough about her to think of her every single time I walk on the west side of our town. My search for her, fueled by the sweet look of her in this photo, is one of the things that warms my heart. Finding the resting place of her oldest brother and essential sibling was a very good day.

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.

Here in my Township

I'm sad, but I'm not going to make it to Market tomorrow. I hate missing the last outdoor Market, with its festive atmosphere and possibly good sales. I toyed with the idea of just taking a tiny load, the hats and bags, and a little infrastructure, but my incision from the surgery hasn't healed and the stress of the 12-hour day won't help that. It needs rest and gentle treatment. I already abandoned the boot a little too early and have done a little too much on my feet in the last few days. Darn.

But instead I will make sure I am prepared for Holiday Market load-in, which I am of course because I got it all organized weeks ago. I'll listen to the Saturday radio shows that I so rarely get to hear and watch the Woodworker show. I'll ride the stationary bike with my good foot.

In a couple of weeks this will be a memory and I can get on to being anxious and worried about something else. Looking forward to that.

But of course the extra time means more house research and I have a new stack of books thanks to Colleen who took me to the library. Just as we had to rush off for our meeting I found a book about River Road which had the 1860 Cadastral Map that clearly showed the Davis claims along the river there and that got me so very excited. Benjamin and Lycurgus Davis picked big tracts of land right there on the river and another Davis, Joseph, set up on the other side of Benjamin. I'll have to see how they were related, if they were. Seems likely. I really cannot wait until I can get on my bike and follow the path all along what was their land (once they took it, that is). I'm hoping to find some architectural remains somehow but that is not that likely. Maybe those two trees...

There is also a section corner right south of me on the Fairgrounds somewhere, or maybe up as far as 18th, and I will see if I can find the exact spot of that, just out of curiosity. I doubt there are markers, but maybe on the telephone poles or something. Have you ever noticed those little metal plaques on some of the poles? I will investigate.

In case you don't know what I am talking about, it's the numbers given to the landscape when it was first surveyed by the white guys so they could divvy it up. I live in Township 17 South, Range 4 West, Section 36 of the West Willamette Meridian. Knowing these numbers allows you to pinpoint your location on the map and provides a relatively logical system for finding boundaries. It has helped immensely to find the original claims and the info about my own. I suppose that a GPS might be handy on the ground and maybe I'll see what I can do with my phone. I have barely explored all the ways I can use my smart phone, but there it lies waiting for me to join the 21st century.

I'm kind of immersed in the 19th. I've started reading the Oregon Trail accounts in search of the Davises and others who came here in the 1850's. It's endlessly fascinating still but soon I will have found all of what has been written. It turns out that if you don't have descendents, you die and are forgotten. No wonder they all placed such high value on having sons.

It was very hard what they did, striking out on adventures that included quite a lot of danger and death. Many, many of these people lost their children and spouses and treasured possessions and built back up with a huge amount of hard work. I imagine, though, that when they started farming this deep river soil they were quite pleased with themselves. No doubt you could grow pretty much whatever you wanted.

So they had some food security, and now over 150 years later we are using the Willamette Valley to grow some of those staple crops again. The Willamette Valley Bean and Grain project is getting some press and what an innovative and encouraging project it is! I've been enjoying the many dry bean varieties and other grains for a couple of years now and I am so happy for people like Kasey who are seeing the results of their own very hard work and dedication.

One of the most fun and bittersweet aspects of watching these young farmers in their highly productive years, seeing them build their families and their social networks of other young families, and remembering my thirties and forties when I was working my ass off building my own, is that I feel profoundly the passage of time. Generally I kind of look to the next project and time slips by unnoticed, but ever since I found myself at sixty a couple of years ago, something shifted.

One of these days it will be over for me, really over, hopefully not for a couple of decades. But loss is constant and there are already things I won't do again, like being a farmer and being a young mother, and taking off on grand adventures without a care. I guess crossing the mountains in my Jeep, pouring oil into my engine with its broken piston, will make a good saga and I had better write it. 

Like these long-gone people I have begun to feel connected to like family, if nobody writes it down, the oral history will someday be forgotten, or at least not easily accessed. The tiny little clues might not get added up. I was watching a program about the big statues in the Easter Island region, how the legends said the statues walked. Always dismissed as impossible, finally some curious people made it happen again. They proved that a couple dozen people and some ropes could indeed make the statues walk. 

But without that word *walk,* they would probably have tried a whole bunch of other methods without success. Without the tiny clues I am finding, like people's maiden names and grave locations and the records of building permits and such, I would not be able to even accurately speculate about this very recent history of my neighborhood and township. 

So I'm glad that I am an archivist and accumulator of artifacts, glad I saved so many small items I found on the property. Someday I may figure out what those little slabs of marble I found were used for. I'll find out when the river rocks were spread under the house, and why my roof rafters are four feet apart. 

Someday I am going to put it all together and make it make sense. I hope I am not as speculative and plain mistaken as some of the historians I've read. I hope I don't end up writing historical fiction instead of history (fine line there, isn't it?) But if historical fiction is all I can manage, that will be okay too. Sometimes imagining how it might have been leads us to the discoveries that prove our points. It's a pretty creative process to do this research.

And it's a really effective distraction from this frustrating situation I've been in all freaking year. It has definitely kept me going and forestalled true acceptance of my dismal (though temporary) reality. It's a fulfilling type of escapism.

But dang, I want to be on my bike freewheeling along the river, thinking about agriculture, or downtown thinking about crafts and food. At least I will most definitely be over on the Huddleston property next week, selling my wares where they used to race their fine horses. It will be good, kind of like a family reunion. Which reminds me that I have to write that story too, take the oral traditions of the Saturday Market to the next level. That will be a long, complicated story that will have far fewer clues perhaps, though many more interviews. With only forty-some years to explore, most of my people will still be within a phone call's distance. Big difference, and a huge challenge. But it will be satisfying I think. Come see me with your stories.