Willamette Valley Voices: Connecting Generations A publication of the Willamette Heritage Center Editor and Curator: Keni Sturgeon, Willamette Heritage Center Kylie Pine, Willamette Heritage Center Editorial board: Gabriel Bennett, Oregon State University Dianne Huddleston, Independent Historian Chad Iwertz, Oregon State University Samantha Reining, Independent Historian Jennifer Ross, Western Oregon University Ross Sutherland, Bush House Museum © 2014 Willamette Heritage Center www.willametteheritage.org Willamette Valley Voices: Connecting Generations is published by the Willamette Heritage Center at The Mill, 1313 Mill Street SE, Salem, OR 97301. Nothing in the journal may be reprinted in whole or part without written permission from the publisher. Direct inquiries to Kylie Pine, Curator, Willamette Heritage Center, 1313 Mill Street SE, Salem, OR 97301 or email [email protected]. 1 In This Issue Willamette Valley Voices: Connecting Generations is the Willamette Heritage Center’s biannual publication. Its goal is to provide a showcase for scholarly writing pertaining to history and heritage in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, south of Portland. Articles are written by scholars, students, heritage professionals and historians - professional and amateur. Editions are themed to orient authors and readers to varied and important topics in Valley history. This issue looks into the topic of work in the Valley—a topic with many different facets despite its apparent universality. Articles in this edition focus on everything from the types work occupying valley residents to the way that work has shaped our communities. In addition to the articles, the edition includes a section called: “In Their Own Words,” our regular feature which provides access to primary sources found in the Willamette Heritage Center’s collections. Reproduced is the transcript of a portion of a newly acquired interview with Ruth DeSart Lively. In it she discusses her experiences as a high school student working at a store on the Wigrich Hops Ranch in the Independence area. Preserving the Valley’s heritage and sharing its stories is part of a continuing process and dialogue of which Willamette Valley Voices: Connecting Generations is but one vehicle. It is with regret that we announce that Keni Sturgeon, founding editor and force behind Willamette Valley Voices, has accepted a new position at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle, Washington. We want to thank Keni for her vision in reviving a publishing tradition of the Willamette Heritage Center and dedication to encouraging and fostering new scholarship and a greater understanding of the history of the Mid-Willamette Valley. We wish her well in her new pursuits. 2 Willamette Valley Voices: Connecting Generations A Journal of Willamette Valley History Volume III Winter 2014 Number 1 Remembering Work in the Valley Making and Searching for Meaning Max Geier PAGE 5 Natural Foresters Native Timber Traditions and Logging from the Grand Ronde Tribe David G. Lewis PAGE 11 The Missionary Ladies Women’s Roles in the Methodist Mission to Oregon Peyton Tracy PAGE 27 Honoring Teachers, Then and Now A Photo Essay Phil Decker PAGE 45 Say Cheese! Cheese Manufacture in the Mid-Willamette Valley Kylie Pine PAGE 54 3 1350 Ferry Street SE From Soap Works to Parking Lot The Evolution of an Historic Salem Site Gloria Lachelle PAGE 74 The Resurgence of Hops Megan Lallier-Baron PAGE 89 Silverton Red Sox and the Struggle of Local Baseball Gregory J.K. Garcia, Jr. PAGE 101 Unfit to Work Disability Rights and the Mid-Willamette Valley, 1960-2013 Chad Iwertz PAGE 128 In Their Own Words PAGE 140 Author Biographies PAGE 145 4 Remembering Work in the Valley: Making and Searching for Meaning Max G. Geier, Ph.D., Western Oregon University Studs Terkel once noted that his much-admired book Working, “…being about work, is by its very nature about violence—to the spirit as well as to the body…. It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us.”1 But he also pointed out that his book was about something more elusive. He described that elusive something as “…a search, too, for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a …sort of dying. …To be remembered was the wish, spoken and unspoken, of the heroes and heroines of this book.”2 The search for daily meaning in work, to which Terkel refers, gains expression in the words workers use to describe their skills and lives, as well as in their actions in the workplace. Simply by living and working, people bring meaning to the places where they do those things. Work changes places and the people who do it. Workers in the mid- valley, even before Oregon became a territory, organized to express their dissatisfaction with working conditions, to demand changes in the terms of their employment, and to assert or protect their ability to control how and when they applied their skills to a particular job. That struggle for control played out in a legal and economic framework that was often hostile to worker demands for fair treatment or respect. As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy asserted in a 1992 judgment striking down a comparable-worth statute in Washington State, “Neither law nor logic deems the free market system a suspect enterprise.”3 Workers who challenged their employers in court encountered legal authorities who viewed with suspicion any efforts to impugn the fairness of an economic system based on free choice in the marketplace. Justices like Kennedy redefined work, and by extension, workers, as just another commodity like wheat, coal, or lumber, that was tradable on the free market. Workers, however, frequently disagreed, emphasizing the human value of community, and the lives that work made possible in those places. 1 Studs Terkel, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (NY: Avon Books, 1974), p. xiii. 2 ibid. 3 David Montgomery, Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market During the Nineteenth Century (Melbourne, Australia: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 12. 5 The struggle for control in the workplace included disagreements over whether workers had the right to draw a bright line between those portions of their lives that they committed to work, and the times they reserved for private lives and leisure activities beyond the control of those who supervised them on the job. Hudson’s Bay Company employees during the early 19th century, for example, challenged terms of employment that required them to return east when their contracts with the company expired. In resisting company efforts to enforce compliance, HBC retirees formed the nucleus of local community on French Prairie, north of modern-day Salem. The lives of workers, as it happens, shaped the foundations of Oregon history in ways that escaped the notice of early historians. Workers near Salem. Willamette Heritage Center Collections, 1997.014.0010. Work, at a very basic level, is a measure of energy unleashed. Water flowing downhill and through the Willamette Valley converts gravitational power into a force that carves out channels and moves portions of the landscape downstream, depositing sediment, rocks, and debris in places far below their origin at higher elevations. In doing this work, water also creates the potential for downstream use and other forms of work. Various 6 mechanisms for harnessing waterpower made places like Albany, Salem, and Oregon City, landscapes of human work. Water-driven mills, and later, electric motors drawing energy from hydropower projects above and around the Willamette Valley, accelerated the pace of work, and helped connect people working in one location with the efforts of those who lived elsewhere. People engaged in particular kinds of work forged community ties across expansive geographic distances, and in ways that connected people across multiple generations. David Lewis, in this edition of Willamette Valley Voices, examines how traditions of timber falling connected members of the Grand Ronde Indian reservation across time and space, linking 160 years of Grand Ronde residents with the far-flung forests of western Oregon. Timber fallers ranged out from the local community of Grand Ronde, working for years at a time at distant logging camps to earn wages that they sent to families in the home community. The away-lives of these timber workers helped sustain families in and near Grand Ronde who otherwise relied on farming and ranching activities that often failed to meet the basic needs of that community. This work was multi-generational, connecting elders with children as young as 6 years old in a mentoring and training relationship that helped ensure a continuity of skills and the employability of the community’s youth. In an ironic twist, Lewis notes that this self-contained pattern of mentoring the next generation encouraged the belief among non-Indian employers, that Native loggers were “natural” foresters. As one consequence, logging interests opposed tribal restoration in the 1970s, for fear it would destroy logging. Despite those fears, the tradition lived on past the 1983 restoration, and the elders who maintained control over the knowledge of the craft of logging were able to pass that skill on to the next generation of timber managers, loggers, and firefighters who assumed responsibility for managing the timber holdings of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. The theme of teaching and mentoring the next generation to carry forward established and learned values and traditions is a recurring concern among workers in the mid-valley, and it is further represented in the contributions of Peyton Tracy and Phil Decker to this volume.