Fifty Years in Oregon was written by Theodore T.
Geer, a grandson of Joseph Carey Geer and a shirttail ancestor of
ours.
I have put much of the book on
this website. I started because several
chapters describe the early roots of our family history in Oregon. I
kept going because
I found many of the chapters from this perspective on the early
settlers and the history of Oregon to be quite
interesting.
We arrived at the home of Grandfather
Eoff, whose farm – on which I was born – of eight hundred acres was situated
both in the Waldo Hills and on Howell Prairie on June 8. I took possession
of my farm of three hundred and twenty acres adjoining this on the first of
the succeeding October, and for the next twenty years was engaged solely in
the endless work which such a farm – or, indeed, any farm – entails. I had
no rest from ceaseless toil except during the four terms I served in the
State Legislature, of forty days each, and the time devoted to public
speaking in various parts of the State between 1892 and 1898.
I can truthfully say that for a long time
I had no clearly defined ambition to occupy public positions. It was
developed as the result of circumstances which I had no hand in shaping.
Early in life I found myself possessed of a liking for newspaper writing,
for the pleasure I found in controversies involving the discussion of public
questions; and as they usually appeared to be welcomed by the papers and
appreciated by their readers, I rather cultivated the tendency during my
farm life. Indeed, I found in it the only diversion from really hard work,
and without some mental rest or occupation to vary the daily grind of farm
labor, the life one leads there is not so different from that of the horses
one drives every day and for whose physical necessities he provides. The man
whose occupation requires all his daylight hours and whose duties call for
the constant bending of the back, the crooking of the elbows and straining
of the arms, really leads a life which differs so little outwardly from that
of the work-mule that the distinction is hardly worth considering. And this
is not an unfaithful picture of the lives of hundreds of thousands of
farmers throughout even these United States, not to mention those less
favorably situated in other parts of the world.
So, as I have intimated, I found some
relaxation after the daily routine – hauling rails, building fences,
splitting wood in the timber, plowing, sowing grain, harvesting it, haying,
clearing land, digging oak “grubs” and postholes, making gardens, hauling
and spreading manure, cultivating potato fields, pruning orchards, killing
hogs and kindred stunts – in spending my evenings writing for the
newspapers. Often, while plowing, I have thought out the substance of an
article for publication and, having constructed and reconstructed a sentence
until I was satisfied with its arrangement, have stopped the team and,
sitting on the plow beam, jotted it down on a paper which I carried with me
for that purpose. This process would be repeated many times, then late some
evening, while the family slept, I would devote two or three hours to the
actual writing of the letter.
The first five years I lived on the Waldo
Hills farm there was no post-office nearer than Salem, eight miles away, and
it was the custom to watch for some neighbor passing along the road on his
way to that town and hail him with a request to bring out our mail. I had a
neighbor whose family lived in Salem, where his children were enjoying the
advantages of better schooling, and he went each Saturday to spend Sunday
with them, returning to the farm late on the afternoon of that day. He
regularly brought the mail for every family living along the road, and “Lew”
Griffith’s return home was watched for eagerly on every Sunday afternoon for
a number of years. At this writing, he still lives on his large farm at the
age of eighty-three years, but has been helpless by reason of a paralytic
stroke for the past ten years. Through it all, however, he has shown
remarkable patience and fortitude and has the sympathy of the unusually
large circle of friends and acquaintances among whom he has lived for more
than sixty years.
In about 1882, however, what was known as
the “narrow gauge” railroad was built from Woodburn, on the main line of the
Southern Pacific on French Prairie, to Springfield, in Lane County, passing
through the Waldo Hills within two miles of my farm. A station was built at
what had been known as “Stipp’s schoolhouse” since my earliest recollection.
It was called Macleay, after Donald Macleay, of Portland, who was
prominently connected with the “Scotch Company” which gave the necessary
financial backing to the railroad enterprise. Afterward, Mr. Macleay donated
a large sum toward the erection of a fine schoolhouse for the town, named in
his honor, with which, and an additional sum supplied by the people of that
school district, was erected an edifice which for many years was the finest
in the State outside the incorporated towns.
And with this innovation passed a landmark
which holds a cherished place in the memory of hundreds of people now
scattered all over the Pacific Coast; for “Stipp’s schoolhouse” was known
far and near in the days when all the people of Oregon were yet pioneers.
Elder John Stipp owned a farm near by and was a “Hard Shell” Baptist of the
most impervious kind – most probably he belonged to the family of Noah – and
his sermons were as long in their delivery as they were dull and obscure.
But this latter characteristic in no wise diminished the appreciation of his
hearers of his theological pronunciamentoes, for he was “called of God” and
the finite mind was not expected to be able to comprehend the revelations of
the Infinite. The more incoherent the deliveries of Elder Stipp, the greater
the evidence of their divine origin and the resultant awe which they
produced. His portrayal of foreordination and predestination, interwoven
with official assurance that infants a span long are burnt through all
eternity in a lake of fire and brimstone because they are not members of the
“elect,” was accepted without question by most of his congregation, and for
many years he was regarded as one of the ablest preachers in his
denomination in all that region.
Soon after my return to the Waldo Hills in
1877, Elder Stipp, who had then lived in Clackamas County for several years,
visited his old neighborhood and preached a sermon one Sunday morning in the
schoolhouse that had just replaced the one named after him, erected in 1850,
and his congregation included all the old-timers within a radius of ten
miles. All greeted the grizzled warrior in the army of the Lord with that
warmth which is characteristic of the pioneers, and the old man, then
showing plainly the ravages of cruel Time, held his audience for two hours
while he delved into the mysteries of revelation and demonstrated that the
second coming of Christ was then overdue, that it is inconceivable how even
the mercy of God can save such sinners as the best of us are, that, in
effect, a smile under any circumstances is an evidence of frivolity and that
an exhibition of mirth of any character indicates a lack of that seriousness
which should mark the deportment of those who expect ultimately to “vie
around the eternal Throne,” etc.
On this occasion Elder Stipp’s delivery
had taken on an additional degree of “hesitation,” compared with which his
former style was a frisky gallop among his confused verbs and nouns. He
always began his sentences in a modulated tone, with a gradual rise until a
satisfactory pitch had been reached, when there was a partial lessening of
force and a lowering of tone for a few words; but the rising scale was soon
resumed and followed until his whole effort was centered on some particular
word near the end, when there was a partial verbal collapse which became
complete when the period was reached. There was a rhythm permeating his
tones after he had talked for fifteen minutes, with a sliding scale of
diminuendoes and crescendoes as graceful and regular as a well-rendered
modern two-step, and if one was not careful, he would find himself
involuntarily keeping time to these variations with a swaying of the head
and body. Sometimes half the congregation were so affected. He had practiced
this method of delivery for so long that it had become an art, and where the
matter of his sermon did not convert, the melody of the musical scale was’
perfectly irresistible. Now you could detect a familiar bar in “Nearer My
God to Thee” for a dozen words, as he described the gold which is used in
paving the streets of the New Jerusalem; a minute later a section of “On
Jordan’s Stormy Banks” would be recognized for an instant, as it was called
into service to emphasize the horrors of perdition – and was gone before
there was time for a salutation!
But Elder Stipp, good old soul, has passed
away, as has the old schoolhouse, his style of preaching, and, for the most
part, the creed he propounded for a full half-century to those who sincerely
thought he was “contending for the faith once delivered to the saints.”
In following this reminiscent vein,
however, I have drifted away from the consideration of the fact that with
the building of the “narrow gauge” railroad, a post office was established at
Macleay, and with it came a daily mail service. This was, of course, a
marked improvement, though it necessitated a trip of two miles each way on
the part of some member of the family. In our case we usually decided at the
noon meal which one should make the trip for the mail during the afternoon,
for by this time many of us felt obliged to take a daily paper and the mail
must be obtained every day. This condition obtained during the other fifteen
years of my residence on the farm, and I reckon that, between all the
members of my family, in that time we traveled some thousands of miles on
foot – for there was a deep canyon to cross and by the road the distance
would have been fully doubled.
Within a year after I moved to Salem,
however, the rural free delivery system was inaugurated and the mail was
delivered at the farm every day before noon. At the same time a telephone
line was erected through that neighborhood, and so two of the rural
inconveniences, with which I wrestled for twenty years, were removed.
But, Mr. Reader, have you observed how
untrue is the assumption that the introduction of the rural mail delivery
and the telephone has increased the sociability in farming communities? This
is a common statement in the average newspaper – that the isolation which
has heretofore made country life so unpleasant has been removed by these two
agencies. But quite the reverse is true.
One day in 1902, I rode from Salem to my
farm on a bicycle, and at the dinner table asked Simeral if Tom Jones was
showing any more gray hairs than when I had seen him last a few months
before. He replied that he hadn’t seen him for two months, he guessed.
“Haven’t seen him for two months?” I
gasped. “Why, have you had a falling out?”
“Oh, no,” he laughingly answered, “but you
know we have ‘phones now and when I want to talk to him I simply ‘call him
up,’ and that is all there is to it. He is well, though, for I was talking
to him this morning about whether the gourds are bad in his wheat this
summer.”
Tom Jones was my nearest neighbor, and
during the twenty years I lived on the farm, there was rarely a day that I
did not see him, either at his home or mine. And I discovered that Simeral
had not been to Macleay for a month. He had no business there, as his mail
was delivered at the house, and not while he waited, either. He had seen
none of the neighbors in that direction since the Christmas entertainment,
six months before, but the amount of information everybody possessed about
everybody else was astonishing. Every family within a radius of ten miles
was on a “party line,” and when two people were indulging in local gossip it
was usual for every family between Salem and Silver Creek Falls and from
Silverton to Sublimity, to have a receiver down – learning the latest. This
is the rule, and is in part justified by the fact that the ordinary
conversation in the country lasts from one to two hours, so, if one wants to
be “next” on the line, he must needs be in position to start his claim at
the drop of the hat. And even then he is frequently left in the assertion of
his right!
One day, merely as an experiment, a
Macleay man called up a neighbor, according to a previous understanding, and
told him that a well-known citizen of the locality had sustained a
dislocated knee joint through an accident occasioned by a runaway team,
though nothing of the kind had happened. Within the next hour the ‘phone at
the home of the supposedly injured man was kept red-hot by calls from every
part of eastern Marion County inquiring as to the exact extent of his hurt!
And when everybody was compelled to go to
Macleay for his mail, one would usually find from ten to twenty men there
waiting for the arrival of the train from Portland and the stage from Salem.
At such times, there was an enjoyable hour or two of sociability which
permitted the discussion of current topics, local, State and national,
religious, political and agricultural. But there is nothing of the sort now.
There is nothing to go to Macleay for! Uncle Sam brings your mail to the
door free of charge, and if you desire to talk to a man living there you can
take down your receiver – if some other fellow has not already brought his
own into use – and have it out with him, while in the former days you would
be getting ready to saddle your horse for a half-day’s journey.
All of which goes to show that in these
days things are so handy that you can put in all your waking hours at work,
while your neighbors are doing the same. Did you ask if I regret the change?
Oh, no, indeed, I was merely stating a fact. Let the improvements come, and
when the airships are perfected we can sail away to the blue Mediterranean
for a little vacation, giving out no information as to the time of our
departure or our return – if, indeed, we do return.
Next Chapter -
Geer wins election to the Oregon Legislature in 1880; stories from his first
session including Z. F. Moody, Terry Tuttle, and J. W. Blevans.
If you are interested in finding this book, Fifty
Years in Oregon, it can
often be located at Powell's Books in Portland
which is one of the largest used book stores in the United States or, through the
Alibris service
which catalogs used books from stores across the country. For more information on the Geer Family, visit the Geer Family website. Other resources
and references include:
