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Country changes
Rural preservation
Lane County history
Voices of Spencer Creek
Writer and historian
Lois Barton
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Sunnyside of Spencer Butte
The Good Old Days?
by Lois Barton
"Everyone in the neighborhood worked on the road." This picture was
actually taken during the construction of Wolf Creek Road (Eugene, OR).
Photo by Ralph Petzhold from Loois Barton's book Spencer
Butte Pioneers
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I've been thinking about all the changes
that have come to ordinary households in this area in the last few decades, even
since we came here to live in 1952. Some of them came late to our particular home,
and I am aware of many more that arrived in the twenty years before that.
A few years ago we were alarmed to hear the siren of a paramedic vehicle going down
the lane of a near neighbor. There was an old couple living there as well as one
of their children's families. I knew that the old folks had been hospitalized and
feared more trouble for them. When things quieted down I called Vivan to see what
had gone wrong. She said their septic system had blocked up and the rotorooter man
came to open it. He got the cover off and started his machine to clear the blockage,
but the machine had a short in it and knocked him cold as soon as he got his knee
on the wet ground and took hold of it. Her brother, a former navy man, happened to
be there, and he instinctively pulled the plug on the machine, and started mouth
to mouth resuscitation. Presently the operator came back from his swoon, and was
fine by the next day.
Septic systems are relatively new in
this former farming community. There is an old outhouse not too far from our house.
I'm glad we never had to race for it on a typical rainy day, since indoor facilities
had been added to this unfinished house before we moved in. The septic system is
an innovation since the 40s on Fox Hollow road. The Fox Hollow School outhouse was
built over the creek so it never had to be cleaned. What would environmentalists
and the poor fish do about that?
City water is clorinated to "purify" it for all those attached to city
plumbing. Our water arrives by gravity flow from a generous masonry reservoir our
predecessors built around a spring up on the hill. It was protected by 2x12 planks
which served well as a rule. One morning the family noticed their household water
came in muddy. When they went to check the spring they found that one of their horses
had fallen through the aging planking and was standing in water to his belly surrounded
by walls as high as his head. They had to build a special scaffold to hoist him out.
We are very popular among our neighbors
when there is a storm-driven power outage. Those with wells and pumps have no water
for cooking, bathing, or flushing the toilet and usually no heat for cooking. A few
years ago when there was an extended outage for five days, our in-house population
grew by two extra households. We had water and a wood cookstove. Those dependent
on electricity were particularly appreciative of hot meals. Incidentally, REA brought
electric power to Fox Hollow Road in 1945.
When I was researching this area for the Spencer Butte Pioneers book I learned about
a unique water supply just up the road. Those folks drilled their will where it was
witched. That happened to be up on a hill above the farm buidings. As Bill Kindt
explained,"The well was some thirty feet deep, but it was quite a ways above
the house and we siphoned water down to the house. As long as the pipes were in good
condition and didn't get any air in them, we just opened the faucet and warer would
run,.. You have to put a pump on it to get it started Then the flow down the hill
pulls it up out of the well. We had water in the house and piped down to the barn."
When we moved to Fox Hollow Road in the early fifties, the school consolidation process
was nearly complete. Our place is in the far south edge of the school district, so
when our eldest was ready for school, she must ride a bus to Eugene. This area was
sparsely populated, not having yet become a bedroom community. We found there were
no children this side of Spencer Butte on Fox Hollow road to be transported to Eugene
Schools. The closest bus connection was two miles away, an impossible distance in
the dark and winter rains for a first grade girl. I had to locate the manager of
the school bus system and show him what we were dealing with. He then made arrangements
for the bus to complete the route around the butte and pick up our daughter at the
end of our driveway.
The rural Fox Hollow school had just
been abandon recently. Many fascinating stories were available from former students
and teachers still living in the area, besides the location of the outhouse. Hot
lunches had been part of the program for many years but they didn't require a special
staff. A former teacher told me, "The kids brought the soup for lunches from
home. They'd take turns. You had to be sure the lid was loosened when you warmed
it. One time we didn't loosen it and all our cocoa went to the ceiling. We had cocoa,
potato soup, beef stew. We had beans several times a week. Something hot to go with
the biscuit they brought. There was a calendar and they signed up. The seventh and
eighth grade took care of the soup." It was warmed on the potbelly stove which
warmed the room..
There is a marked change in the roads
as well. Early on, the only access to the area from Eugene was a dirt road up the
west side of the Butte. It stopped in bottomless mud below the present park entrance.
One story tells of a local husband taking two horses to the end of the road to meet
the doctor who was coming by horse and buggy to help with delivery of a child.
In 1921 a road bond and pressure for another market road was in process. A local
boy, Lester Swaggart. drew three cartoons which were published in the Guard promoting
a yes vote for this new road, which was completed at that time. The road surface
was only gravelled for the next fifty years. Then in the 1970's it was paved, but
not before some of our teenage drivers fished tailed on a gravel curve and found
their cars hanging headfirst in the fence below the road...
And so we live with progress. Our elderly
neighbor in the late 50's reacted to the story of a sputnik in space by declaring
that the report was a ruse to get our minds off of what the government was up to...
I'd be lost without my computer, but we didn't even have a TV in the house until
our son traded his electric guitar for an old black and white sometime in the 60's,
and I wouldn't want to go back.
Lois Barton is an 83 year old mother of eight children. She has lived on the same
rural acreage just south of Eugene, Oregon for more than 50 years. All their children
learned to milk, to keep the woodboxes filled, to do their share of household and
garden chores. Her first book, Spencer Butte Pioneers, was published in 1982
when her youngest started to school. Since then she wrote five other books: Daughter
of the Soil, now out of print; One Woman's West; A Quaker Promise Kept;
and Through My Window, autobiographical sketches, sequel to Daughter Of
the Soil. Through the years Lois has been a 4H leader, president of the neighborhood
association, a precinct committe woman, election board clerk, editor of the Lane
County Historian, and a life long Quaker. She spent a month in Southeast Asia in
1974 as a member of a church peace mission, after working for ten years as director
of the Eugene Chapter of the World Without War Council.
Some of Lois Barton's West By Northwest On the Sunnyside of Spencer Butte
articles and/or check the Archives for more:
Charlotte's Overdose -
Just who is Charlotte and what did she take?
The Midwife - The
midnight call awoke an unusual midwife.
The Mystery of Fox Hollow
- Fact and fiction meet in this story of the origins of Faith Rock.
Trees, Tame Trees and Squirell
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Books by Lois Barton
History and stories of the peoples of the Northwest.
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