The Logger’s Daughter
Tony and I began our cross-country trip this past August in the far northeast corner of Oregon, home of the Wallowa Mountains. Known as the “Alps of Oregon,” they offer grand views and long trails. We’d also come, though, to learn more about the Wallowa logging community of Maxville, where African-American and White loggers worked side by side in the 1920’s and early 30’s, at a time when Oregon’s exclusion laws prohibited “free Negroes” from moving to the state to live and work.
The mountains were all we hoped for, but it was the story of Maxville, told by Gwendolyn Trice, a daughter of one of these Black loggers (born when her father was 58), that lingers. In 2009, the Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) produced a 28-minute video “The Logger’s Daughter,” filled with Trice’s interviews with men and women, “colored and not,” who worked and lived in Maxville during those years.
“What I thought was going to become my story is really the community’s story,” Trice says at the end of the film.
Here are pieces of that story, gathered from the extraordinary OPB video and an afternoon spent with Gwendolyn Trice at the Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center she has created to keep this story alive.
“My dad was ten feet tall to me, and everyone knew him as Lucky,” Gwen explained. One of seven children, she lived in La Grande, Oregon, a town of 11,000, 30 miles west of the Wallowa Mountains, where her family’s black skin was as rare as fine china. Despite the racism that stared him in the face, Lucky owned a succession of small business and commanded the local American Legion Post. He was an avid conservationist and outdoorsman. “I was raised on elk and venison, pheasant and crop [a fish],” Gwen said.
One night when she was watching her father change clothes, Gwen saw a long scar on his arm and asked him what happened. He said he’d been in a logging accident. “Wow, that must have hurt,” she thought. He didn’t elaborate; she didn’t push.
Years later, having lived and worked in Seattle for 30 years, Trice returned to rural Wallowa County. Hoping to discover what had brought her Southern-raised parents to this rugged outpost, she learned that her father had traveled in a boxcar from Arkansas to Wallowa when he was nineteen, hoping that logging would lift his economic fortunes.
“I can only imagine what it was like for my dad to come to a place that was so remote and so foreign from everything he knew,” said Gwen, “doing a job that was so brand new to him.”
Lucky was one of some 400 men imported from Arkansas and elsewhere in the South by the Missouri-based Bowman-Hicks Lumber Company, which had acquired a large tract of Ponderosa pines perched on a six percent grade 13 miles north of the small town of Wallowa. Then as now, Oregon led the country in softwood lumber production.
On a large flat meadow, Bowman-Hicks set up a company town: housing for 400, a post office, commissary, hotel, doctor’s office, blacksmith, a roundhouse to turn the log-train engines, a horse barn, and two schools. Steam locomotives balancing on railroad trestles wound through the forest, carrying logs to the lumber mill below and hauling supplies uphill.
Named after the company’s superintendent, Maxville was different from other logging camps because families, not single men, lived there and 60 of the residents were Black, defying Oregon’s Negro Exclusion Laws. Although Black and White loggers worked side-by-side during the day, they returned to a segregated township with two housing districts, two baseball teams, and two schools divided by color. The baseball field and a swimming hole, made from a dammed-up stream, were located near the White part of town.
In a county composed of small settlements, Maxville quickly became one of the largest towns in Wallowa County.
“Everybody was good, everybody was nice”
For most people in Wallowa County, Lucky and his Southern brethren were the first African Americans they met.
Gwen asked the White old-timers she interviewed about her father.
He used to bring the wood in for me.
My husband was very fond of him, they logged together.
He had a level head on him. Where things were bubbling up, he kept the lid on.
A snag [dead tree] fell over my husband and hit him in the back. Lucky picked him up and packed him quite a ways so that he could get to the doctor.
She asked about the relations between the races. (She welcomed their plainspoken answers.)
Everybody was good, everybody was nice. The colored people were just as white as we were. We never showed partiality with nobody. They would come and visit us and we would visit them. – Bertie Prince
When my father was riding into the woods to saw logs, he rode with the black men in what was called the candy wagon. The expression candy wagon came from the fact that the white loggers called them chocolate drops. I think it was just an expression that came from the company in the south.
We had a good friend here who was named Nigger Bob. I don’t think anyone here gave him that name, I think it just came with him. – Orvalla Hafer
The colored boys felled the trees and the white men loaded the trains. – Jack Gregory
Ester Wilfong, Jr., the son of a Black Maxville logger, laid out the bargain:
The adjustments that were made by the minorities there is that you did what you were supposed to do, keep your mouth closed, and not step out of line, and you got along fairly well. These were hard working people. It was a chance to make the money you couldn’t make in the South and better yourself.”
As Jack Gregory, the son of the town doctor, suggests, the types of logging jobs—and the pay scale—were generally assigned based on race. Whites more likely worked as section foremen, tree toppers, and truck drivers, and Greek immigrants worked as bridge builders. Most of the hands-on jobs—such as log cutters, section hands, tong hookers, and log loaders—belonged to the Black laborers.
To build community, the town’s Blacks held picnics to support its Colored Giants baseball team, attended church in nearby La Grande when a visiting Black preacher passed through, or held Saturday night card parties (which is where Trice’s father earned the name “Lucky”). As Bertie Price suggests, Blacks and Whites also “visited” each other.
After a day in segregated classrooms, however, the town’s children regularly joined up to hunt, fish and play together in the woods. They shared the same swimming hole. When it came to baseball, the town’s White and Black teams paired up and emerged victorious when they competed against other teams in the county.
In a 1978 newspaper interview, Trice’s father shared this flashback: “I remember the night the Ku Klux Klan came to Maxville. Our boss de-hooded the leader and said, ‘Don’t come back here ever again.’ And they never did. We’d see their crosses and fires burning sometimes, but they never came near us.” ( Oregon Humanities, “Reaching Back for Truth, 2017)
“It was a nice place to work, but no place for pleasure”
One ingredient, for sure, united Maxville’s residents: hardship.
“I don’t know how we lived, I really don’t. Those were hard times, I tell you,” said school teacher Madeline Riggles.
Regardless of race, most of Maxville’s residents lived without plumbing and electricity, they harvested wood for heating and cooking and water for drinking, and supplies were often short.
Residents also endured a generous visitation of blood-sucking bedbugs; mud in the spring and fall; and in the winter, snow storms and winter temperatures that dipped below minus twenty degrees. Death was also a regular visitor to Maxville, whether one’s life ended under a felled tree, from diphtheria, or by accidentally being shot by a hunter. (Oregon Humanities, “Reaching Back for Truth,” 2017)
“It was a nice place for work but it was no place for pleasure” said Alvie Marsh, a Black logger who now lives in Texas. Mattie Wilfong, the wife of another logger, called it the worst place she had ever lived.
And the dangers inherent in cutting 100 foot trees stalked everyone. Alvie Marsh summed it up this way: “When you is in the logging woods, you is always in a dangerous situation, every day you go there. The snags are the killers. You never knew when they are gonna crash down on you and leave you as dead as you could ever be.”
Disappeared
The Great Depression felled the timber industry, and by 1933 Bowman-Hicks had cut most of its holdings in Maxville and began to dismantle the town.
The company pulled up its tracks to Maxville, sold its mill in Wallowa, packed up its equipment, hauled some of the homes and buildings to other towns, and moved on. So did most of the workers and their families. The children of the remaining families, White and Black, attended the same school until it closed.
In a few years, the town had disappeared. Just like that.
The only full structure that remains today is the large meeting hall where Bertie Price recalls a community taffy pull that stretched from one end of the hall to the other. “You don’t know how many of them had washed their hands,” she said.
I have visited several ghost towns in my travels around the West, all legacies of economic decline but with substantial buildings remaining. Maxville cast a different and much more powerful spell. As Tony and I followed the Snake River across southern Idaho, the severity and humanity of Maxville kept stealing my thoughts.
________________________
In 2008, Gwen Trice formed a nonprofit and in 2012 launched a museum called the Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center in downtown Joseph, a tourist gateway for the Wallowa Mountains. The museum collects, preserves, and interprets the history of Maxville and other logging communities across the West.
As the journalist from the Smithsonian wrote about her visit to the museum recently:
Hanging in pride of place on the wall inside was a grainy sepia photograph from the 1920s, which showed a team of African American loggers dressed in overalls with enormous saws over their shoulders, posing alongside white workers in a mountain forest. Another picture showed a half-dozen black and white children sitting together with their teacher in a field of cabins. Both were scenes that would have seemed like science fiction elsewhere in the state.”In 2015, the nonprofit foundation was given the camp’s lone surviving structure by the new landowners. A November 2020 grant from the Meyer Memorial Trust’s Justice Oregon for Black Lives, an initiative to invest in long-term strategic change in the state, along with the Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center’s ongoing fundraising efforts, should allow for the purchase of the 240 acres of Maxville and surroundings in the year to come.
Add your name to the email “blast” announcing new posts. Please send your name and email address to: subscribe@postcards-from-the-rogue-valley.blog