SOU Students Will Help Uncover the History of a Ghost Town
ASHLAND, Ore. — Uncovering the history of a ghost town is the adventurous trip students and faculty members from Southern Oregon University’s Sociology and Anthropology Program will undertake in the fall.
Members of the expedition will turn back pages of time in a grim racially segregated period of history at a logging ghost town in eastern Oregon.
Black Loggers Worked Alongside White Counterparts
The site they will examine is close to Maxville Heritage and Interpretive Center (MHIC) in Wallowa County where they will search to uncover the hidden lives of black loggers who worked alongside their white counterparts in the early 20th century.
Funded by a $20,000 grant from the Oregon State Historic Preservation Office, the SOU contingent will conduct on-site investigations from September 4 to 14, gaining professional experience in excavation, archaeological surveying and analysis. The on- site work will be done in collaboration with Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, and the Eastern Oregon University.
SOU Professor of Anthropology, Mark Tveskov, says long-held beliefs that Oregon’s logging industry was a ‘white space’ have been discarded by the site close to MHIC. Instead, Tveskov says it was a diverse area whose population included African Americans and people of Latino heritage who worked alongside white loggers.
The expedition is hoped will offer a better understanding of the residents before Maxville became a ghost town when the lumber industry slumped after the Great Depression.
Maxville is located 13 miles north of Wallowa and was once home to 400 residents. A news release states that Maxville became the biggest railroad logging town in Wallowa County from the mid-20s to mid-30s. Loggers and their families from the Midwest and the South arrived in search of work, and although Oregon adhered to exclusion laws at that time, the lumber company that owned the town – Bowman-Hicks – employed Black loggers.
Even though the African American loggers worked alongside their white counterparts, the families lived in segregated housing, the children attended segregated schools, and they played in a segregated baseball team.
It Was a Jim Crow Mindset and a KKK Era
The founder and executive director of the Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center, Gwen Trice, describes the situation as a ‘Jim Crow mindset.’ The Jim Crow belief system held the premise that whites were superior to black people in several ways, including intelligence, civilized behavior and morality.
Trice points out that in the 1920s, exclusion laws for Black Americans in Oregon were in full force, and the state was home to the strongest Ku Klux Klan. Describing Maxville as a ‘deeply racist space,’ Trice says the KKK burned crosses on the mountainside outside the town. She says at one stage, about 200 members of the KKK marched into the town of Wallowa.
“So, the black loggers were essentially moving to another deeply racist space, where the KKK was burning crosses on the adjoining mountains outside of Maxville, and at least on one occasion came into the logging town,” she said. “At one point they had about a 200-person-strong Klan march in the town of Wallowa, close to Maxville, she added.
Artifacts Will Tell a Bigger Story
Tveskov says if the archaeological dig can identify an area inhabited by an African American family, the dig could uncover ‘the lived experience in that space.’ The group will be aided by aerial photographs taken of the site in the 1940s. Prof Tveskov says they will gain a better understanding of what lies beneath the town with the use of lidar technology.
Takeaways
Wallowa has a population of 7,000, but this number swells to 100,000 in summer when visitors flock to the area.
Trice established the Maxville Heritage and Interpretive Center to house the history of African Americans, indigenous and immigrant loggers in the Pacific Northwest.
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