A Bit of Family (and Oregon) History: Mary Alice Beebe Walden

Walking among the gravestones at the top of Portland's Mount Scott on a cold and sunny winter's day, I grasped a small bouquet of daphne, sword ferns and a sprig of Oregon grape with tiny bright green blossoms just beginning to form. I thought it was an appropriate memento to leave at the grave of my great-grandmother, Mary Alice Beebe Walden, whom I'd always heard was an herbalist and midwife in the tiny town of Bridal Veil in the Columbia River Gorge.

I'd found the record of her burial while searching for her name online. Driving to the cemetery, I picked up a map from the office that gave an approximate location, a plot in the older section of the vast hilltop property. The map placed her grave at the bottom of the hill, where the roots of old trees were lifting up some of the markers and other gravestones were partially obscured by mud that had washed down the hill in the winter's rains.

Triangulating the general position of the plot, a bit of wandering brought me to a small, flat slab of rose-colored granite with Mary A. Walden, 1863-1934, carved into it, and the word MOTHER in italicized type underneath. [From the family records I have, she actually died in 1933.] I'm guessing that her son, Carson (or Carsie, as he was called by the family), had chosen this place for her, since a gravestone with his and his wife's names on it was nearby (top photo).

In a short biography written by my father's older sister, Mary Alice was an almost magical presence:

"Nature was her religion. While my grandfather lived, the family attended church faithfully, but after his death, the dome of the sky and the pillars of living trees became their cathedral.

"Extraordinarily tall for her generation, Grandma carried herself tall and proud, as the Indian Princess we children were convinced had been her ancestress. Her blue-back course hair, piercing black eyes, dark sallow skin and high, hawk-nosed profile were considered [signs of] aristocratic beauty when she was young. She was slim, lithe-limbed, deep bosomed and untiring. On the long hikes through her beloved wilderness, her swinging, slightly pigeon-toed gait carried her on for hours, long past the endurance of the most seasoned of woodsmen.

"There were no plants, insects, animals or birds for which Grandma didn’t know both the common and Latin names. From her early years, she would often disappear for hours and, in later years, for days at a time into the wilds. When she emerged it was always with an apron or bark basket full of herbs and medicinal plants. We never knew where she learned the medicinal lore that made her healing powers famous wherever she lived."

The family eventually moved to Portland, at the time a small city of just over 200,000. Near the end her life, my aunt records her grandmother was still in fine fettle:

"In the late summer of 1932, she caught a bus up to the slope of Larch Mountain after arranging for my Mother and Father to pick her up later in the day. About five o’clock, we saw her swinging down the trail, her buckskin skirt and hiking boots soaked through from the showers that had fallen that day. Her floppy felt hat was pushed back on her head, an improvised sapling yoke over her shoulders weighted down with huckleberries in peeled bark baskets. She sang and hallooed to us, her face and hands purple with berry stains.

"Two weeks later, she collapsed and was taken unwillingly to the hospital, where the cancer was diagnosed as beyond remedy. The hospital was not to her liking and the doctors agreed that she would be happiest at home, nursed by her daughters. She died on December 17th.

"As a final gesture, she left instructions that at her funeral the hymns were to be joyous ones. She was to be dressed in the pastel violet gown she had chosen years before as her shroud, and anyone wearing black was not to be admitted to the chapel."

Farm Bulletin: The Roots of Ayers Creek Farm

The following post was written by contributor Anthony Boutard of Ayers Creek Farm for Big Picture Agriculture, an excellent blog about trends and developments in agriculture, food and farming.

"Anthony Boutard, born in Massachusetts, grew an early appreciation for plants from his father who was a renowned botanist. Educated as a biologist with a graduate degree in Forestry, Anthony and his wife Carol moved out to Oregon in the early 1990s for Anthony to work with a company called 1000 Friends of Oregon, which focuses on land use and landscape preservation. After a few years in Portland, Anthony and Carol decided to take up farming and purchased a 144-acre working farm out in Gaston, about 30 miles from the city. Their philosophy is simple: to grow what tastes good and does well on their land."

The photos below are "lantern slides" taken c.1900 in a beautifully rugged region of Switzerland. Anthony assumes that the photos were taken by his Danish great-grandfather, Ernest Boutard, an engineer who had a patent partnership in Copenhagen, but whose heart was at home in the mountains. He studied at the Polytechnic in Zürich. His grandmother's family was from Graubünden, Switzerland.

[Anthony provided the captions to go with the photos. Click on a photo to see a full size version.]

Käs wägen in der alp hütte ("Cheese weighing in the Alpen hut"). The man weighing the cheese is carrying the cheese to market in the next slide in the series. This places the hut near the village of Schwand, in the Canton Oberwalden. [Anthony notes: "The cheeses of Switzerland remain exceptional because they still adhere to the practice of moving the herds to the high pastures where the lactating cows graze on the alpine flora, the same intensely flavored vegetation used to produce the amaros (kräuterlikörs), bitter liqueurs that I savor as much as the cheeses."]

Öberefahre, Appenzell. The Öberefahre is the Appenzell procession celebrating the move of the herd from the valley to the high pasture. This Swiss tradition of shifting the herd to the complex vegetation of the high alpine pastures during the summer months gives Swiss cheeses their distinctive character. The hornless Appenzeller goats are led by children, followed by three cows with large, carefully tuned ceremonial bells and led by the herder with his decorated milk bucket slung over the shoulder. Today the procession follows the exact same pattern as seen in this photo, but with a bit more pizazz for the tourists.

Harvesting wine grapes, most likely in the canton Ticino. Note the tile roof on the buildings. Ticino, bordering Italy, is the mildest region of Switzerland.

A building for storing grains. The flat rocks between the granary and its supports keep rodents from entering the stores. Yes, that is the Matterhorn in the background.

Strada per Promontogno ("Road through Promontogno). This is the Val Bregaglia in the Canton Graubünden (Grisons). The mountain peak is Piz Badile which sits on the border between Italy and Switzerland. The trees are chestnuts in bloom, so this photo was taken in late June. Chestnuts only grown in the southern-most valleys of Switzerland. This large Canton extends from Lichtenstein to Italy, and has three official languages: German, Romansh and Italian.

Ziegenherde bei der sennhütte ("Goat herd near the goat dairy"). Somewhere in the Canton Graubünden. Horned goats are typical of the canton. Two breeds, ‘Chamois-colored' and 'Grisons Striped’, are endemic to the canton. I love the chaos that attends the group of goats while a doe milked by her herder in the midst of it all.

Engelberg am Wegr. a. Schwand ("Engelberg on Wayside to Schwand"). Canton Obwalden with the Uri Alps in the background. The peak Grosse Spannort on Right. The peak of Brunnistock is on the left. The man weighing the cheese is now carrying the wheels to market along the footpath to Engelberg, an alpine town and the site of a Benedictine Monastary. (The mountains in the background remind me of the Dents du Midi.)

Alpsegen auf Belalp ("Alp blessing on Belalp"). The chapel is still there. The Canton Valais is a predominantly Catholic canton. Note the rosaries. It was tradition to have an open-air blessing when the people and their livestock returned to their alp, the mountain pasture. The term “alp” properly refers to these pastures and not the peaks, but language has a way of drifting.

Thanks to Big Picture Agriculture and Anthony Boutard for allowing me to share this essay.

Women Welders of WWII

It started as just another errand in a busy day. The small tank that carbonates the beer in Dave's kegerator was running low, so I headed over to our handy dandy gas supplier in northwest Portland.

As I was waiting, I glanced over at a nearby column where I noticed a framed black-and-white photo of a group of women in welding garb. There was a little typed tag glued to the mat that read "Swan Island 1942." Intrigued, I pulled out my phone and took a shot. I asked the guy at the counter if he knew anything about it and he shook his head.

A little research revealed that, as WWII took more and more men away to war, there was huge recruitment effort to get women onto the factory floors and into manufacturing plants to keep the guns, bullets and ships flowing to the war effort. One source, the Oregon History Project of the Oregon Historical Society, says that "at their peak, the two Portland shipyards—Oregon Shipbuilding and Swan Island—employed 16,000 women, and the two child-care centers cared for approximately 700 children."

The wage scale for these women welders was the same as that for men and, as indicated above, with the influx of women into the workforce, industries quickly responded to their workers' need for childcare by establishing round-the-clock onsite centers. Our very own Multnomah County even had a handbook (right) for working women and a child care counseling service that, like the onsite centers themselves, was staffed by child care professionals.

As you might expect, at the end of the war most of the women went back to their previous roles as wives and mothers. Some who wanted to stay were able to keep their jobs, but many were essentially forced out when the men returned. But this 70-year-old photograph certainly raises intriguing questions when compared to today, when pay equity is a problem—women are paid 75 cents on the dollar that men make in comparable jobs—and daycare is something that a working woman has to solve on her own with little or no help from her employer.

Just goes to show you never know what you'll run across on your next errand.