Assertions about Historical Significance of Meyer Farm Remain Murky

With well over 100 pages of new comment, there is little new to say about opposition to the Meyer Farm proposal. It is telling that there is no consensus on the date of any DLC: 1847, 1850, 1852, or 1873. Claims for the historical significance of the farm area depend on what boils down to myth and legend about "Uncle" Joe Waldo. That significance is assumed, and not proved.

A copy of the 1855 survey has "Waldo" penciled in,
part of comment layers from 1870s and 1880s

This says something about the weakness of our historic preservation framework, which is understood here publicly more as a tool to foil development than as a way to tell better history. Even though history has been invoked from the start, the process does not seem to have much of a place for the City's Historic Preservation Officer, who might have been invited to submit a report or some comment. The Staff Report dismisses any historical significance with three sentences in section G.

In the absence of definiteness on the history, most objections resolve to expressions of the Eco-NIMBY impulse: The land should remain park and open space, and the carbon sequestration of open space and tree should be a primary goal.

Overall, this situation seems like a pretty classic instance of the truth, or best outcome, being in the middle.

There would be ways both to preserve more trees and to build new housing, but in part because of haste and a disputed trust, the proposed plan is very cookie-cutter for single detached houses, and is a suboptimal balancing of tradeoffs between trees and new housing.

It's not possible to say "this is a good plan" or to say on the opposite side "neighbors are right the plan should be halted." The plan could be a lot better, and could accomplish both goals for trees and housing. The best outcome might be just a pause in hopes that adversaries can negotiate an improved overall site plan. 

Although in early November the Morningside Neighborhood Association said they intended to appeal, they did not file any appeal before the November 18th deadline. So the review at Council on Monday is purely at Council's discretion, and the disputed questions therefore more than a little squishy, potentially resolving down to pure procedural matters.

The 1878 Marion and Linn County atlas is silent

Here are some considerations we've mentioned before, which have not been addressed at all in new public comment.

• The more open space we have, the more we deny the proximity of useful things. Slack, open space, even when dedicated to carbon sequestration in trees and park, imposes greater autoist spacing, car dependency, and emissions. Advocates for more open space do not recognize their implicit autoism.
  
• The 20 year gap apparently between filing the claim circa 1850 and the claim's granting on June 13th, 1873 two years after Waldo's death in 1871 deserves more scrutiny. How significant really is this DLC? Why the delay? Just to explain it as "backlog" is not clarifying. By comparison, Daniel and Malinda Waldo's claim was granted October 16th, 1858.
• News reports in 1865 suggest Waldo's barn burned down. What is the evidence for a still intact barn from 1854?
• What about America Waldo's parentage? How laudable really was Joseph even when popularly known as "uncle"? (Brother Daniel was also known popularly as "uncle Dan." The epithet may not be a very relevant fact.) We need a more critical history before we go all-in on Joseph Waldo boosterism.
  

I finally found a copy at the BLM of the 1855 survey referenced in the brief historical report on Meyer Farm (can't link directly to the map, alas). The actual map is a copy, perhaps from 1857, and also has years of annotation. Marginalia in pen from 1863 and 1868 are easy to read, and a note in pencil may be from 1876. The map contains layers of information that post-date 1855.

December 13th, 1871

Marginalia on the copy of the 1855 map

Nearby the Meyer Farm area are several other claims outlined and noted in pencil on the map. The dates they were granted are all after 1855, and several after Waldo's. You can see the Reed, Pringle, and Holinan on the clip at top. All this make it clear that the map of "1855" is a compilation with updates from much later, and is of no independent authority for dating the significance of the Waldo claim and any homestead to earlier than 1873.

Holinan - January 24th, 1866
Reed - July 24th, 1873
Pringle - October 15th, 1873
Clarke - June 14th, 1877
Jeffries - June 30th, 1879
Gaines - March 2nd, 1883

Advocates for the farm can't appeal to this map to date any Waldo DLC to 1855 or earlier. The fact is, again, the patent wasn't granted until two years after Waldo was dead.

September 18th, 1865

There are still questions about the antiquity of any barn. The paper here in Salem said in 1865 "the large barn of Mr. Joseph Waldo...was totally destroyed by fire." Not just "a barn," but "the barn." Again, writing in the paper is not at all ironclad proof, but advocates against the development have offered no proof that the barn actually dates to 1854. It's just an urban legend at this point.

One new item may be even more wishful thinking.

A small mound or rise in the topography

Some have suggested there might be a Kalapuya mound at the farm, and that there might be an "arrowhead" of trees deliberately planted to point at it, a kind of stonehengeian significance for a pre-historic alteration to the landscape.

Maybe the mound is something, probably it's nothing, but here the prospect of it is used instrumentally in the attempt to foil development. Significantly, in the initial public comment, there is no formal Tribal comment. What descendants themselves actually think and would like to happen is not clear. It will be important to listen to anything they might have to say and not to presume that we know what is the significance and outcome they might desire. Some extra time and care would be helpful here, regardless of the ultimate outcome, and a hasty development plan works against that.

The Staff Report suggests an "inadvertent discovery plan" will be necessary and adequate, but excavation equipment seems too coarse and powerful for any small finds of archeological significance.

June, 2020

The work and collaboration at the Jason Lee House site could provide a model for more detailed investigation that does not block, but does precede, a major redevelopment project. (Though of course there is always the question of funding, who will pay for it.) At the same time, Jason Lee is far more foundational to the history of Salem and of Oregon than is Joseph Waldo, and advocates for the farm may overstate his significance. If we take the Lee house as a baseline, it may be that at the Meyer Farm site, relatively speaking, the public interest does not require the same allocation of resources to any historical or archeological investigation.

The white BMW's driver crossed over into bike lane
on Pringle/Battlecreek at Hillrose

Finally, one theme in criticism that seems indisputable concerns speed on Battlecreek/Pringle Roads. People drive too fast there, and the City should take neighbor complaint more seriously. (See notes on the nearby crosswalk at Leslie Junior High.) Neighborhood streets can easily handle a few hundred new trips at neighborhood speed. It's the lethality of speeding on the collectors and arterials that is the problem, and we should reframe our traffic analysis to focus less on trip count and traffic generation, and instead focus on dangerous speed. Speed, not congestion, is the real problem.

It will be interesting to see if comment over the weekend turns up more on the farm and its history, and also on Monday what matters Council zeros in on, as they seem to have very general discretion since no formal appeal was filed.

See previous notes on the Meyer Farm and its history here.