With the announcement earlier this week of the new baseball team name, artfully quibbling on berries from Marion County generally, and on Marionberries specifically, it prompted a closer look at the cultivar.
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| The announcement pamphlet, Feb. 1957 (Oregon Raspberry & Blackberry Commission) |
The first time it appeared in the papers was in the Oregonian on December 6th, 1956. There is it identified as the Marion Blackberry. This was continued in the pamphlet formally introducing it in February of 1957.
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| First news, December 6th, 1956 |
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| December 31st, 1957 |
In the March of 1958 a headline writer abbreviates Marion Blackberry to Marion Berry, and the piece also refers to "the Marion" several times.
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| March 12th, 1958 |
It wasn't until the mid-60s that the term "Marionberry" really starts appearing. Then something happened around 1980 for the usage to flip and Marionberry to prevail in a wider shift. One candidate is a new product or new marketing effort by one or more fruit processors. But it seems like a bit of a cultural shift and there were many independent agents, farmers, marketers, and consumers, making decisions on which word to use. It may not be possible to locate any single cause. But the name, and not just the cultivar, also has a history. It may also have peaked around 2010.
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| Dominant name changes c.1980 |
Separately, yesterday online the Oregonian published "Quilt may finally be finished after patterns, printed in The Oregonian a century ago, mysteriously donated."
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| But wait, there is more! |
They focused on the mystery of the donation, and on the quilt and a kind of general history of quilting.
[A volunteer] immediately understood the significance of the envelopes containing unfinished quilt blocks and correspondence, some mailed weeks before the stock market crash of 1929. “These must have been in someone’s grandmother’s attic,” she said. “The blocks are in good shape. It would be really nice if someone finished this quilt”...
Quilter and historian Eileen G. Fitzsimons of Southeast Portland agrees the quilt is a treasure. “The pieces are reflective of an era of prolonged financial misery for many Americans, especially women during the Great Depression,” said Fitzsimons, who served as co-chair of the 2011-2019 Oregon Quilt Project, which collected stories of quilt-makers in every corner of the state.
But a far more specific historical interpretation is possible. A Salem address is plainly legible: W. P. Johnston, 1645 S. Liberty St., Salem, Ore. The letters themselves must tell more of a story!
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| April 30th, 1926 |
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| 1645 Liberty St. SE is still there! |
The address from the Oregonian letter may have been transcribed from a phone conversation, easy to mix P and B, as the papers suggest W. B. Johnston is correct. (Was the letter addressed to Mr.?) Two months after that letter, and just a couple of weeks after the Crash, Mrs. Johnston was hosting sewing and needlework groups, one of them apparently named.
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| Nov. 15th, 1929 |
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| Nov. 23rd, 1929 |
Neva Johnston's husband, W. B., died in 1932, and that's the kind of disruption that might lead to a packet of letters and a quilt pattern being abandoned.
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| Dec. 8th, 1932 |
Without researching very much at all, the outline of a real social history is visible, and hopefully there will be historians able to place the quilt in multiple contexts, in histories of the Johnston family, of voluntary women's associations, of Salem, and of quilting and sewing. The letters and pattern is a rich set, and there's lots to interpret!
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