Solar at the Airport? A Better Sign near Boon's. Good Ideas at the Planning Commission and Historic Landmarks Commission

The Planning Commission meets tomorrow, Tuesday the 16th, and you might have seen on social media a great idea for a solar farm.

So much open field - some for solar?

Planning Commissioner Michael Slater has a motion to study the possibility of using some of that open space for solar panels and a microgrid.

Motion at the Planning Commission

That seems like an excellent way to use open space that has otherwise been empty.

Old and badly dated sign deserves an update

Separately, at the Historic Landmarks Commission on Thursday the 18th, Jim Scheppke has been working on a proposal to replace the outdated narrative and framing on a sign from 1959 across the street from Boon's, commemorating the second mission of Jason Lee.

The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and the Confederated Tribes of the Siletz agree we deserve an updated and more inclusive narrative of our local history there.

Newish Plaque at Jason Lee House site (April)

There is also that sign at the Jason Lee house site. (Where are the bricks? It references invisible bricks!)

That area is old and deserves a much richer telling of the intersecting and sometimes conflicting stories at a cultural crossroads in the center of Salem history.

This too is a great idea.

A Footnote on Maria Campbell Smith as a kind of First Salemite

The strangest thing about the ceremony for the Jason Lee portrait in 1920 was the bit with Maria Campbell Smith.

"oldest native"
Oregonian, November 20th, 1921

As "the first female white child born in Salem" she was featured during the dedication. Being "the first white child" for an area, large or small, was a common claim and honorific. It appears in multiple obituaries and death notices at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century as those born here in the 1840s and 50s died. Whenever Maria Campbell Smith is in the paper, it is mentioned about her.

That claim to fame is her birth and infancy, but the claim is displaced and complicated quite a bit for the portrait ceremony. She showed up wearing "the bridal robe of her sister who came around the horn with Jason Lee on his second trip...." In the tableau, her role is not infant, even grown up. It is bride.

October 27th, 1920

The costume made a big impression, and a few days later, on the 31st in the "Society" column, they noted

Probably no visitor in the Capital City this week was more interesting nor interested than Mrs. Maria Campbell Smith of Portland, whose part in the Jason Lee exercises in the house of representatives Tuesday afternoon, was really the feature of the afternoon....Much interest was manifested by the feminine representatives in the audience, in the quaint gown which Mrs. Smith wore. It had served as a bridal robe for her sister, who had made the journey to Oregon with Jason Lee on his second trip. The gown a deep majente was of pure Lion silk, in a remarkable state of preservation.

What is going on here? Why is the sister as bride the active symbol rather than the baby?

Jason Lee Portrait unveiled 100 Years Ago, Lost to Fire in 1935

100 years ago today, on October 26th the City and State held a grand unveiling for a new portrait of Jason Lee at the old Capitol. I could not easily find information on it or its painter, and I assume it was lost in the 1935 fire at the Capitol. The Methodists had commissioned it, and the dedication coincided with a conference here in Salem. 

Jason Lee portrait in back. (detail)
Swearing in Gov. Julius Meier, 1931
Oregon Historical Society

"Patriot and Colonizer"
October 27th, 1920

From the morning preview on the 26th in 1920:

Church dignitaries, pastors and laymen numbering several hundred will arrive in Salem this morning from all over the state to take part in, and witness the formal unveiling and presentation of the Jason Lee Portrait, which will take place at 1:30 o'clock this afternoon in the honse of representatives in the state capitol.

Bishop V. O. Shepherd of Portland will make the main address, and there will be contributions to the program by other prominent representatives of the church and state. Patriotic musical numbers will precede and close the exercises, and another feature will be the reminiscences of Jason Lee by Mrs. Maria Campbell Smith, the first female white child born in Oregon. Governor Olcott will present the portrait to the state.

The portrait, which is life-size, was painted by Hester L. George, a Boston artist, the commission being given by the historical society of the Oregon Conference or Methodists.

Through this society also the gift of the portrait is made to the state of Oregon.

The old Capitol, from SW looking NE
Oregon State Library

The interval from 1920 to Lee's time in Salem around 1840 corresponds roughly to the the gap between now and World War II. Additionally, veterans in their 20s during the Civil War and at Statehood would be in their 80s in 1920 and passing on. We are at the very end of a human life span and of direct human memory for these events, and so there is a retrospective renewal and refashioning of collective memory, sifting for details to remember and details to forget. In telling stories about Lee they told stories about themselves, just as today we are choosing what stories to tell about ourselves.

As we have considered changing views on Lee, it is interesting to note a gulf in the news coverage in 1920. The morning Statesman had wall-to-wall coverage of the portrait and speeches; the afternoon Capital Journal largely ignored it. Usually there is greater overlap with both papers covering significant events in Salem. Perhaps this is evidence there was a real ideological purpose to the portrait and ceremonies. Certainly from a century later, the speeches are saturated with ideas, and it is reasonable to suppose not everyone gave them all the same significance.

The Mill offers Talks on WCTU and Jason Lee with Online Lecture Series

This is old news now, but it's good news and deserves more notice. The Mill's announced what looks like a terrific series of lectures, "Zooming Back to History," distributed by online video and $10 each.

Two of them given by Willamette University faculty are of particular interest here.

Mary Ramp via the Mill
and Brooks Historical Society

On October 20th, Leslie Dunlap will talk about the WCTU:

Into the 1980s, many historians and members of the public viewed participants in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union as puritanical laughingstocks, driven by the “haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy” (in H.L. Mencken’s words). In the 1980s, historians recharacterized the WCTU, the largest political mobilization of women in the U.S. in the nineteenth century, as a “proto-feminist” organization whose efforts to prevent drinking segued into efforts to win the vote, reform rape law, and stop domestic violence. My research on temperance women reframes the question by focusing on race and women’s activism.

I find that instead of either “progressive” or “conservative,” the movement was a meeting ground, where African American, Native American, and white participants debated the purpose and direction of women’s political participation.

The Ramps: From Temperance to Anarchism

As it happens, perhaps keyed to the lecture series announcement, on FB the Mill reposted a 2012 piece on an important local advocate:

Mary Anne Hammer Ramp was born in 1829 in Kentucky. She married Samuel Ramp in 1849, and in 1853, they and their two small children left for the West along the Oregon Trail. They had another child during the journey. Initially settling in the Silverton Hills, the family saved and eventually purchased a farm on French Prairie just north of Brooks. By the time Samuel Ramp died in 1898, the family owned 11 farms in the Willamette Valley, which Mary continued to manage after Samuel’s death.

Even though she raised seven children, Mary Ramp took up the suffrage cause while also championing temperance. She gave Salem a home for the W.C.T.U (Women’s Christian Temperance Union), known as “Ramp Hall for the Promotion of Equal Suffrage and Temperance. Temperance was later changed to “National Prohibition.”

Mary Ramp was active in the early suffrage movement and she was an ardent prohibitionist. After her husband’s death, she moved to Salem, where she lived until she passed away in 1916 at the age of 86. She was survived by three children, 21 grandchildren and 28 great grandchildren.

There are so many interesting directions to go from here! Dunlap's talk may be more about the national or regional context of the WCTU, but here in Salem there is a history also of course.

The Ramp Memorial Hall was downtown where the Umpqua Bank is now, across from the Conference Center and former site of the Marion Car Park. It is interesting that the newspaper and post office, both of which had offices in the building, have associated pictures in our archives, but the building is not featured as the home of the WCTU in photos. We have postman Ben Taylor out in front multiple times, but never Mary Ramp. In the materials that have come to us, unsurprisingly there is a real bias towards masculine enterprises and the men who conducted them. But of course there is an important history of the WCTU, and as it is retrieved it will turn out to be more significant than our last-century's histories supposed.

Former WCTU Ramp Memorial Hall in 1955
(Salem Library Historic Photos)

As Jason Lee House Site has Layers, so History Telling has Layers

On May 31st as the Tulsa Race Massacre was unfolding in 1921, a note on the front page of the afternoon paper here said "the spirit displayed by the early pioneers" was a "true expression[...] of the Anglo-Saxon race."

May 31st, 1921

I was going to write about Tulsa, but more relevant here in Salem is the story of Jason Lee. It is striking how strongly writers over the decades centered not just his whiteness, but the centrality of "the Anglo-Saxon race." Tulsa is not directly our story, but Jason Lee and the ways we have understood him is very much our story, a substantial part of our self-understanding and origin story, and peeling back the layers in the telling of that story is as important as digging through the physical layers of dirt at the house site.

February 1st, 1884

Read Elisabeth Walton's 1965 Thesis on the Jason Lee House, Mill Place

The City and Historic Landmarks Commission has published the third and what is, it seems, final installment of videos on the archeology project at the site of the Jason Lee House.

It's a little anti-climactic, however. Rather than building towards any new insight or discovery, it is mostly a wrap-up with lots of thanks, and rehearses bits already in videos one and two.

In all three of the videos a notable absence was Elisabeth Walton Potter, who must be our foremost expert on the house. Perhaps she was not interested in participating, but it is a remarkable silence.

Jason Lee House as occupied by John Boon
Kuchel & Dresel's "map" of Salem, 1858
Willamette University Archives

She may feel she has already had her say. The Mill has now published a scan of her 1965 masters thesis on the Jason Lee house, "Mill Place" on the Willamette: A New Mission House for the Methodists in Oregon, 1841-44. (366pp)

Still doing history, Elisabeth Walton Potter in Salem Reporter
via Twitter

It is fascinating both as a discussion of the Methodist Mission and early Oregon history as well as study of local historiography and the founding of Mission Mill and what we now know as the Willamette Heritage Center. The National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 followed her thesis by one year, and she went one to be one of the original, founding staff of the State Historic Preservation Office of Oregon. The thesis itself, the forces to which it was responding, and the nascent preservation efforts to which it contributed, are themselves legitimate objects now of historical research. It is itself an artifact! There are many levels on which to approach and appreciate the document - including the way it testifies to a long and distinguished career.

Second Mission of Jason Lee and Origin of Salem Set for Dig this Month

One of the hobbyhorses here is the way we uncritically celebrate Jason Lee as Founder. Founder of Salem, Founder of Willamette University, one of the Founders of Oregon. He has a prominent place in our myths of origin.

3 cent Oregon Territory Centennial, 1948

But if he founded important institutions, he was also a prime mover in settler colonialism. An accurate history requires looking at the myths, silences, and evasions, and doing a better job in our official histories with ambiguity, ambivalence, and costs. What is likely myth and what is likely truth? What have we erased as we've polished up the image?

"Unappreciated" in some ways, but also overappreciated
as the subject of hagiography later.

In the paper on Saturday was a small blurb on the archeology dig that is preceding the construction of a small apartment block on the corner of E Street and Broadway.

Give Margaret Jewett Bailey her #MeToo Moment: Ruth Rover and The Grains is Justified Rage

Original 1854 title page
via Wikipedia/Oregon Encyclopedia

(Stuff happens and sometimes it's necessary to revisit things.)

The headlines of this past week have brought back to mind that we have an account of harassment and abuse at Jason Lee's Methodist Mission and in early Oregon we still haven't properly honored and absorbed into our official histories, The Grains, or Passages in the Life of Ruth Rover with Occasional Pictures of Oregon.

Wednesday: Pervasive and enduring

Thursday: Defiant

Friday: Resigns, but still defiant

After her time at Jason Lee's Methodist Mission and other activity in the Oregon Territory, in 1854 Margaret Jewett Bailey published a hard-to-classify book, Ruth Rover. The blurb for OSU's modern edition is typical and subtly discounts it, stressing it as "a novel" and using the lightly condescending rhetoric of "unique and provocative":

This autobiographical novel, first published in 1854, is generally considered the first novel written and published in the Pacific Northwest. Bailey provides a unique and provocative view of many prominent figures in early Oregon history.

It's not just "unique and provocative" like she was stirring the pot and making trouble. That's how we dismiss claims by "difficult" women. The books' claims are likely very true. In this last year of #metoo, it is increasingly clear that we should look past the "fiction" tag of Ruth Rover and believe it as essentially true. The accent should be on autobiography and the default assumption should be that it is true. We should believe Margaret Jewett Bailey. It is unfair not to.

Work on 1906 Railing at Jason Lee Cemetery Causes Kerfluffle

The cast iron railing on "diamond square" needs help
(from Staff Report and application materials)

The Historic Landmarks Commission meets on Thursday the 19th, and they'll be deliberating on a proposal to replace and/or restore historic fencing on "Diamond Square" in the heart of Jason Lee Cemetery ("Lee Mission Cemetery" to be exact) on D Street.

Jason Lee, Memorial Day 2014

Diamond Square is a plot in which Jason Lee himself and other important early figures are buried. It really is the core and center.

1852 General Land Office survey map, Salem area.
Parrish home, the cemetery, the Methodist church
and Willamette U sites highlighted

Methodist Missionary Josiah L. Parrish, for whom the school is named, set aside the land from his Donation Land Claim. It predates the asylum by a good bit, and belongs in the orbit of our pre-statehood history. Pioneer Cemetery gets most of the attention in town, and Lee Cemetery deserves more love. (On the map you can also see David Leslie's home site, which Asahel Bush purchased in 1860.)

Jason Lee was Fired! Ruth Rover's Alternative to Mission Hagiography

The whole Mark Hatfield v. Jason Lee debate is being cranked up again, and apparently a new blue-ribbon committee is going to make a recommendation on who would best represent Oregon in the National Statuary Hall.

A great friend of the blog shared a fascinating book recently. The Grains, or, Passages in the Life of Ruth Rover, with Occasional Pictures of Oregon, Natural and Moral was published in 1854.

Original 1854 title page
via Wikipedia/Oregon Encyclopedia

The book is many things.

For one, it is a candidate for one of the very first novels written in Oregon. I say candidate because while some critics and historians stretch call it a "novel," I can't read it as one. It's thinly disguised (if at all) autobiography and really has the form of a kind of literary scrapbook.  It's a pastiche of letters, journal entries, commentary on other published documents, and finally some episodic narrative. There's not really a story. It's not picaresque even in the tradition of Don Quixote or Huckleberry Finn. Or fully epistolary like Pamela or Clarissa. Maybe in form it anticipates (as in theme it surely must) something like Lessing's Golden Notebook, which I have not read. Earlier this year the obituaries for Bel Kaufman highlighted Up the Down Staircase, which also sounds similar.

Readers who have read more widely may know more about mid-19th century forms, especially those written by women, and about innovative 20th century forms, and might have more incisive things to say.

Apart from ways in which the book might be interesting formally, in a normal readerly experience, as a whole it's not a satisfying aesthetic work.

It's ranty, is what it is.

Maybe that shouldn't be surprising.  In the pre-settlement and very early settlement eras, you had to be a little crazy to give up everything, get on a ship for half a year or more, and to settle in a strange country with a handful of fellow missionaries, whom you didn't know and might not even have liked.

In January of 1837 Margaret Jewett Smith left Boston on a ship and traveled with David Leslie to join Jason Lee at the Willamette Mission.

Her time at the Mission was not pleasing. It was more like a disaster for her. Between the intensely sexist patriarchal social structure at the Mission and her own propensity for self-sabotage, things didn't work out and Margaret was miserable.

After a bit more than a decade of additional experiences outside of the Mission, culminating in a bold and very rare divorce proceeding, Margaret composed The Grains with a view towards defending and vindicating herself.

Published in 1854, it's a rare peek into pre-Statehood settlement and society (such as it was), but it also is a testament to Margaret's tremendous sense of being wronged. It is a difficult work in many ways, but it also complicates our picture of Salem's origins.

And Jason Lee is one of the central figures.