A named special collection
The life's work of Dr. Bob Zybach: Oregon forest history, oral history and historical ecology
Places. People. The record they leave.
Explore Oregon through the work of historian Bob Zybach and the people who helped make it. Follow a question from a remembered landscape to a printed page, a photograph or a voice.
Take a short guided trail
Listen to a valley through its people
Oral histories, family photographs, a historic auto tour and the places they share.
Moore family farm, about 1899–1900 · Samuel H. Moore. Courtesy of Myra Moore Lauridson and the Soap Creek Schoolhouse Foundation.
Go into the forest with its historians
Recorded journeys, field-trip videos and photographs, connected by stop and subject.
Elkhorn Ranch field trip, April 9, 2020 · frame from the creator’s ORWWmedia video.
Follow a life through the original record
Court papers, land records and Bob’s published research, from the Oregon Trail to a home of her own.
Soap Creek Valley, 1993 · photograph by Bob Zybach.
Compare the accounts of a contested past
Journals, letters, Bob’s writings and the modern memorial project, including the recorded Native account.
Fort Vancouver, 1845 or 1846 · Henry J. Warre, as dated in Bob’s caption.
This is a reading edition: transcribed pages are readable here, with links to the creator’s originals. A page link opens the cited passage in its surrounding text. How to read and cite it →
Soap Creek Valley is a small farming valley in northern Benton County, Oregon, a few miles north of Corvallis. Between 1975 and 1995 the people who had spent their lives in it — farmers, loggers, schoolteachers, a botanist, a Civilian Conservation Corps enrollee, and the foresters who came to manage the hills above them — sat down with a tape recorder and told the valley's history in their own words.
Twenty-one of them are here. Their interviews were printed as fifteen books between 1990 and 2009, indexed and cross-referenced so that a sentence about a creek in one book leads to the same creek in another. The tapes are at Oregon State University. This collection is the whole of that work, made readable page by page, with a second body of recordings made a generation later on the Elliott State Forest.
The recording was not one man's doing. Royal G. Jackson and Jennifer Lee began in 1978, Karen Thomas joined in 1980, and Bob Zybach — who edited the series and carried it into print — recorded from 1989. Research assistants, students and transcribers worked on it too, and each book names its own.
Every passage below is printed exactly as it stands in the book, and every one links to the page it came from, where the sentence before it and the sentence after it are waiting.
Yeah, the oaks were there first and they'd died off because the firs grew up and shut off the sun. You had to be very careful in working in there because you'd go up to a tree that looked like a small oak tree and you could tell it was dead because the bark would be off of it and you could push it right over, because the firs, they reach for the sun right away and the oaks lost out.
You go down to the school house. And there was a little creek that came down from up above and we got our water for the school house out of that little creek. There isn't any creek now. Right below the school house was a bridge across Soap Creek. That bridge floated out three different times while I was a kid and right now I don't think that creek was over it's banks.
Well, yes. It was a link, link with your neighbors. Party line, everybody was on the line. And if you were smart, you wanted to be careful what you said, because you knew your neighbors were listening in.
One valley, one book at a time, each named for the person who talks in it. Open a cover and you get the front matter as printed, the recording sessions, the transcript page by page, the photographs and the index.
#01 · 1990 Lorna Grabe 
#02 · 1990 Paul M. Dunn 
#03 · 1991 Donald Dickey 
#04 · 1991 Edward Sekermestrovich 
#05 · 1993 John Jacob & Wilma Rohner 
#06 · 1994 James Hanish 
#07 · 1994 Charlie Olson 
#08 · 1994 Neil Vanderburg 
#09 · 1994 Eugene Glender 
#10 · 1994 Velma Carter Rawie 
#11 · 1995 Bessie Murphy 
#12 · 1995 Wanda Marcks Cook 
#13 · 1997 William A. Davies 
#14 · 1996 Charles and Norman Hindes 
#15 · 2009 Marvin Rowley Covers as the creator scans and publishes them at nwmapsco.com; the Library shows a display copy and links to his originals.
Forty years after the Soap Creek tapes began, Bob Zybach did the same thing on the Elliott State Forest, in Coos and Douglas counties: drove its roads with his narrators, recorded what they said at each stop, and tied every stop to a minute on the tape and a page in the transcript. Then he went back with a camera. Nineteen videos follow the same ground — field trips, class sessions and talks.
The Elliott was school trust land for most of a century, until the State Land Board decoupled it from the Common School Fund in 2022. That is why a school-trust library keeps this part of the record.
Explore the 1989 Auto Tour online: eleven historic stops, each with its original account and illustrations. The places index connects named places with the available recollections that mention them.
Start with the Series Index. It brings together the names in all fifteen books and links to the printed pages where they appear. The People directory adds profiles of the narrators, interviewers and contributors; other people named in the books can be found through the index.
Start with the evidence. Every printed page has its own permanent link, the 1999 thesis shows how these interviews were tested against maps and photographs, and the timeline sets the narrators’ dated statements side by side, disagreements included.
A longer walk through, with the first thing to read in each case
Bob Zybach's work runs wider than these two forests. Two more bodies of work are now described item by item, and four are described at inventory level — what exists, where it is, and what the Library has decided about each.
The map could not load. The list below carries the same places.
Both coordinates are approximate regional centres chosen for this overview map, not survey positions. Place coordinates on the series pages carry their own method and confidence.
Counts are of what the Library has described so far, not of everything the creator holds. The six series above are counted as descriptions, not as items.
Materials documenting Oregon forest and pioneer history: the Soap Creek Valley oral histories and the research built on them; the Elliott State Forest's management, ecology and public history; Oregon coastal fire history; and related Oregon pioneer-history projects where they help readers understand the school trust record.
Soap Creek interviews were recorded between 1975 and 1995 and printed between 1990 and 2009. The Elliott interviews and field trips were recorded 2017–2019, with videos to 2024. Two earlier tapes the creator collected and published alongside the Elliott material date from 8 October 1962 and 11 November 1965. Oregon State dates its own Soap Creek collection 1978–2009 and its Elliott collection 2017–2022.
Dr. Bob Zybach is the creator of this collection and the editor of the Soap Creek series; he is not its only author. Oregon State University's finding aid for the same oral histories lists five creators: the OSU Research Forests' Soap Creek Valley History Project, Royal G. Jackson, Jennifer A. Lee, the Oregon State University College of Forestry, and Bob Zybach. The Soap Creek work was funded by the OSU Research Forests and the College of Forestry; the Elliott work by the Oregon Department of State Lands and the OSU College of Forestry. Bob is also the Reference Librarian of America’s School Trust Library. About the creator.
The Library holds preservation copies of the digitized recordings supplied by Oregon State University. Those copies remain private while the rights questions are resolved. The original collections and request information are described in the finding aids below; selected public excerpts are linked from the reading trails.
This is a working edition, published with the creator’s permission while rights and consultation reviews continue. The material here was made at different times, under different agreements, by different people, so each part of the collection carries its own rights statement rather than one label across all of it. The indexes and apparatus are the Library’s own work and an open licence for them is under consideration. How the Library decides what it can publish, and how to ask for a change.
Rights, use and takedown sets out how the Library decides what it can publish, and how to ask for a change.
Cite the book first and this page second; both forms are set out on the citation page. How the pages were made, and by what, is in the colophon. Corrections already made are listed on the errata page.
How to cite · Provenance and chain of custody · Content note · Errata · Colophon · Corrections
Something wrong on this page? Submit a correction — the Library corrects in public and keeps the old wording visible.
