America’s School Trust Library The Zybach Collection

The Zybach Collection

Soap Creek Valley: Oral Histories and Landscape History

Fifteen oral histories of the people who farmed, logged, taught and kept house in one Oregon valley.

North of Corvallis, Oregon, Soap Creek Valley holds the history of farms, one-room schools, sawmills, Camp Adair and university research forests. Twenty-one people recall that changing landscape in interviews recorded between 1975 and 1995.

Bob Zybach’s research method brings residents’ memories together with photographs, maps, historical records and observations of the valley itself. Interviewees had lived or worked here and knew its farms, forests and communities firsthand. The transcripts were reviewed, edited and indexed by names, places and subjects. That common index lets readers follow a place or activity across several people’s accounts and compare their memories with other evidence. The aim was to understand how the valley’s forests and open lands changed, and why.

Two works connect these personal accounts to the larger landscape. Zybach’s Historic Soap Creek Valley Auto Tour (1989) links historical themes to eleven places in the valley. His thesis, Using Oral Histories to Document Changing Forest Cover Patterns: Soap Creek Valley, Oregon, 1500–1999 (1999), examines oral history as a way to reconstruct forest change and understand its causes.

The Moore family farm and open hills of Soap Creek Valley
Moore family farm on Soap Creek, about 1899 or 1900. Photograph by Samuel H. Moore. Courtesy Myra Moore Lauridson and the Soap Creek Schoolhouse Foundation.

The fifteen books

Published by Oregon State University Research Forests and the College of Forestry, 1990–2009.

The people

Photographs from twelve of the books; each book identifies the people pictured.

Everyone named in the series

What they said

Each quotation links to the original passage in its book.

Of course there were a few hazards, such as a frozen water pump, getting poison oak from carrying in wood from the woodshed, oiling the schoolhouse floor, and I might add, an unexpected visit from the County School Superintendent at least once a year. The good old days when parents didn't come to school to tell you how to teach!
Maxine DickeySchoolteacher, Berry Creek School, 1938–1940Monograph #03, page 59
No, it wouldn't bother me because there is no sentimental value left to that out there. . . It isn't the same country as it was before Camp Adair went in.
Velma Carter RawieFarm wife and dairy farmer; store clerkMonograph #10, page 43
Yes, we were going to go completely across the forest in ten years, and do thinning, salvaging, whatever was necessary on this first time. And it just was an unmanaged forest—I mean, nothing. It was just as we’d purchased it, and, like I say, it was anything from clearcut to real old-growth patches.
Marvin RowleyManager of the OSU Research Forests, 1946–1986Monograph #15, page 47

Explore the valley

Select a place to find the people and passages connected with it. The map includes the 1989 tour stops, home sites and other named places.

  • Tour stop
  • Narrator home site
  • Other place named
Basemap: USGS The National Map. Pan and zoom with the mouse or the + / − controls; select a marker for its name and a link.
Everything on this map (112)

Auto Tour stops (11)

CCC camp (former) (1)

Farms and ranches (4)

Ridges, peaks and buttes (8)

Roads (14)

Schools (2)

Settlements and communities (8)

Streams (18)

Valleys (2)

arboretum (1)

bridge (1)

building (3)

city (3)

forest (3)

grove (1)

highway (1)

hill (9)

homestead (1)

lake (1)

landfill (1)

landform (1)

logging camp (former) (1)

military camp (1)

museum (1)

park (1)

pond (1)

railroad depot (former) (1)

  • Wellsdale railroad depot (former) · 13 mentions

range (1)

saddle (2)

school (former) (1)

slough (1)

spring (1)

town (3)

town (former) (2)

  • Tampico town (former) · 106 mentions
  • Wells town (former) · 52 mentions

university (1)

169 further places the narrators named lie outside the valley — Portland, the coast, the places they came from and went to. They are on the places index.

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