J.. Hanish Homestead

Bob Zybach: And that would be back on the road there?

James Hanish: Yes, back just up in that grove of fir and oak.

Kevin Sherer: [KEVIN] North by Northeast from the Dickey homestead.

J. Hanish Homestead

Bob Zybach: Jim, we're on the site of your old home right now and we're looking at bricks and mound, blackberries but this is the location of your old farmhouse.

James Hanish: This is it.

Bob Zybach: in the painting you've got of the barn, it's directly behind you.

James Hanish: Yes, it was up by the creek there, on the creek. Should be maple trees in behind it.

Bob Zybach: You say these maple trees in front, in those days they were just.

James Hanish: Just saplings.

Bob Zybach: in those days they planted these maple trees so they'd have living fence posts, so they wouldn't have to keep putting in fence posts?

James Hanish: Yes.

Bob Zybach: Do you remember who planted those maples?

James Hanish: They were in. . . probably Joe Smith planted them, they were in here. I know we used to have an unbroken view of the valley from the house.

Bob Zybach: You said, at night you could see the trains there?

James Hanish: Yes.

Bob Zybach: What trains would those be?

James Hanish: Southern Pacific.

Bob Zybach: OK.

James Hanish: On a clear day you could see mountains, there's a snow capped peak in the Cascades? I don't know if it's Mount Baker. . . not Mount Baker, but Mount Washington, just the mountain that's south of Mount Hood.

Bob Zybach: OK.

James Hanish: But right in the center, as you look at down the valley, see those trees along the creek, they've grown up a lot but we could see Suver and Wren and you could hear the trains, the lights of the trains.

Bob Zybach: Suver and where else?

James Hanish: Wren, remember Wren.

Bob Zybach: I thought Wren was over on the Kings Valley side.

James Hanish: Not Wren, another little town.

Bob Zybach: You're thinking of. . . Wells.

James Hanish: There used to be a town called something like that. It was just east of Mountain View. And it was this way.

Bob Zybach: Was it Wells, Wells Station?

James Hanish: Might have been, but it . . . Wren sounds familiar . . . but anyway, that's . . . you can't see the mountain.

Bob Zybach: It's April 10th, is this smokier than you remember when you were a kid?

James Hanish: Yes, we had a dust storm one time come from Eastern Oregon over here, it was yellow.

Bob Zybach: Is that right?

James Hanish: Yes, you could see it coming and instead of brown like dust it was kind of yellow, funny color. And when it came over here, it deposited a lot of white . . . it looked like sulphur dust.

Bob Zybach: Out here?

James Hanish: All over. We used to . . . it was up in the mountains, we'd fall a tree and we'd have to get away from it, because there just be a cloud of that crap come down.

Bob Zybach: Did they write about it in the newspapers?

James Hanish: They didn't write about it. We . . . now, it would cause panic activity. I would say it might have been from a volcano.

Bob Zybach: That would be 1930's?

James Hanish: Oh, way back there. But it was . . . the neighbors thought it was just a dust storm, but the funniest damned dust I ever seen. It just, it had to have come over the Cascades.

Bob Zybach: There's lots of it left there, you could have seen the Dickey family.

James Hanish: Dickey family, now there's the hill . .

Kevin Sherer: [KEVIN] Over here, you can see the flowering quince is over there on the ground behind the house.

James Hanish: Right over there. And beyond that up on that knoll where that oak and stuff was, above the barns, would be the cemetery.

Bob Zybach: So right on that knoll up there?

James Hanish: Yes.

Bob Zybach: The highest point?

James Hanish: North toward the highway but it's in that area.

Bob Zybach: OK. Now where the barn is, was that barn there in those days?

James Hanish: Which barn?

Bob Zybach: Down there now?

James Hanish: No, that's Oregon State's Barn.

Bob Zybach: Ok, so that's a new one.

James Hanish: That's new.

Bob Zybach: Then the house that's there

James Hanish: The Coote's house was originally, always there.

Bob Zybach: Was it always called the Coote's house?

James Hanish: Yes, not called the Coote's house, but that's where the owner of the sawmill lived.

Bob Zybach: OK. And then between him and Dickeys.

James Hanish: Dickey's lived right over there, the house and barn and everything, and they tilled this land.

Bob Zybach: Right in front of us.

James Hanish: Right in front of us.

Bob Zybach: What were the crops they raised?

James Hanish: I think it was mostly oats.

Bob Zybach: Oats.

James Hanish: They raised a lot of oats in here at that time. Oats, and then on the other side they raised wheat. In the other valley other there.

Bob Zybach: Did they have an orchard?

James Hanish: They had a small orchard around the house, but I see it's all gone.

Bob Zybach: Okay, did you have an orchard here?

James Hanish: Yes, we had an orchard, we had prunes, plums and pears, and our barn was about over in there. Just about. Not quite that far, but the whole thing's gone, they even took out the fir trees that were here.

Bob Zybach: That's what we were looking for last time; for the fir trees.

[Withheld from this edition pending review. The page keeps its printed number and its permanent link, so a citation to it still lands here.]

James Hanish: We'd try to dig them out and a long chain on a horse and pull them out.

Bob Zybach: Wild rose or any other name?

James Hanish: Wild roses.

Bob Zybach: Sweet briar?

James Hanish: Sweet briar, they'd blow a hole in the. . . there was always a yellow jacket nest in the woods.

Bob Zybach: So when you looked out when you lived here before were those old oak trees, those firs that are on top of the oak now, were they that tall or could you see mostly oak?

James Hanish: That was mostly. . . they were about that tall, they haven't grown much. The barn was right up in there, it wasn't too far from the house. The house was real pretty, it was a short distance.

Bob Zybach: You were also talking about the pond up on the mill, you said they had that funneled and you say you also had a dam in here.

James Hanish: Yes, we had a. . . it was only about that high,

Bob Zybach: About two feet.

James Hanish: Yes. Backed up the creek. The last time I came out it was gone. I think what happened, it was either this creek here in the winter time is a raging torrent, in fact we couldn't sleep at night on account of the noise it made when we lived here. So it probably since nobody used it, they just took it out or filled it up with debris and that was it. We used to have a . . . gravity. See those coppice trees up in there, that's just about where the dam was. We had this ditch running down . . . this was all garden. We had cherries, prunes, apples, pears.

Bob Zybach: But none of those trees are left now?

James Hanish: No.

Bob Zybach: So you were going through the Depression.

James Hanish: Yes, we went through the Depression.

Bob Zybach: Did it feel like a Depression to you?

James Hanish: Well, for the prices that we got out of things, yes. But we did, we survived.

Bob Zybach: We walking through a bunch of wild strawberries here, did you ever pick those or use any of the native berries around here?

James Hanish: No, we had our own. We had a nice big bed of them, we raised our own berries.

[Withheld from this edition pending review. The page keeps its printed number and its permanent link, so a citation to it still lands here.]

[Withheld from this edition pending review. The page keeps its printed number and its permanent link, so a citation to it still lands here.]

James Hanish: resistances to it would just power over the whole works.

Bob Zybach: Would salmon ever run up this fork?

James Hanish: No, we didn't. . . no. Yes, that's a nice hole. [Looking down into creek]

Bob Zybach: We're on what you called the south meadow?

James Hanish: Yes, the south meadow.

Bob Zybach: OK, there's a flowering cherry tree there, that be a wild cherry wouldn't it, would that have been anything to do with the family?

James Hanish: I think that was there when we were here, that's right. Like I said, in that country there, there were orchards all through there.

Bob Zybach: Up through there?

James Hanish: Yes. Through that wilderness.

Bob Zybach: And what were those orchard from?

James Hanish: Homesteaders.

Bob Zybach: Before your time?

James Hanish: Yes, oh, yes, because I used to go up in there, I'd find remnants of an old shack and two or three trees around, evidence of where deer were eating on the fruit.

Bob Zybach: Oh, and that's just straight back from us right up here?

James Hanish: Yes, back anywhere in the . . . two, three, four, five miles. I used to walk all through here.

Bob Zybach: Do you recall about how many orchards might have been in that country?

James Hanish: I must have found at least three of four.

Bob Zybach: Three or four? Those wouldn't be the Mennonite orchards though would they?

James Hanish: I don't know what race they were, just people who came out and settled and they couldn't make it.

James Hanish: All gone. Go out through there and around.

Bob Zybach: So this would be the road that went back to the old homesteads, that would be to our south. And then the old road used to come across the field here to your.

James Hanish: Our road used to come down from the house, across the bridge, go right through here, following and make a left turn and head to have bunch of trees across the creek, come through the meadows and come to Berry Creek then.

Bob Zybach: Ok, then this creek that came through here, when we went through last time it was dry.

James Hanish: Yes.

Bob Zybach: But did it ever dry up when you were a.

Kevin Sherer: [KEVIN] Is there an old road that went off? Out that way, did your road come around like this?

James Hanish: Our road crossed the . . . crossed the creek, went through here, around the trees and into . . . went through there and across the trees and out . . . out to the highway.

Kevin Sherer: [KEVIN] Ok, from what I saw, there was possibly your old road, do you know why this is all broken in here where this first trees are in the brush and then there's another clearing and then a bunch of dirt.

James Hanish: Yes, there a creek used to . . . in the wintertime there was a. . . see that row of. clump of stuff way over there?

Kevin Sherer: [KEVIN] Yes.

James Hanish: Well, there was a creek that only run in winter, it come down through there, and then it would run out over into the other creek.

Kevin Sherer: [KEVIN] Did it have. . . big mound of dirt and stuff?

James Hanish: Yes, eroding.

Bob Zybach: On that creek there, we didn't get that on the end of the tape, but you said it would dry up part of the year and start.

James Hanish: Get dry in the summer.

Bob Zybach: Where the head waters of it at?

James Hanish: Well, it just came out of the hill up there, probably a spring.

Bob Zybach: A marsh, was that?

James Hanish: The marsh was down lower.

Bob Zybach: Oh, Isee.

Kevin Sherer: [KEVIN] You can kind of see where it heads back up over in that there, so it's low and then down over here, you can see where the cattle walked through it.

Bob Zybach: Is it running now?

James Hanish: I think was just a drain, because it would dry up in summer.

Bob Zybach: Jim was saying back this way for four and five miles is a bunch of old homesteads with old apple orchards, right off in this direction, and this old road use to go right through there. [KEVIN] Isn't that the 100 road right off over there?

Bob Zybach: Yes, that's where we're going, right?

Bob Zybach: IKE VINJ Well, we'd have to go back out and hit the 100 road.

James Hanish: There isn't . . . road right up that God forsaken country up in there.

Bob Zybach: Yes, that's

Bob Zybach: That old maple?

James Hanish: Yes.

Bob Zybach: That was big when you were a kid, huh?

James Hanish: That was big when we were out here. The bank was steep there. And this is where the barn.

Bob Zybach: So this is the. . . the barn was right on this flat here?

James Hanish: Right here.

Bob Zybach: Next to the maple. Do you know who built the barn?

James Hanish: No, the barn was here when we bought the place. I don't know whether Joe Smith built it or whether . . . who had the property he bought off, I don't know.

Bob Zybach: What year did you paint it about? [Painting donated to OSU Research Forests]

James Hanish: Oh, I painted it. . . let me see, I didn't paint here, I didn't take up oil painting until I got married. Then I went up to the high school and took an art class up there. And then I draw them from my mother's album, she has some old pictures of this place, she's got a picture of the barn and a picture of that field over there. And so I took the picture and painted it. The barn's about that big according to the picture. You can have the whole thing.

Bob Zybach: That would be great.

James Hanish: We had it a long time and wife says give to him, you know, also give him the book about the Applegate Trail because it don't deal with this country at all, it's all California and north. I used to oil paint quite a bit. Now, I kind of concentrates too much on what's .

Bob Zybach: Your mom's photo album, does she still have those photos?

James Hanish: I think she still has them.

Bob Zybach: Ok, would it be possible maybe to make duplicates of those photos too?

James Hanish: I don't know if she's still got the prints or not. You can have the photos if you want them.