C.. The Joe Smith Place

Bob Zybach: And then going down to Goviers down here?

Neil Vanderburg: Uh huh.

Bob Zybach: Was there a mill going there at that time?

Neil Vanderburg: A little later.

Bob Zybach: So this mill wasn't quite going yet?

Neil Vanderburg: No. Leslie Gardner's husband worked there. Roif was his name. And he worked in that mill when they were building it, and that was after this fire had taken place.

Bob Zybach: Do you remember anything about the Hildebrands, what kind of people they were?

Neil Vanderburg: Only that he was just kind of a small, light, fair type person. Nice looking kid and very quiet. He got on the bus and sat down and didn't say much.

Bob Zybach: Uh huh. Was this called the Hildebrand place?

Neil Vanderburg: Far as I know. Of course, this was away from my old stomping ground, so all I knew was the kids that got on the bus. You know how kids are when they're on the bus, they're kinda flirting with the girls and all that stuff, they aren't much interested in scenery!

Bob Zybach: Yep. Can you recall any other thing about this site here, in particular?

Neil Vanderburg: No, only I remember the house sitting out there in the clearing. I mean, all by itself basically. And we're standing here in front of a couple of fir trees that are probably 50 years old and if they were there they weren't as big as Christmas trees. And now they're big enough to saw. People that fight the clearcutting can't realize in a man's lifetime how big trees can get.

Bob Zybach: Yeah. Well, all these silver maples here have just gone to weed.

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah.

B. The Marcks Place

Bob Zybach: Okay, we're going by the old site on Marcks place. The school building on the left. And we're talking about Reese Mallow.

Neil Vanderburg: Reese Mallow, I believe lived down in here someplace around the Dobrinins. We ran out of hay one year and my dad bought a big truckload of hay from Reese Mallow and later on he lived out there 8 miles south of Corvallis by where I moved in the late 1950's, but I didn't have too much to do with him. But he was always a cattle dealer and hay dealer. And that's about all I can tell you about him.

Bob Zybach: Okay.

C. The Joe Smith Place

Neil Vanderburg: Okay. I think this is probably part of Berry Creek. I can't get my bearings yet. But that marsh would be about where those trees right there are. Just the other side of that tractor, according to my memory. It might be over behind that barn. Probably more likely behind that barn over there.

Bob Zybach: Okay, we're just south of the Joe Smith homestead.

Neil Vanderburg: The Joe Smith home. I don't know whether it was a homestead or what, but that's where he lived when I lived here.

Bob Zybach: And just north of Folks' place and we're looking due west.

Neil Vanderburg: Just about due west.

Bob Zybach: And so that grove of trees across the field there, maybe about a mile?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: Is where you think the old marsh was?

Neil Vanderburg: Well when we get up here on the Suver Road I can show it to you real plain.

Bob Zybach: Okay.

Neil Vanderburg: But from down here . . . I was only down in here once. The Whites that did, well Charlie White and so forth, they moved here for a short period of time while we lived over there. And I came over here to see the Whites one time. It was the only time in my life that I was ever on this road before today.

Bob Zybach: Is that right?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: Uh huh, it's the first time for me so.

Neil Vanderburg: There was about four houses in here.

Bob Zybach: Oh, in this area?

Neil Vanderburg: In this area right here. Was just kind of a little. . . I don't know, Joe Smith was John's father. Joe was quite old when I left here in the late 30's. And John was farming t. I understand they both hit the bottle pretty heavy. But, like I say there was about four houses in here and there was a rental house apparently that old man White moved into, and this is, the slough area in here apparently that comes off of Berry Creek, I think that's probably Berry Creek in front of us, when we get onto Suver Road I can show you the back of our place from the road. I can show you our old fence line and from there we can tell where that was, because that marshy place started right at the end of our back field.

Bob Zybach: Was this slough here when you were a kid?

Neil Vanderburg: I think so.

Bob Zybach: On Joe Smith, did he have any reputation locally as a writer or a historian or anything like that?

Neil Vanderburg: Not that I knew. He was just a big landowner. Any time you talked about Joe Smith everything around here belonged to Joe Smith.

Bob Zybach: Did anybody put him together with Greenberry Smith, talk about Greenberry Smith at all?

Neil Vanderburg: No, I didn't know about Greenberry Smith 'til I moved out on Smith Loop south of Corvallis.

Bob Zybach: Did you know anything about Joe Smith's politics or religion or anything?

Neil Vanderburg: No, I didn't.

Bob Zybach: Just that he owned a lot of land.

Neil Vanderburg: Just that he was a big landowner and I heard rumors that he had a bottle hid in every corner.

Bob Zybach: Did most people think he was pretty fair, the way he treated people?

Neil Vanderburg: I think so. I never heard any complaints about him. I heard a lot of complaints that he didn't take care of his sheep very well. There was a lot of them died when we had snows and stuff like that. He just let them run and if they died, they died. And we saw a lot of dead after that three-foot snow we had, well there was snow all over Folks Hill over there, dead sheep and lambs and stuff. [Snowstorm in 1937-1938] It happened that snow hit in January and the lambs are always born about the middle of January, and so there was a lot of lambs that didn't survive.

Bob Zybach: Now on the Folks, can you remember anything in particular about them?

Neil Vanderburg: Well, Ethan Folks went to high school with my older sisters. He was older than I was. I met him a few times. Bert Folks had the position of the Director of the Soil and Water and Conservation when we left here, and that's what I had up until last December, and I hadn't thought about -- I thought he was a pretty big shot when he was the Director, but I didn't think too much about me being a Director! But anyway, that's basically all I knew about Bert Folks, was that he came to our farm and checked to see. . . well he didn't check too much about pollution but more about erosion and that sort of thing. We didn't have too much problem with erosion around here then because the fields were all so full of fern that the water couldn't get through them. And we had no sprays to get rid of them. And we tried all kinds of things to get rid of those fern, but the more you plowed them the more you spread them around. And we tried clean cultivating, we tried a lot of things, but we just were unable to get on top of them. And that was our biggest problem on our hill grounds here. Now, we had creek bottom ground that was Chehalis soil, it was very clayey, we were farming with horses, it was very hard to farm, very hard to work down. And my dad finally went down to California and got his brother's Fordson tractor, and we plowed with that and Mr. Hanish told us he wanted us to work in the woods for him so he told us that if we'd let that soil lay all summer in the fall we could work it down, it would just all mellow down. And so my dad took his word for it and so we plowed it in the spring and then in the fall when we tried to work it down our Fordson tractor would get high centered on a clod and we'd sit there and spin both wheels and then we had to either go get a team of horses or, of course in those days you had lugs on your wheels rather than tires so, we could take a fence post or a log and put across underneath the tractor and get it under the lugs and then the tractor would pick itself up and go to the next clot!

Bob Zybach: So the advice didn't work too good!

Neil Vanderburg: No, it didn't work good at all. But he got us to cut wood for him that spring.

Bob Zybach: Do you remember. . that's Jim Hanish's father.

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: Can you recall his first name?

Neil Vanderburg: Not right now.

Bob Zybach: Just called him Mr. Hanish?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah, that was who he was. He was an old man to me and he was hard to get along with, and kinda what you would picture a wife beater. I don't know if he did but that's kinda the picture you had of him. And he was a big man. But he was very dominating, and kind of a recluse. He, I don't think that we ever saw him away from his home. He never came down and got the mail, he never, you never saw him. I don't even know if they had a car. But he, his wife came and got the mail when the mail was picked up. And I don't know as I ever saw him where he wasn't either where he lived or up where his timber was.

Bob Zybach: Did anybody come from Berry Creek down into this pond area here for swimming or fishing or picnics?

Neil Vanderburg: It wasn't that much of a pond then. Then you can see that this has been built up by bulldozers or something. It was . . . I came down, came through our back fence and came down through it and it was just marshy, muddy, with swamp grass and stuff. And it was pretty hard going for the horses, kind of grey looking soil where the horses threw it up. And it was not a place that I particularly cared to go to, it was just a

Neil Vanderburg: place you went around.

Bob Zybach: So this has been built up since the war then?

Neil Vanderburg: I'm quite sure it has.

Bob Zybach: Would this have been the furthest end of the swamp that we're talking about between here and Berry Creek?

Neil Vanderburg: I would think so, I would think so, yeah.

Bob Zybach: Okay. Can you recall anything else about this particular area or the people that lived right through here?

Neil Vanderburg: Like I say, I was down in here once. And I know that there was just a little settlement in here. And I wouldn't be surprised if that white house over there wasn't here when I lived here.

Bob Zybach: But the brick house was here then, and the green house, both.

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah. I know that and there were some houses on this side. Of course, this here is evident that it wasn't here. It's too new. Of course, they put some metal siding on it so they may have made it look a lot newer than it is, too. But they . . . this was always kind of a prosperous looking area, when you drove by it up there on Suver Road.

Bob Zybach: Now these houses are smaller than a lot of the older farm houses, and they're obviously newer, from the 1 920's or 30's, did anybody think that was odd that they built these newer style homes or smaller homes?

Neil Vanderburg: We always felt the Smith's had money, you know. And of course, Joe Smith, all there was his wife and him by the time he built this house down in here I imagine, so he probably didn't have use for a very big house. And I never heard that John had any kids, I don't know if he did or not. But it was always just Joe and John was all 1 ever heard.

Bob Zybach: Now one more question. We're seeing birds everywhere. Can you recall if this, geese or ducks because of the marsh or swamp through here, if this was part of the flyway? Can you ever recall seeing any particular birds around here, or shag pope, anything like that?

Neil Vanderburg: I don't think that it was part of the flyway. Geese once in a while would get up our direction, we'd hear geese. And when we would, it was enough of an oddity that we'd go out of the house to look at them. So, we wouldn't have been on the main flyway. And I don't think there was enough water in this. .. it was just too flat for it to be enough of a pond for anything like that, the land in here.

Bob Zybach: Can you recall any eagles or hawks or cranes or egrets? Types of birds that might.

Neil Vanderburg: No, I can't.

Bob Zybach: Okay. We talked to Don Dickey the other day about it. . . can you recall any owls in the area?

Neil Vanderburg: I can't, no. Yes, I can. I can remember I went to Hanishes one night, after dark, which was going around the Dickey place, and I was walking through some timber there, and an owl hooted pretty close, and I really took off! It scared me to death!

Bob Zybach: So they weren't real common, then?

Neil Vanderburg: I don't think so, but then, I was pretty young and there was a lot of things that I could have missed. But I do know that one owl was in that tree because it like to scared me to death!

Bob Zybach: Can you recall seeing bats around?

Neil Vanderburg: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: Quite a few, or just now and again?

Neil Vanderburg: Just now and again. We had one in the house one time. Got in some way, and we were pretty concerned about getting it out. Yeah, there were bats in the barn, too.

Bob Zybach: Well, might as well go for one more animal while we're here. How about beaver? Can you ever recall any beaver along Berry Creek?

Neil Vanderburg: I never saw a beaver on Berry Creek. I never saw a beaver dam until I was over with Jeff Garver above Sulphur Springs, that's the first beaver dam that I saw in this area. I had beaver over on my place south of Corvallis. And I tried to keep them around but there was always hunters, deer hunters that would see the evidence and come back and trap and so they . . . We also had fox over there. And people, well the hunters think the fox is terrible because it's gonna kill the pheasants and so forth. And to me, I kind of enjoyed the fox.

Bob Zybach: How about nutria and possum in this area?

Neil Vanderburg: Nutria didn't come to this country, the United States, until after I left here. See the nutria were brought in right after World War II. They were brought in from South America.

Bob Zybach: How about the possum?

Neil Vanderburg: I never saw any. I never saw any possum or coon or anything like that. But I wasn't looking for it.

Bob Zybach: I see. Would you see many deer?

Neil Vanderburg: Very few. I think I put that in the recording before. I think I saw two deer in all the time I lived here.

Bob Zybach: Wow. And that's what, four. .

Neil Vanderburg: Four years. Part of five years. But there wasn't that much browse for them. The fir trees were up there 75, 100 feet high and not very big around, but still there was nothing underneath them. There was an awful lot of ladyslippers up in around the [J. W.} Chaffin place, which is a form of orchid that is very beautiful. And my sister commented that she hated to see clearcuts cause she was afraid she'd never see any ladyslippers anymore and she always loved them so much.

Bob Zybach: Can you recall other iypes of wildflowers in this area?

Neil Vanderburg: Yes. There was a lot of wildflowers. Bachelor Buttons. We had Bachelor Buttons like you couldn't believe. I mean the fields would be full of, just clear blue with Bachelor Buttons before the wheat would come up through. The first year we moved here my mother ordered some flower seeds for her little planter in the window, it turned out they were Bachelor Buttons, and the neighbors really booed her! They thought that was really funny that she'd send off for seeds of a . . . we didn't call them wildflowers, we called them weeds, so that's why I had to think a minute. And there was, yeah, there was quite a few wildflowers. But like I say we tended to think of them more as weeds than we did wildflowers, but they, because they were detrimental to the amount of crop we got because they'd draw the moisture from what we were trying to grow. And I'm not thinking too much of anything else, but I might later.

Bob Zybach: How about Camas in this area?

Neil Vanderburg: I don't know what Camas is, I guess.

Bob Zybach: Okay. And the type of fern, was that Bracken fern?

Neil Vanderburg: I suppose. Just one fern that'd shoot up and spread out then the roots go underground and there's another and here's another.

Bob Zybach: So it's just a single stem per fern.