9. Oak Creek Guard House, Tuberculosis Sanitarium, and Tampico

Royal G. Jackson / Jennifer Lee: That's not there anymore, is it?

William A. Davies: No, I had it burned down, much to the disgust of one woman who is interested in the history of Oregon. She got on my neck after it. Blake said that early road used to go right by his house on the other side from 99 West. He said one of the things that he remembered was that when they had a kind of an uprising on the Umpqua Reservation. They took the renegade Umpqua Indians and placed them on the Grand Ronde Reservation, I believe. The soldiers and the Indians went right by his house. They stopped and got water there when he was a little boy.

Royal G. Jackson / Jennifer Lee: He'd seen them himself?

William A. Davies: Yes, well, he was in his eighties or maybe nineties at the time in 1950, early 1950's when I talked to him, so he was born probably in the 1860's or 1870's.

Royal G. Jackson / Jennifer Lee: Have you ever heard of any other Indian activity in the area of the school forest?

William A. Davies: No.

Royal G. Jackson / Jennifer Lee: Any arrowheads anyone has ever found, or pots, or anything of that nature?

William A. Davies: Have you talked to McDaniels?

Royal G. Jackson / Jennifer Lee: Vern?

William A. Davies: Vern McDaniels. Yes, He knows a lot more about that early history than I do because he was there before I was. But Vern told me one time he talked to a woman that lived out there, very elderly woman. She was elderly when he talked to her; that must have been in the thirties or forties. She told him that her father had a pig ranch there, down below, and that in McDonald Forest up there, that part, there was a solid oak forest - at that time no Douglas-fir, all oak. Their father used to run the pigs up there to fatten them in the spring and feed on the acorns that fell off the oak. Now, it's a Douglas-fir forest; came in naturally under the oak. Oh yes, I saw some of that out on Dunn Forest, clear out on the northwest end of it there. There's a beautiful stand of second growth now that's about, gosh, I don't know, about 70 years old or more, 80. We thinned it. Beautiful stand; good stand. And you can see the old dead oak laying there yet where they felled them - big oak. That was an oak pasture, and they had that big snow, and the cattle were starving, and they went in and fell all those oaks so the cattle could feed on the winter buds to keep them alive. The Douglas-fir came in after that.

9. OAK CREEK GUARD HOUSE, TUBERCULOSIS SANITARIUM, AND TAMPICO

Royal G. Jackson / Jennifer Lee: Did you know very much about the period of the CCC occupation?

William A. Davies: No, that was in the thirties. The camp was down there, I understand, where the Arboretum is, but the CCC's built that house at the Oak Creek entrance.

Royal G. Jackson / Jennifer Lee: The Oak Creek Guard House?

William A. Davies: Yes, which the school gave to the fisheries department here. They have it now under lease, or rent, or something.

Royal G. Jackson / Jennifer Lee: I'd like to know about other structures that were in the forest that you perhaps burned?

William A. Davies: There were some old homesteads around through the forest. Of course, early homesteaders homesteaded every place, and some of those old structures were still there in bad shape and I burned a couple of them, I guess.

Royal G. Jackson / Jennifer Lee: What was your motivation for doing that?

William A. Davies: One was to keep them from burning in the summer when they'd burn the whole forest down. Kids hike in there and build fires, you know. One had a fireplace that was kind of falling down and all the wood from the house was still there, but you could just barely see there was a house. The roof was kind of caved in, and boy, if somebody just touched a match to that, it would be some fire in the summer. That's the reason we burned it.

Royal G. Jackson / Jennifer Lee: Did you know anything about the history of these structures?

William A. Davies: No, It was an old homestead house, is all.

Royal G. Jackson / Jennifer Lee: Where were these located in the forest, do you remember?

William A. Davies: Yes, one was out pretty much in the north end of the Dunn Forest - the one that I was just talking about. And then in another place there, I guess, somebody had burned a house before. Buildings there looked like they had been burned years before, maybe accidentally or on purpose, I don't know. It was a tuberculosis (TB) sanitarium and it was on the north slope of the forest there. It seemed kind of queer that they'd had a TB sanitarium on the north slope of the hill.

Royal G. Jackson / Jennifer Lee: Now where was this located?

William A. Davies: Out on the Paul Dunn Forest. It's right on the edge of the land between the forest and the ag land which they call their Beny Creek Farms or something like that. Just up on the hill there.

Royal G. Jackson / Jennifer Lee: Is there anything left of that site?

William A. Davies: No, we tried to plant trees in there, but the blackberries, I think, and the grass has kind of taken over. It's hard to get anything in there. Just an opening in there is all there is. We have a road going right through there, you know.

Royal G. Jackson / Jennifer Lee: How had you heard about this TB sanitarium?

William A. Davies: Only that it had been a sanitarium.

Royal G. Jackson / Jennifer Lee: How did you know that? Where did you get that information?.

William A. Davies: It seemed to be pretty general knowledge of the old timers around here, and probably McDaniels and some of the others told me about it. It hadn't been in operation for many, many years before I came here.

Royal G. Jackson / Jennifer Lee: How about Sulphur Springs? Do you know anything about that site?

William A. Davies: Not of the history of it, no. When I came here in 1946, it had been set up. I think it had been done by the CCC's as one of their projects when they were here. They built a lot of very fine rustic tables; they split poles that big around and put the flat half up. Made these beautiful rustic tables - there's four or five of them through there - and cleared out so they had a real nice picnic area. And they cut up a lot of wood, piled it up. Then the Sulphur Spring was there and somebody had put some tile around it. That's where you could get water out of it, you know; some people like to drink that. And then they had a nice rustic bridge across the creek there, Soap Creek, and two toilets up on the hill back there and invited the public to use that as a picnic ground, because the county road goes right by. For quite a while you could go out there on weekends and find people picnicking there. Sometimes the fraternities would have big doings out there and that went on for quite a few years. Then along in about the fifties or some place in there, when the young people in this country decided that vandalism was the way to live, they tore that thing all up. They tore up all the tables and burned them. They tore the toilets