Part VI. May 8, 1995

PART VI: May 8, 1995

[Interview conducted by Bob Zybach at the Forestry Club Cabin, Oregon State University Research Forests, Corvallis. Ann Rogers and Shahid Islam were present.]

Bob Zybach: Marv, we are going to resume the interview you have been doing, and I have some questions from the earlier interviews. To start with, you were explaining the project with John Beuter and how you got started on the soils and inventory projects, and how you developed some of this information. Would you describe that process, and what came of it?

Marvin Rowley: When we determined we were going to do an inventory of the forest and needed additional personnel to do this, we hired Jeff Garver to head up the inventory program. As the plan developed, we determined that we should identify each individual timber stand on the forest. They would be identified by age, stand density, and species composition. We set five acres as a minimum-size stand area to keep track of. Areas smaller than five acres were placed with an adjoining stand. Second, to keep track of the stands, we divided the forest into compartments to reduce the map sizes to manageable size. Compartment boundaries were property lines, roads, streams, and other easily located dividing lines. When the inventory was complete, I began working to create a forest history that recovered every activity that had taken place in each stand. Every activity we had record of over time was entered into the stand history. I did most of this work after I retired from the forest manager’s position. I went through the old records and entered the evidence of all activities—those that were written, remembrance of individuals, and some from observing the conditions in the stand. These stand histories were to be updated each time an activity occurred in the stand until it was totally harvested. At the time of planting, a new stand number was to be assigned to the area. This leads to the stands being dynamic and changing over time, but the compartment boundaries were to stay unchanged.

Bob Zybach: Did you and John Beuter invent that system of dynamic stands and static compartments?

Marvin Rowley: No, we didn’t invent it. It is basically the way foresters have kept track of forest histories since they began keeping records in Germany. It is a good way to keep track of changes in the forest over time.

Bob Zybach: Was Jeff specifically hired to do that job? What year was it about?

Marvin Rowley: The year was 1980 or 1981. Jeff was hired to assistant forest manager, and his initial job description stated he was in charge of developing a forest inventory. This forest inventory was under John Beuter’s direction; other management work was under my direction. This dual overseeing led to problems as time passed, so we sat down as a team and designed an organization chart that clearly defined job responsibility for all the activities on the forest, and set down a chain of command that was missing in the original job description. This organizational chart set up areas of responsibility for the forest supervisor, manager, and assistant manager. It set up a chain of command designating who reported to whom for each defined task, and solved most of our problems.

Bob Zybach: When you said this inventory system was based on the German system, did they, so far you know, designate stands like you and Jeff, or use essentially the same process?

Marvin Rowley: I believe they followed a similar plan that designated stands and management plans for the

Marvin Rowley: stand that allowed for change over time. They made ten-year plans that forecast the operations for ten years. They modified this plan by conditions that occurred year by year. At the end of the ten years, they checked to see how close they followed the plan and developed a new ten-year plan—considering the lessons learned from the last plan. Things that changed the plan are still working today—such as storms, fires, changing markets, new manufacturing techniques, public needs, and so forth.

Bob Zybach: What do you think you changed the most from the German methods?

Marvin Rowley: On the university forest, we are education- and research-oriented, and the German foresters were probably resource-oriented. Our forest manager is committed to manage following the dictates of the Dean and the State System of Higher Education, as defined by the laws of the state. The management of the forest developed as the forest was acquired. In the beginning, the forest was managed by a committee consisting of appointed faculty. This led to problems because of no continuity of purpose, and was replaced by a full-time manager in 1948 when Harry Nettleton was appointed to the position. He was an old-time forester whose main duties as a manager had been protection, and protection held a high place in his management strategy. He was working on a limited operating budget that restricted his options. In the early 1950s, stumpage was around $5 to $10 per thousand board feet and it took a good-sized sale to generate enough income to run the forest. This meant he was competing with education and research for operating funds. The management objectives before 1948 were limited to regenerating cutover lands as they were acquired and harvested as mature stands. Salvage work to rehabilitate existing stands and thinning young stands were nonexistent. Early trials at thinning followed the idea of removing the larger trees to give the smaller trees room to grow, and resulted in weakening the stands to severe wind-throw damage. In one stand south of the Powerhouse Saddle, a stand was thinned before 1946 using this method and almost 100 percent of the leave trees were blown down in the first winter storm. About 1953, a large sale was put up for bid and the price was bid to about $40 per thousand board feet. This marked the first time the forest began paying its way. About this same time, Harry Nettleton began putting up a series of salvage sales for small logging operators that kept a cash flow coming and enabled him to begin managing on a paying basis.

Marvin Rowley: In 1956, my partner and I negotiated a contract to fall two-thousand snags in an old burn area with an option to salvage any merchantable wood at $10 per thousand board feet stumpage. The salvage value returned more than the cost of falling the snags. From that date forward, there has never been a deficit sale or operation, and the forest began paying for research and education needs.

Marvin Rowley: In the late 1940s, Crown Zellerbach began commercially thinning young Douglas-fir stands in the Vernonia area. Lessons learned from this work were tried on McDonald Forest beginning in 1956. Harry Nettleton, with the help of Prof William [Bill] Davies laid out a sale in the Oak Creek area following the guidelines developed by Crown. This was basically removing understory trees that left the dominant and codominant trees to grow. It removed what they referred to as the four Ds—the dead, dying, diseased, and deformed, along with suppressed trees. My logging firm [Rowley and Parker Tree Farm Service] negotiated to log the first trial harvest on Oak Creek. The following year, they put up a larger sale in the Arboretum area and advertised it for public sale to the highest bidder. My firm was the lone bidder, and we purchased every sale put up for bid until Harry retired in 1959.

Bob Zybach: Did you log through the pioneer research studies in the Arboretum area, or were they excluded?

Marvin Rowley: The pioneer studies you refer to were within the sale boundary. These trees in this sale were all marked by the forest manager, and they looked at that study as being over—the records couldn’t be found.

Bob Zybach: Did you have any markings for the early research plots?

Marvin Rowley: Yes. We knew where they were and we tried to keep the tags and boundaries intact, and no one from the college ever came to work with them. There was a one-acre control plot on the top of the ridge that we avoided, to leave as an example of no thinning. This one acre was about ten percent above the volume predicted by the yield tables. This plot was located near the end of Spur Road 531. It was 130 to 140 years old and contained 109 thousand board feet. This plot is located in a stand that was seeded in about 1830 to 1840.

Bob Zybach: For the records, the plot you are talking about was contained in a thesis by James Keeney, Master of Science thesis dated 1932. You estimated with Royal Jackson that you believe there was never more than five or ten percent of the forest occupied by old-growth stands. Was that counting some of the old growth in the Dunn Forest and the stands logged by the Caffall Brothers at the head of Soap Creek?

Marvin Rowley: Yes. There were a few older trees scattered throughout the forest that would meet most definitions of old growth, but the 300- or 400-year-old stands were restricted to canyons, north slopes, and areas where fires couldn’t burn because of wet conditions when the fires burned. Examples of this are found at the head of Calloway Creek, north of the Lewisburg Saddle, on the headwaters of Baker Creek, and West Fork of Oak Creek.

Marvin Rowley: The original land survey notes that the head of Soap Creek had trees in the 40- to 60-inches diameter class, but only occasionally. They were in the area of 150 to 200years old, at the oldest.

Bob Zybach: Have you found any trees or heard of any trees, oak or Douglas-fir, 400 years of age or older in the forest?

Marvin Rowley: I think we find a few. In Section 4, T11S, R5W, Willamette Meridian, north of Lewisburg Saddle, there is a six-foot diameter and an eight-foot diameter tree. I haven’t counted the rings on those sized trees, but large trees I have counted have all come out less than 400 years old. Most people who see those large trees believe they are older than they really are. During the 1980s, we had a group of students who called their group the Concerned Students of McDonald Forest. They wanted to preserve the area south of the county road and west of Lewisburg Saddle because it was old growth, although the stand age was about 120 years. They wouldn’t accept that age and said it had never been entered, even though I had records showing the harvest date and volume removed. They said there weren’t any stumps in the stand. The old county road from Lewisburg to Soap Creek ran through the middle of the stand. I ended the confrontation by telling them to come back when they understood a little more about the forest.

Bob Zybach: Do you think the area the Caffall Brothers logged and some of the areas in the Dunn Forest came up when the Indians stopped burning in the 1930s?

Marvin Rowley: Yes. I said earlier, there were scattered older trees, but most of the stands originated after the burning stopped.

Bob Zybach: This map, dated 1945, made from old aerial photos, shows the patches of old growth we are talking about, a small patch of five or ten acres. There are two ways to interpret this. One is to say that they are relics of much larger contiguous stands, and the other is to say these are small pockets of trees that seeded outwards. Either way can be interpreted from the aerial photos. What is your opinion on this?

Marvin Rowley: There is no doubt in my mind. There were no big stumps in most of the clearcut areas. The surveyors of the 1850s described McDonald Forest area as open savanna oak forest for the most part. We have this historical evidence established at that time. If you want, watch the process of Douglas-fir overpowering an oak forest. It is happening now along the ridge north of the OSU horse barn and west of 53rd Street. The Douglas-fir is appearing in this stand, where it wasn’t visible 20 years ago. About 1975, I walked through the stand and found many places where there were thick stands of Douglas-fir understory pushing their way through the oak canopy. Back during the 1940s, there wasn’t one Douglas-fir visible in that stand. When the Douglas-fir overtops the oak, the oak dies. This process may take 50 to 100 years.

Bob Zybach: Do you think that process is one we should encourage, or is there a way to preserve some of the oak stands? Or are the oak stands just transitional?

Marvin Rowley: I believe the oak stands are transitional on the better soils of the forest. If we want an oak forest, establish an oak stand and maintain it by preventing Douglas-fir from becoming established by burning the understory or treating with herbicides. Don’t try to preserve a mixed stand where the oak has been overtopped, because the oak has been weakened and will not do well.

Bob Zybach: Do you think there is any reason or any rationale for turning, or maintaining, parts of the forests into their earlier condition, such as prairie or savanna as the Indians had, or thick oak stands as the pioneers had, or young Douglas-fir as it was when you were young?

Marvin Rowley: Education-wise, it is important to have all these stand conditions to demonstrate their requirements to students. I am sure they will be needed for research also. For a research and education forest, all conditions are important, but that is not true of a forest maintained for timber production. To have these conditions, you will have to create them from scratch by following prescriptions designed to create them. You won’t have them any other way. Wildfires created most of them in the past, and we control fire to the point where conditions don’t develop. If you want to burn in our culture, you need to change the way people think and react to burning.

Bob Zybach: Do you think it would be a valid educational objective to try to change the way people think or to replicate other cultures’ activities?

Marvin Rowley: It is hard to say what people will accept as far as burning and maintaining open spaces in the forest are concerned. There will always be some disagreement about what you are doing.

Bob Zybach: When Royal Jackson interviewed you in 1979, you said the Columbus Day Storm of October 12, 1962, was a major shaper of the forest that continued to define the management decisions up to then. Can you still see actions of the Columbus Day Storm in the forest?

Marvin Rowley: Yes. When I think about present-day decisions, and look back in time to identify what action in the past forced the present decision, it is the major storms that cause or influence the current action. For instance, the Columbus Day Storm was a 100-year storm, one that happens only once in 100 years. The high winds of this storm blew from about south ten degrees east. They hit the trees from a different direction than the usual storms, and therefore the trees were not used to the force from that direction. The trees blew over, either by uprooting or by shearing off near the ground. There were about seven million board feet of timber blown over on McDonald and Dunn Forests in two hours’ time. There were another two million board feet lost in the next two years from Douglas-fir bark beetle that built up in the downed timber and carried over into the live trees as their numbers increased. In salvaging the wind-blown and bark-beetle-killed trees, we worked around the surviving trees, leaving them to grow. This left some openings and shelterwood conditions that resulted in understory brush increasing and an

Marvin Rowley: occasional stand of natural reproduction. These conditions are what I see dictating actions of today when making decisions about stand management.

Bob Zybach: What effect do you think the small incremental changes and occurrences have on shaping the forest, such as small pockets of wind-throw or insect infestation?

Marvin Rowley: They have a small effect, but much of these blend into the management and are hard to see in a few years. If they happen along the edge of a stand and leave it exposed to more wind, though, they can have a domino effect that may carry through a whole stand. An example of this type of action would be black-bear damage to a stand. The bears may girdle a few trees scattered through the stand to start with, and they are hardly noticeable. But the problem may build up until 20–50 percent of a stand is affected, and they stand out as a major problem. Since the early 1960s, our management plan called for removing these small-event happenings on a yearly basis, so it didn’t leave a place for insects to build up. We salvaged the wood while it was useful.

Bob Zybach: Don’t you think the wildlife need this dead and dying material?

Marvin Rowley: Yes, I know they need dead and dying material, but I believe there is plenty of it left for them in the cleanest salvage work we have done. The blacktail deer are an example of this on McDonald Forest. During the ‘20s and ‘30s, the blacktail-deer population was hunted until they were getting hard to find. When McDonald Forest was created, they didn’t want hunters where they would conflict with students doing field labs. So, they signed an agreement with the Fish and Wildlife Commission to make the forest a big game refuge. By 1950, the population of blacktail deer had built up to the point where most of the Douglas-fir regeneration was being destroyed. The college negotiated with the Fish and Wildlife Commission to have a controlled hunt on the forest to bring the population down to where the seedlings could have a chance to survive. As they reduced the deer population, the average weight of the deer climbed and the percentage of bucks killed increased. With a smaller population, the herd was healthier and more bucks were surviving the winter. One year, due to a miscalculation, they harvested 700 deer on McDonald-Dunn Forest and thought they had ruined the herd, because the average harvest had been 300 per year. The next year, they harvested 300 deer as if nothing unusual had happened the year before.

Bob Zybach: What do you think about the Fish and Wildlife Service introducing species such as rainbow trout or turkeys?

Marvin Rowley: I think it depends on the species introduced. The introduced species should not hurt timber production beyond what the native-animal population does. They should not upset the balance of nature with the current wildlife population.

Bob Zybach: This creates a new recreational activity in the forest. Is the forest the proper environment for creating this type of activity?

Marvin Rowley: This gets into politics. Some species and the recreation that goes with them will have no effect on the wood-fiber production of the area. But others will have a major impact on the ability to grow trees. I would hate to have a herd of elk move in on my 100-acre tree farm. Even a small herd would destroy my ability to produce the growth that pays my taxes and helps put food on my table. I already have a deer population on my tree farm that causes damage to my orchard and my timber stands that runs $200 or $300 per year. I think a property holder should have more control over these populations. We don’t, because our laws were received by tradition from England. In England, the king owned the game animals and this rule followed

Marvin Rowley: us to the colonies and was adopted by the states. The state controls the game, but in countries such as Norway the landowner has some say in the management of the game. The landowner is allowed to harvest game, depending on how many acres he owns. And, I believe, they can let others hunt their quota. I think they may be allowed to hunt until they fill their quota. Our game-management people are doing a fairly good job managing the game most of the time, but I don’t think they pay attention to the landowners enough, and they get politicians making decisions.

Bob Zybach: What you are saying runs a little bit against the prevailing thoughts of people now. They say we have to encourage habitat and game animals that exist in the forest. You are saying we have to encourage control of the populations?

Marvin Rowley: Yes. I believe, with good forest management, I will have all the species that have existed in that forest condition, and the population needs to be controlled just as I control the tree species, the spacing, and the harvest age.

Bob Zybach: How about grizzly bears and wolves?

Marvin Rowley: I know these species used to be here, but they don’t fit into the conditions that exist now. There are plenty of species here that do the same thing the wolves and the grizzly bears did. Why should there be more competition now? On McDonald Forest, we have all the species present and, as long as we keep a variety of habitats that fit their demands, they will continue to exist here.

Bob Zybach: The day after the Columbus Day Storm, you told us, you flew over McDonald Forest in an airplane and mapped the wind-throw areas. And the map was on your map rack for years. Has that map ever been found?

Marvin Rowley: No. Since I left the office, I have no idea on what happened to it.

Bob Zybach: You said there were seven million board feet of wind-throw. Would it be possible to recreate that map?

Marvin Rowley: Yes. I think I can recreate the map by looking at the harvesting records and using my memory of the events.

Bob Zybach: Did you notice much damage on adjacent lands during the aerial survey?

Marvin Rowley: No, I don’t remember even looking for any. While flying over the forest, I concentrated on the forest and not adjacent lands. When you are looking at a map and trying to identify ownership boundaries, it directs your vision to the areas you are interested in and excludes the rest.

Bob Zybach: Was there damage on the Spaulding Tract located west of Philomath?

Marvin Rowley: Just scattered damage. The 40 acres that were set up as a demonstration area, that we thinned in 1956, had scattered wind-throw in the stands, but not enough to change the stand compositions.

Bob Zybach: Was there damage on the Dunn Forest?

Marvin Rowley: Yes. The map of wind-throw included the Dunn Forest.

Bob Zybach: You described to us how you and John Beuter took over the forest management and forest supervising jobs in 1973. Would you go over that again?

Marvin Rowley: When I took over as forest manager in July 1973, the Forest Management Team consisted of myself and one forest technician. The Forest Management and Forest Engineering secretaries were to type letters for me, so I didn’t even have a secretary. To get my book work done, I

Marvin Rowley: came to work early and left late. During the work day, I laid out the harvest areas, supervised the contractors, and supervised all the activities on the forest. Bill Davies used to write an annual report consisting of one or two pages, and I helped him do that by keeping the harvest records. John and I came up with an annual report that covered all the forest-operation activities, including the teaching and research uses. My first annual report was sixteen pages long, and within four years it was over 100 pages long. This plus all the other activities began to overwhelm me and I asked my part-time secretaries to do more and more. In 1976, John Beuter was appointed head of the Forest Management Department. When he saw how much work I was requiring from his secretary, he hired me a secretary of my own. My first secretary was Nancy House. She was one of the best. She organized my files and made order where order was needed. She handled everything without difficulty, but she only lasted six months. Then there was Florence Johnson, and next Diane. Between the two of them, they worked until 1980. Then we hired Ellen Hooven. She is a forestry graduate from the University of Washington, and understood the job from the first day. She needed to learn a lot, because she had been out of the job market while she raised a family. She learned and worked out in a tremendous way. During this time, up to 1982, with a helper and a secretary we did a lot of the forest work using student work crews and I supervised them, too. We had a full-time summer maintenance crew who worked on road upkeep, regeneration surveys, and so forth. Then, during the winter months, we ran a tree-planting program with anywhere from 10 to 40 students. When Jeff Garver was hired in 1981, he became my third full-time assistant. Then, with the beginning of a forest inventory, we hired two more full-timers to set up the initial design and control for the new forest inventory. That brings us up to the beginning of the forest inventory and a major expansion of the forest operations.

Bob Zybach: What kind of problems did you have setting up this inventory system?

Marvin Rowley: One of the main problems was the variation of magnetic attractions, so that using a magnetic compass to run cruise lines was difficult. The readings could vary by as much as from five to ten degrees. We solved this problem by running control lines with a transit control. The transit survey followed roads for the most part, and we found that the rock on the roads was full of iron that caused the roads to influence the magnetic attraction. If the survey points stayed on the same side of the road, the magnetic declination stayed nearly the same. But, if a survey point fell on the opposite side of the road, there was a drastic change in the magnetic declination. This could be as much as five degrees off by just crossing the road. This, along with the local variations there naturally, gave some real problems. For instance, the original survey in the 1850s identified as much as six degrees variation along the west line of Section 6, T11S, R5W at the head of Soap Creek.

Bob Zybach: Tell us about your experiences of working with the students as part-time workers on the forest.

Marvin Rowley: My first experience directing student work crews started about 1970. In 1969, we had removed wind-thrown trees from an east-sloping hill on the Dunn Forest and machine piled and burned the slash. Student work crews planted the area the following winter. The survival rate was only about 20 percent at the end of the first growing season, and Bill Davies said we wouldn’t do any more jobs like that if we couldn’t get regeneration established. I went out to the site and pulled dead seedlings, and found that 70 percent of the roots were “J” rooted. It was bad planting that had caused the poor survival. The main reason for the bad planting was students supervising students, and they didn’t feel they had the authority to correct the planters when they made mistakes.

Marvin Rowley: The next year, in December 1969 and January 1970, we clearcut-harvested 30 acres of scattered timber on the north side of Mitzy Point at the head of Oak Creek. Bill had me supervise the student planting crew to ensure the area was planted properly. That was the first year a woman applied for work on the planting crew, and Bill said no women were allowed on the crew. This student made a beeline for Dean’s office, and Bill was informed that she would be on the crew. She stuck it out through the planting, but there were times when she would have stayed home if she hadn’t made such a big issue out of it. Anyway, we got about 85 percent survival on that planting, and I supervised all the planting from them on. Since that year, we always had women on the planting crew and even supervising the planting crew.

Marvin Rowley: When I took over as research forest manager July 1, 1973, I had to rely on students to accomplish most of the labor-intensive jobs like planting, roadside maintenance, herbicide applications, fertilizing, inventories. The average number of students working part-time was around 50 per year. Many of these students became like family to me as we trained and worked. As the number of women enrolling in forestry increased, so did the number of women increase on the work crews. Most of the students came to work inexperienced, so we were always training them in safe operations and procedures. Some of them worked at one job for a short period, and others worked for the full time they were students. Many of them became permanent employees after they graduated, like Debbie Johnson, who is the inventory forester on the present staff.

Marvin Rowley: Susan Sahnow was another student who worked for me her full four years as a student on a variety of jobs. She ran a farm-type tractor mowing road shoulders, planted trees, and worked on the summer maintenance crew. She was raised on a farm near Forest Grove, so she had a good background of work experience to build on. She tells people she learned more from me working on the forest than she did in the classroom. Susan is working for the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission, setting up and maintaining interpretive centers in northwestern Oregon.

Marvin Rowley: Of course, most of the students who worked on the forest were men, and many of them worked for most of their time at OSU. They were the students who needed part-time work to help pay the bills, and usually they were very good workers. One of the tree planters for a couple of years was Ernie Richardson, a black from the streets of New York who came west to play football and get a degree in forestry. He was about six-foot-six-inches tall and weighed about 250 pounds. He was a great football player, but a poor student. He never learned how to study, but he was a great tree-planter. When he swung his hoe-dad, it buried to the handle. Then, a slight pull back opened a hole, and in went the tree. He could plant about twice as many as the rest of the students on the crew. I followed him checking on his planting, because I thought he couldn’t be doing a good job if he planted that fast. I never found a poorly planted tree in his row. After many ups and downs, Ernie finally graduated with a degree in Forest Management. He worked for Crown Zellerbach for a few years. The last I heard from him, he was selling cars in Gresham, Oregon.

Marvin Rowley: We used to have a student get-together at New Year’s, when the tree-planters had about run out of energy. We made a stew in a five-gallon kettle—we called it “tree planters stew,” and had homemade bread and apple cobbler. The students came to our house with their wives, kids, and friends to share the evening. The year Ernie planted, we had planned on 35 and only 20 showed up. I thought my wife and I would be eating leftover stew until February, but Ernie

Marvin Rowley: came to our rescue. When he was on his fourth bowl of stew, Marion [Rowley] asked him if he was going to have some dessert. He said, “Yes, I’ll have dessert, and then I’ll have another bowl of stew.” And he did. When he finished, the kettle was empty.

Bob Zybach: How many black people worked on the forest that you can think of?

Marvin Rowley: Not many. Ernie is the one that stands out. I don’t remember others. I had two blacks working for me when I was logging, before I became forest manager. They were Walt Watson and Jim Pearce. Walt ran tractor and a variety of other jobs as the need arose, and so did Jim. One day Bill Davies was out going over our logging west of Cronemiller Lake when Jim was running a skidder picking up scattered wind-fall trees. He had picked up a turn of logs and was dragging them down a dirt road just as Bill and I sat down on the upper side of the road to eat our lunch. Jim was looking back at the logs to make sure they would miss a small seedling on the lower side of the road. The front wheel of the skidder climbed the bank a little. When the logs cleared the seedling, he turned to the right, and, with that one wheel on the bank, it caused the skidder to overturn no more than ten feet from where we were sitting. All we could see was the bottom of the skidder and the wheels. Jim came crawling out of the cab, unhurt but somewhat shaken. I said to him, “Jim, you almost turned white.” We all had a good laugh about that, and in about an hour we had the skidder back on its wheels, checked over, and ready to work. Jim lives in Brownsville now, and we still visit occasionally.

Bob Zybach: There is one thing you mentioned to me—about how people were assuming some trees were shaped like a rocking-chair rocker because of soil movement. And you pointed out that the trees were misshapen due to a thick stand of young trees being pushed over by a heavy snow in 1936. Then you mentioned a couple of other weather incidents—an ice storm in January 1940 and the flood of 1964. I wonder if you can tell us what kinds of permanent effects, or even short-term effects, those events must have had on the forest?

Marvin Rowley: Well, the snow of ‘36 caused a lot of snow-break, and flattened some stands that were too thickly spaced. Some of these trees lived, and turned the tip leader to vertical—leaving the butt of the tree misfigured for the life of that tree and causing the tree to lose the value of the first 16 feet at least. That storm and the ice storm of 1940 broke over 70 percent of the tops in some young 30–50-year-old stands. If this didn’t involve the whole green crown, the tree put out a new leader. In some stands, researchers found that top rot got into the stem at this break, and the trees lost one foot of the stem to the rot for each year. Twenty years after the break, the rot could be down from the break 20 feet. This happens in stands with low vigor, and the larger the diameter of the stem at the break, the more likely the rot. But, in stands with a high vigor, there is very little loss from rot. This shows up on the Blodgett Tract in Columbia County. That site is a high “two” or low “one.” Even though there are more ice storms in that area, the rot incidence is less than in McDonald-Dunn Forest.

Bob Zybach: Do you think there was a genetic adaptation up there?

Marvin Rowley: No. I think the vigor of the stand controls the outcome of the damage. It’s the soil and climate, and maybe the amount of rain when rot spores form that keep it washed off of the fresh breaks.

Bob Zybach: How about 1964 flooding?

Marvin Rowley: It was a 100-year event and probably a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. It had minor influence on the overall forest. There were many headwall failures near the top of the ridges, some creek

Marvin Rowley: beds were washed clean, and a few culverts lost, but the storm didn’t cause major changes to even one percent of the stands. Most of them are part of the natural process in a young mountain range like our Coast Range, that has been an uplifting type of process. The headwall failures are unstable areas that are the reverse of the uplifting. I was in Peru in 1979, and flew in a light airplane over a branch of the Andes that was about 9,000 feet high. All along the top of this sharp mountain ridge, there were a series of headwall failures—even though the area was uninhabited for over 50 miles.

Bob Zybach: How about Oak Creek and Soap Creek. Did flood water back up anywhere near the research forests or on the Soap Creek ag land?

Marvin Rowley: The flood washed out a few culverts. One large culvert on the county road just east of Sulphur Springs [Sulphur Springs Road] was washed out, and many of the headwall failures sent surges of water down the creeks that flooded areas for short periods.

Bob Zybach: It sounds like, from what you are describing, that, in the last 150 to 200 years, the principal shapers of the forests have been wind storms and people using fire and logging?

Marvin Rowley: Yes, I think that is true.

Bob Zybach: We haven’t talked about any fires in this area. What has your experience been with fire?

Marvin Rowley: There haven’t been any major lightning fires on the forest during the years I have been here. One fire covered less than a quarter of an acre. There have been man-caused fires, with most of them being slash fires set to remove the logging slash to reduce the fire hazard and clear the ground for planting. One of these slash fires, in October 1949, burned into green timber in several areas on the head of Oak Creek. These areas were salvaged about ten years later.

Bob Zybach: You are using fire and logging to maintain a productive forest, but it seems as if we are talking about timber production, and not the other component—such as recreation and wildlife. What about them?

Marvin Rowley: I don’t think we have to differentiate between timber productivity and recreation and wildlife. I think they all work together. I believe we can modify our forest to keep it healthy, and the wildlife will be there and not suffer because of our management. If we let the forest deteriorate, the amount of wildlife will vary. But, if we keep a variety of age classes, we will have that habitat needed by a wider variety of wildlife. Some of them use grassy or brush openings, and some of them use dense stands. And I know that recreational opportunities are there in the managed forest, probably in more abundance than in a wilderness.

Bob Zybach: So, is a productive forest one that produces values that the people want?

Marvin Rowley: I believe a productive forest is one that produces income and values for the owner within the laws of the land, and I believe, when the laws of the land become so restrictive that they take away the ability to use property for income and personal values, they need to be changed.

Bob Zybach: Would you call that an unproductive forest?

Marvin Rowley: Yes. If a law restricts a landowner from harvesting and making an income to pay his expenses, then the law has taken the property. This discussion gets us away from managing a public forest and into private forest management, but it is the most important issue facing landowners and foresters today. It has to do with the Endangered Species Act [ESA] and how it is enforced. The ESA calls for species to be protected when they have been scientifically proven to be endangered, and that is one of the main problems. Much of the work done to prove endangerment is not scientific, but hypothetical in nature. A

Marvin Rowley: few observations are made and a judgment made, without fully proving if the condition of “endangered” is really there.

Bob Zybach: I want to ask you a few more questions about the Arboretum, but on the soil issue. There is a soil survey that was done about the same time as the timber inventory. Is that all tied into the forest inventory you and John Beuter started?

Marvin Rowley: We did the soil survey before the timber inventory was started. We hired a former student, Susan Jorgenson, with a minor in Forest Soils to do the inventory. She ran grid lines over the whole forest, dug soil pits to get a good soil profile, and put all the soil types on our main forest map. I checked over her work as it progressed, and made suggestions as needed. There were very few disagreements as this work progressed. Because of my extensive experience of working on the forest for over 25 years, I was able to point out problems. Once Susan had typed a soil north of Calloway Creek as a well-drained soil type, and I asked her to go back and check it because, when I built a road through the site in 1961, I had found it to be very poor-drained soil. Susan’s resurvey of the site proved me to be correct.

Bob Zybach: You talked about a soil problem on Berry Creek that we didn’t get recorded. What was that about?

Marvin Rowley: This was about the Fish and Wildlife Department developing a research site on the South Fork of Berry Creek. They built a dam in the creek with a weir to control the flow of water on a quarter-mile section of the creek. All the excess water was diverted around the area in a canal dug in a level field on the south side of the study area. The canal returned the water to the main channel just east of the 100 Road. When the creek flooded in the winter, the canal that started out as an eight-foot wide by four-foot deep ditch eroded down through the soil until it had eroded a ditch 20 to 30 feet wide and 10 to 12 feet deep. All this material washed down to the main channel, and filled it in until there wasn’t room for the water to go under the bridge on the road. After fighting the situation for a number of years, I installed a concrete dip with a 24-inch culvert under it. During low water, all the flow went through the culvert; during high water, most of the water flowed over the concrete. The next big rain storm after installation of this low-water crossing resulted in the water spilling over the concrete slab and cutting through the silt and rock deposited from the bypass ditch. It cut down to the original creek bed, about eight feet lower, and revealed a square timber sticking out of the bank that must have come from the sawmill that operated upstream from the study area. During the 1960s, I found the remains of this mill and several shacks that had been used to house the mill crew. There were young trees growing up through them, and the roofs had mostly caved in, making a home for wood rats. Since that time, all the evidence of buildings has rotted into the ground, and all that is left is the young trees. It is amazing how fast the works of man can be obliterated by nature.

Marvin Rowley: It reminds me of a time during World War II when I was a soldier in the 41st Infantry in the southern Philippines. We were on a two-day combat patrol along the shore of a large island. About the middle of the second day, our Filipino guide, Manuel, stopped us in a young stand of trees and brush. He began looking all around and I asked him what the problem was. He said, “If I can find the house, I can get a bearing on where the trail goes into the forest.” We found the remains to a house with trees up to six inches in diameter and 30-feet tall growing where the house had stood. Manuel said, “This was a field last time I was here four years ago.”

Marvin Rowley: Manuel had a wife and two children, and when we finished the patrol he asked me if I could get him some canned milk. I said I didn’t know of any, and he told me his baby was dying be-

Marvin Rowley: cause his wife couldn’t nurse it and they were keeping it alive with sugar water. I went into the kitchen area and found two cans of milk and give them to Manuel. We left the area a couple of days later and returned three months later. The baby had died. When I left the Philippines, I lost contact with Manuel.

Bob Zybach: You mentioned Deep Creek as a tributary to Oak Creek. Could you show me on the map where it is so we can mark it?

Marvin Rowley: Yes. The reason we named it Deep Creek was because it was eroded down about eight feet below the surrounding surfaces, with almost vertical banks. There had been a headwall failure upstream, and I think the surge of water resulting from that mass failure did the eroding to cut it so deep. In that general area, there were other mass failures over the past 20 or 30 years. Just north of this area, in Section 18, T11S, R5W, I found a crack running along the contour of the land that was from 6 to 12 inches wide and 300 feet long. The ground on the downhill side of the crack had slumped about a foot, but didn’t move any farther. This crack was visible for several years, but eventually filled with soil and duff. I found several areas on the forest where this same thing occurred. I call them “near mass failures.”

Bob Zybach: Do you think they will fail next time?

Marvin Rowley: We never know. Some of these were located away from any of man’s influences. Others may have been because of the water table being influenced by roads. They are something we need to be aware of when we enter these areas.

Bob Zybach: Would they have anything to do with road building, or are they just a part of the nature of the terrain?

Marvin Rowley: Probably both. There was no human activity near the failures in Section 18, but one in Section 16, with a culvert above it, could have been caused by the water out-flowing the culvert. There was a mass failure on the West Fork of Oak Creek that was caused by four-wheel-drive vehicles using a skid road and destroying the water bars before the 1964 flood. The waters ran down the skid road for about 1,500 feet to a waterbar cut into a rock-surfaced road that routed all that flow onto a steep slope. This slope overloaded and failed. It flowed into a steep ravine, and ran about a half mile to the West Fork of Oak Creek Road. The road stopped the slide. At that point it was a mixture of mud and rotten logs 10 to 20 feet deep and up to 50 feet wide.

Bob Zybach: I want to ask you about Colverson’s Peavy Arboretum plan from February 1982. Did it have something to do with the soil survey?

Marvin Rowley: No, it was not connected to the soil survey. Peter Colverson worked on this plan as part of his major study as a student, and then worked part-time for me on Arboretum maintenance and planning. There was a list of plants in the Arboretum that was very outdated. Trees and shrubs had been planted and listed over the years, but no one followed up on planting to make sure they lived. As a result, many of the listings did not exist. Under Peter’s plan, we developed a grid system with a base much like the one used in the Hoyt Arboretum in Portland. When the grid was in place, we inventoried all the plants and located them on the map by grid numbers. For the first time, we had a complete list of plants and their locations in the Arboretum. One of the things this plan did was establish an order for future plantings. Over the years, species were planted with no guidelines as to where they were planted or what they were. We determined to group plantings and stay with western United State species as much as possible.

Bob Zybach: On top of the mountain near the Powder House Saddle on the section line between Section 35 and Section 36, there is evidence that there was a lookout tower there. Do you know anything about it?

Marvin Rowley: Yes. It wasn’t a lookout tower. It was a radio repeater station. The State Forestry Department built a small building for the radio equipment, and climbed a large tree and rigged an antenna in it. They had a telephone wire running down the ridge to the Arboretum. They used to communicate to the radio, and broadcast and receive messages from vehicles as needed. The concrete blocks and boards you found are what is left of the building that housed the radio. They had a jeep road from the main road that they used to haul batteries to the radio as needed. This was in use until the State Forestry Department moved from Peavy Arboretum to Philomath in 1964.

Marvin Rowley: When the State Forestry Department Office moved from Peavy Arboretum to Philomath in 1964, they moved the building they used as an office with them to Philomath. There were several other buildings in the Arboretum that were sold, and were to be removed from the site. I believe Georgia-Pacific purchased the buildings. The old kitchen, dining room building, from the CCC days was remodeled and given to the OSU Foundation. The remodeled building is Peavy Lodge. The other buildings were remodeled or removed, and a new residence was built in their place. These buildings are the others on the east side of the creek in the Arboretum, and were given to the College of Forestry.

Bob Zybach: We were talking about the various buildings in the Arboretum area. Would you tell us about the Forestry Club Cabin?

Marvin Rowley: Soon after the College began acquiring land for a university forest, the students and faculty built a log cabin on the site of the present cabin. It was about 40 by 60 feet, with one door in the middle of the south side and a huge brick fireplace at each end of the building. It had a shake roof, and in the beginning it had a dirt floor. Sometime before 1949 a concrete floor was added. This building was used by faculty and students as a meeting place and party room. In February 1949, it burned to the ground after a fraternity had used it for a party. It was determined that the logs had developed rot near the fireplace, and a hot fire had caused this to

Marvin Rowley: catch fire and smolder until it opened to a draft of air and ignited the whole structure. Within days, the Forestry Club had investigated the possibility of reconstructing. There was $6,000 available from the state insurance fund, and it was determined that would be enough to get the basic structure built if we used mostly donated labor. I was a junior student in Logging Engineering at the time and was taking, as electives, all the Architecture courses Oregon State University had to offer. I was drafted by the Forestry Club to design a new cabin. I came up with three plans and, after the club reviewed the plans and the campus administration reviewed them, we settled on the plan you see now.

Marvin Rowley: By September 1949, we began building. The Logging Engineering students, using a D7 Army surplus tractor, logged trees from a stand near the Oak Creek Saddle, and hauled them to the war-surplus sawmill on Lower Oak Creek. Forest Products students did the milling, squaring the logs on three sides, and they were hauled to the cabin site in war-surplus trucks that were used as student transportation during the week. We constructed a preservative-soaking tank at the cabin site, and began a cold-soaking treatment of the logs. The foundation was poured in October and the walls were started soon after. We set the roof trusses in place over Easter vacation and installed the decking. By having some professors bring their field labs to the site to install the cedar shakes, we were ready for the first use of the building in May 1950. I was also the construction foreman for the job, and took part in every phase of the work right down to helping finish the concrete floor just days before the first use. Mel Lieurance, a Forest Management student from Kansas, whose father was masonry contractor, had the know-how to direct that part of the work.

Marvin Rowley: The shell was completed, but there was a lot of finish work left to do on the inside. Students of the class of 1951 and ‘52 completed the work. The fireplace was contracted out to Robert Wilson, a major contractor from Corvallis, who was also a student across campus and just getting started in the contracting business. Over the years, a heat system was added and then improved, shutters were added to reduce window breaking by vandals, an outdoor balcony was removed for the same reason and the most recent addition has been the indoor restrooms replacing the outhouses.

Bob Zybach: Where were the restrooms located?

Marvin Rowley: They were west of the cabin, up on the hillside in that stand of Douglas-fir. That whole hillside was clearcut to supply the logs for the first cabin built in 1925. I think this stand is a natural stand, although they started the forest nursery about the same time as the cabin was built. These trees seem to be too natural—there aren’t any rows that stand out like in a planted stand. To the north of this stand, there is a grove of black locust that was planted about that same date. Many of them were blown over by the October 12, 1962, wind storm. A few years ago, I had a student work crew cut the wind-throw into rails for the rail fence south of the cabin. That was another project aimed at reducing damage to the cabin site. People were riding horses all over the lawn when the ground was wet. The rail fence ended that problem. The black locust rails were still solid 12 years after they fell, and are just as solid today.

Bob Zybach: They used to cook “Bean Hole Beans” here. Where did they do that?

Marvin Rowley: Yes. Professor Harry Patterson would. Had a trench dug about 18 inches deep and 24 inches wide, and long enough to handle about a dozen one-gallon cans. They would build a fire in this trench and fire it until they had a good bed of coals. Then they threw a little dirt in on the coals. Then the sealed cans filled with beans were placed in the trench. Then the dirt was filled back into the trench covering the cans. This was done the day before they were going to be

Marvin Rowley: eaten. When the crew was ready to eat at noon the next day, the cans were uncovered steaming hot and ready to eat. The trench was just to the west of the porch, and ran south about 15 feet.

Bob Zybach: Was the maple tree here then?

Marvin Rowley: Yes. It seems like it has been there ever since the first cabin was built.

Bob Zybach: The Forestry Club Cabin is 45 years old now. Do you think you will be around for its 50th anniversary?

Marvin Rowley: Yes, if I keep my cholesterol controlled.

Bob Zybach: There is a pond in the Arboretum. How was that constructed?

Marvin Rowley: Sometime in the early 1960s, the College of Forestry had a grant of money given to improve the Arboretum. They hired two students to work the whole summer, putting in water lines and building walkways and trails. They routed the creek to its present location and the pond was constructed. They used dynamite to shoot a ditch to reroute the creek, and I built the pond using a TD-9 International tractor. That was while I was a contract logger working on the forest. I uncovered a cast-iron griddle while building the pond. It had evidently been buried back during the CCC days. I had run over it with the tractor and broke a corner off. I took it to out shop and welded it together, and used it on campouts for years. I lost it some time in the 1970s. I think my son used it and never returned it.

Marvin Rowley: Another interesting event from that summer was the dynamiting of the ditch. This was accomplished using ditching-grade dynamite. A steel bar was driven into the mud about two feet and one stick of this 80-percent ditching powder was inserted into the hole. There was one hole per foot for the whole ditch, and the whole thing was exploded using one dynamite cap in the last stick placed. The students asked me if they should remove the windows from the old CCC building, and I advised them not to bother because the dirt would not throw that far. I didn’t go into the building to check them, and that was a fatal error on my part. The windows were sitting on the sills without anything holding them in place but gravity. The shock wave from the explosive blew them all in onto the floor, resulting in a lot of broken glass and one red face. I was right on one thing—the dirt didn’t even hit the building.

Bob Zybach: Did you uncover anything else?

Marvin Rowley: About the same time we were logging to the west of the Arboretum, I found the remains of an outdoor latrine about 60 or 70 feet south of the gate on the road to the Forestry Cabin. It was about 10 by 20 feet in size, and was about a 12- or 16-holer. When I found it, the walls were still standing but the roof had caved in. The pack rats had used it for years. They say these are good sites to dig up artifacts in.

Bob Zybach: Wow. That’s the biggest latrine I’ve ever heard of. Did they have any kind of privacy?

Marvin Rowley: You obviously were not in the service. There is no privacy in the restrooms or showers, no screens or dividers of any kind. You are just like goldfish in a bowl. You learn to live that way. Like overseas in combat as an example. We had been on the front line living in trenches for three weeks. When we came down off the mountain, we came to a creek about the size of Oak Creek and they allowed us to clean up. A platoon of men spread out along the bank, and stripped off and waded in for a bath. Then, when that campaign ended, they mounted a wing tank from an airplane on a platform along side of this creek, and filled it full of water and mounted a shower head on it. That was our shower. It was about 50 feet from the road that the whole area used. If you took a shower, there were no screens. You stood out for everyone to look at. You lose your modesty fast, or you go dirty.

Marvin Rowley: Near this same gate, there was an irrigation ditch that ran from the creek on the south edge of the nursery southeast to the neighboring ranch. This ranch had water rights from the pioneer days, and used the ditch until they installed pipeline from above the Forestry Club Cabin to their ranch—sometime in the 1950s when Harry Nettleton was forest manager.

Bob Zybach: What is the biggest change you had noticed in your whole time at the OSU Research Forest?

Marvin Rowley: The biggest change was going from an unmanaged forest to a managed forest. Before 1956, there was very little done with the timber stands. The logged-over areas had been planted, but the older stands, from 40 years on up, were filled with wind-throw, insect-killed trees, various rots, and deformed trees caused by snow and ice storms. Ninety percent of the forest was thinned or salvaged in the first 12 years of management, resulting in a dramatic change in the looks of the stands. Before the rehabilitation work was done, the College of Forestry personnel were somewhat apologetic about the forest. Afterwards, they began to brag about it. Because we removed the small trees from the stand, it actually looked like there was more volume than before the operation took place.

Bob Zybach: Do you think the appearance of the forest is an important consideration?

Marvin Rowley: Yes. When I managed the forest, I always tried to imagine what it was going to look like to the people who used it for recreation and how it looked from the valley below. I made a series of clearcuts along the east side of the 500 Road that always had tall trees blocking the view from the valley below. I figured, by the time I cut the trees that blocked the view, the first cutting area would be green, 15- to 20-year-old reproduction and be pleasing the eyes of the neighbors. In the early 1960s, we had a tour of Forest Service personnel visiting our thinning operation. One area we had thinned four or five years previous to the visit looked as if it had never been entered. They questioned my information until I showed them the stumps and the skid trails. They were difficult to see, because the needle drop and forbs’ growth had covered them.

Marvin Rowley: Another big change has been the development of a network of good all-weather roads to give access to almost all of the forest. The miles of all-weather roads increased from about 50 miles to a total of over 110 miles from 1956 to 1996. This gave us year-around access to most of the forest, making it available to researchers and forestry classes.

Marvin Rowley: A third change has been the use of the forest for research. Before 1973, there was no control of research projects that registered location and type of research. Research had been located on the forest in a haphazard manner. As a result, much of the work was lost as soon as the researcher finished the project. John Beuter and I began registering the research projects in 1973, and requiring the researchers to furnish data as to what they were studying. Then we approved and assigned an area where it was located, and required a report on the results of the research.

Bob Zybach: What is your proudest accomplishment during your time on the forest?

Marvin Rowley: I think it is the demonstration of carrying on an active harvesting operation on a forest adjacent to a rather large metropolitan area for over 30 years without upsetting most of them. In fact, as the operation developed, the recreational use of the forest increased dramatically, and part of that was due to our operation. More areas were accessible, and they looked more pleasing to the eye than the unmanaged forest.

Bob Zybach: Did you operate on all the forest?

Marvin Rowley: No, there are a few areas we reserved from harvesting because of unique characteristics—such

Marvin Rowley: as Calloway Creek from Cronemiller Lake west to the Powder House Saddle and north of the 500 Road. Also, the area southeast of the switchback on the 600 Road. These areas contain remnants of old-growth stands that are important as examples and study areas for researchers and forestry classes.

Bob Zybach: This brings us to the conclusion of this interview. Do you think an oral history of this nature is worthwhile to capture facts and information?

Marvin Rowley: Yes. The early foresters in Germany developed their management plans by looking back ten years to see what actions were taken, how well they followed the management plan, and then developed a plan for the next decade based some on how well they followed the previous plan. They had records going back 300 and 400 years to relate to—also maybe carrying them through three or four rotations. Without this looking back, we can be making the same mistakes over and over again.

Marvin Rowley: In looking at the confusion in the forest administration and management we are going through in our nation and in the world today, I think it is important to develop some good sound rules to guide us in the management and use of our natural resources. On the political front, we need sound laws to direct our management policies. These laws should be general. They should be based on facts as they are, and not on untruths or emotions. They should let the foresters in the field design the actual management plans and carry them out. The field plans should be developed by experienced personnel on the actual area, and not in some distant office. The most important tool we have to manage our forests with is our feet. We have to walk the area to discover the needs first-hand, using all the information available to us. If we follow a plan based along this line, the ecosystem will be in good shape.

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