Soap Creek Valley · Timeline
Timeline
A chronology of Soap Creek Valley built out of what the narrators actually said — every entry verbatim, with the person who said it and the printed page it is on.
Bob Zybach divided the valley's history into eight periods in his 1999 thesis. Two more sit either side of them here: what the narrators say about the valley before the 1844 Donation Land Claims, and what has happened since the last interview was recorded. Everything in between is theirs.
- to 1844 Before 1844 146 entries
- 1845–1859 1845–1859 97 entries
- 1860–1890 1860–1890 70 entries
- 1891–1920 1891–1920 279 entries
- 1921–1940 1921–1940 378 entries
- 1941–1950 1941–1950 198 entries
- 1951–1970 1951–1970 170 entries
- 1971–1995 1971–1995 171 entries
- 1996–2026 1996–2026 11 entries
- no date given Undated 3 entries
Events several narrators remember
- Houses, families and neighbours of the valley
- Vanderburg family record: births, marriages, deaths
- Work, careers and appointments
- Changing forest cover, planting and old growth
- Farms, crops and livestock
- Sawmills, logging camps and the timber trade
- Schools and schooling in the valley
- The OSU School and College of Forestry
- Roads, trails and travel
- The Soap Creek Valley History Project
- The Great Depression in Soap Creek Valley
- Sulphur Springs: hotel, bicycling and automobiling
- Wildlife of the valley: deer, bear, beaver, birds
- The Soap Creek Schoolhouse Foundation
- World War II
- World War I and its demand for lumber and crops
- The new Soap Creek schoolhouse, 1899-1900
- Murphy family record: births, marriages, deaths
- The Army establishes Camp Adair
- Cook family record: births, marriages, deaths
- The coming of the automobile and the tractor
- CCC Camp Arboretum and the 3-C boys
- Paul M. Dunn's deanship at the School of Forestry
- Soap Creek Valley, 1990s
- Tampico: the valley's short-lived town
How this timeline was built
Every entry is a sentence a narrator said, or a line Bob wrote in the thesis chronology, copied without change. Nothing here is a paraphrase and nothing is a synthesis. Where two people give a different year for the same event, both entries stand and the disagreement is marked rather than resolved — the disagreement is part of the record.
