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Proving up and pulling out: early-20th-century homesteaders in southwestern Oregon

Stacy LundgrenUS Forest Service

INTRODUCTION

The Forest Homestead Act of 1906 precipitated one of the final rushes for free land in American history. A nascent land management agency, the USDA Forest Service, created a systematized process for the review and documentation of purported forest homestead claims. Over one hundred years later, the forest-homestead examination files of the (then) Crater National Forest in southwestern Oregon provide an historical record that exposes the motivations and actions of numerous individuals as they negotiated the steps entailed in the public-land-disposal process. This project does two things: first, it explores the phenomenon of homesteading; and secondly, it focuses on the activities of individual homesteaders.

RESEARCH OBJECTIVES

METHODS AND MATERIALS

1.Archival research2.Archaeological survey

Archival material included: Crater National Forest (Rogue River-Siskiyou

National Forest) homestead files:1.Form #253, ‘Application Under Act of June 11,

1906’2.Form #110, ‘Report on Agricultural Homestead

Applications’3.Form #655 (“six-five-five” in ranger parlance),

‘Report on Agricultural Settlement’4.Photographs, sketch maps, affidavits, trial

transcripts, telegrams, letters, timber estimates, newspaper clippings, internal memoranda

Census records: http:/persi.heritagequestonline.com/hqoweb/library/do/census/search/basic.

Geneaological data: http://www.familysearch.org/.

Land patent records: http://www.glorecords.blm.gov/PatentSearch/Default.asp?.

Tax assessment records: http://web.jacksoncounty.org/fca/index.cfm.

RESULTS

.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Determine answers to several questions, among them:

Who were the people who attempted forest homesteading in a rugged mountainous setting?

What were their primary motivations?

What sort of housing did they fashion for themselves in the higher slopes of the Cascade Range and Siskiyou Mountains?

Where upon the land did they choose to place their habitation areas?

What were the spatial arrangements of those habitation areas?

What today is the nature of the archaeological record of the forest homesteading phenomenon of the early 20th century?

The author is indebted to the following people: David Brauner, Ph.D., Loren Davis, Ph.D., Ronald Doel, Ph.D., and Jessica White, Ph.D., MAIS committee members, Oregon State University; Ann Ramage, Medford BLM; and Jeffrey M. LaLande, Ph.D., Forest archaeologist, Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest. Oregon Archaeological Society provided partial funding.

As an example of documentary archaeology, this investigation of early 20th century homesteading within the Crater National Forest has revealed the ‘intimate details of everyday life.’ Individuals--both men and women, settlers and Forest Service personnel--contributed to the settlement of forest lands in southwestern Oregon in the early 20th century.

Very small amounts of land were actually cleared in the forest--far less than required by the law. Men and women--whom we now know by name, age, and occupation--all seized one of the final opportunities in the 20th century to gain access to free public land. That their efforts frequently failed was due in part to the nature of the land itself--high elevation coniferous forest--and in part to their own lack of good faith. It was the trees that were valuable, not the agricultural potential, for there really was little of the latter.

This comprehensive examination of the people ‘behind the sites,’ and the forest officials who documented them, tells a story not so much of the ‘pioneer’ myth--that of hard work and determination--but rather a concerted effort by groups of people endeavoring to procure for themselves ‘Uncle Sam’s acres’ through inventiveness, mutual support (e.g., serving as each other’s witnesses), and self-interested avarice.

Analyses:Demographic dataSettlement dataBuilt environmentLand-use data

Data source:447 forest homestead files 51 files with Form #655, ‘Report on Agricultural Settlement’ 1. 27 forest homestead claims on public land (NF and BLM) given archaeological survey2. 24 forest homestead claims on private land (today’s landowners: lumber companies)

Below and right: Ira Johnson and his sons, Harley and Charley, claimed adjacent forest homesteads. Ira cultivated ½ acre; Harley, 2 ½ . Both occupied their claims in the summer only, spending the rest of the year in their Ashland home (Harley was only 16). Ira’s claim was allowed, Harley’s disallowed.

Left: The entire Mahoney family filed multiple forest homestead claims. Father Michael filed a second time on a claim after being rejected the first time; daughter Gertie filed on two separate claims; Prof. Albert (ex-husband of daughter Mary Alice) filed on two separate claims; and daughter Jennie, the schoolteacher, filed on one of Prof. Albert’s rejected claims. (Jennie had, in fact, sold her interest to the Rogue River Lumber Company prior to actually gaining title to the land.) As for Mary Alice, she and her ex, George, filed for adjacent claims, she in the SW quarter of Sec. 23, he in the NW quarter of Sec. 26, both on the same side of Box Creek .

Hall claim,

1911.

Mahoney family claims. All photos, 1910.

Mary AliceGeorge

Michael

Family home, Butte Falls

L to R: Terrill site map, 1982; Bradshaw claim, 1910; Terrill claim, 1909.

Terrill site

1982

2004

1982

Spencer claim, 1909.

Ira Johnson’s Form #655, 1908.

Charley Johnson family, 1908.

Harley Johnson claim, 1908.

Above and right: A naturopath with an office in Portland, Oregon, Dr. Grover actually began his push for land in ‘The Unsurveyed’ in 1907, by writing to Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot from his home in Los Angeles, “my health is such that I require outdoor work…could I enter as a squatter on unsurveyed land?” In the following years Dr. Grover kept up a steady bombardment of communications from his practice in Portland--telegrams, night cables, letters written on his practice’s letterhead, letters to the Forest Supervisor, letters to the Chief, letters from his D.C. lawyer Horace Stevens—to no avail. His claim was denied.

Grover’s Form #110, 1907.

Grover claim, 1910.

The ‘Unsurveyed’, T34S, R2E,1930.39 claims by 1914.

Ranger Gribble, Land Examiner and Photographer, 1910.

Christian Lystig claim, 1908.