Story by Haley Rivet
Photo by Sumi Kim
Nine birdhouses are hanging outside the forest home of Maria Fisher in Florence, Oregon. She had just moved from a suburban neighborhood to a house in the woods, where she could live in harmony with wild animals.
Throughout the spring, none of the birdhouses had a single bird. “Can’t you make the birds come to our yard? Please,” Maria said to her husband, Amen. “When you hang a box in a tree and nobody lives in it, it doesn’t give anything to anybody.”
Amen decided to create habitats for the birds out of what he thought they use in nature. The Fishers began to collect driftwood and small branches that had naturally fallen off the trees to create birdhouses.
“The way the tree grows, the way the mosses are colored – all these elements combine to inspire us,” Maria says. The Fishers donate these houses to any community auction fundraiser that asks for one. They were one of the venders at the Florence Winter Folk Festival, an event that happens once a year to benefit the local school districts.
The people of Florence truly embody the age-old saying, “it takes a village to raise a child.” When the funding for music programs was cut from the Mapleton School District, the community banded together to create a unique experience for their students. The festival was created 12 years ago in hopes of putting music programs back into the local schools.
The Friends of the Florence Event Center is a group of volunteers determined to make events like the Winter Folk Festival happen. They raise money to pay for teachers to teach in local schools using the curriculum they provide, which includes the songs that the festival’s performing artists play. They also fund the buses that take the children to the event center. Every year there is a theme incorporated into the design of the backdrop and set, which the children work with local artists to create. A picture from every child in Siuslaw Elementary School hangs on the walls of the auditorium. They are images that represent important things in the children’s lives.
The Fishers’ role in the festival of venders is different than the musicians’ because they don’t directly work with the children; however, selling their birdhouses means giving back in a different way. “People come back to us and tell us over and over again that the art that we have created actually makes their yard a better place, and it actually gives them joy and smiles,” Maria says.
The Fishers now work on the birdhouses full-time in their fifth year of the business. “You normally don’t think of a birdhouse business, or even an art business as something you can sustain. But we are trying so hard to do that, and we are making it work,” Maria says. The prices they charge don’t make the business very profitable considering the labor and expenses that go into building the birdhouses.  However, the Fishers care about giving back to the community and the natural habitat more than they do about profit. “We don’t get back what we put into it. It’s all just giving out, and eventually it might tip, the good karma and stuff like that,” Maria says.
The Fishers’ generous lifestyle truly embodies the spirit of the beachside pocket that is Florence: a community of people dedicated to the well-being of one another. The town is nestled between the Siuslaw National Forest and the Oregon Coast. People travel to Florence just to experience the Sea Lion Caves, sand dunes, and endless camping and fishing sites. While Florence may be a popular tourist attraction, roughly 8,500 people make up the tight-knit community they call home.
The town fosters a special relationship between its inhabitants. The residents feel responsible to take on the problems that their neighbors are facing. “This is a group of people that, no matter what the project is, come together to help support each other,” Hal Weiner says.
Weiner is a Florence resident, proud community member, and one of the creators of the Florence Folk Festival. He used his connections to make the first event successful. “I knew a lot of people who were folk singers in the sixties, who were at that time famous, and I got on the phone and I said, ‘We are doing this festival out here and all of the proceeds are going to bring music into our schools because we have none. Would you like to come out here and play for next to nothing and support this program?’ and they all said yes,” Weiner says.
Weiner takes pride in his city and the way community members care for one another. “If somebody gets really ill here in this community and can’t find healthcare and needs emergency care, this community comes together and raises money over a weekend to do that,” he says.
The residents are especially proud of the city’s event center. Weiner refers to it as, “a world class auditorium.” The Florence Event Center was built without a single dollar of tax money and was funded entirely by volunteers over the course of 15 years. Due to the economy, however, the event center was recently added to the city budget.
The winter can be a desolate time for an Oregon coastal city that relies on tourism for much of its income.
“There’s nothing that happens here in the winter,” Weiner says. The Florence Winter Folk Festival began in part as a way to stimulate the economy. However, upon entering the festival, it seems as if most of the people aren’t tourists at all, but rather neighbors that have only traveled a few miles. The way one festival-goer greets another emphasizes the family-like community in Florence. Typically a festival assumes that people will be traveling to attend, whereas this festival emphasizes a local philanthropic cause.
Barefoot Leroy was one of the bands that played at the festival on Saturday January 18, 2014. This was Barefoot Leroy’s first time playing in a festival with all of its band members. “Having pro-sound, and a professional stage crew, and an audience that listens – that’s huge,” a band member Lea Jones says. Barefoot Leroy is based in Eugene. Some of the members have been performing together since the eighties.
Many of the band’s songs were inspired by the beauty of Oregon. “How can you not be inspired by this state, the spaciousness and the glory of nature,” Jones says. “If you don’t get a buzz out of that then you must be dead.” Oregon is also an interesting environment for musicians, according to Jones.
“The thing about Oregon is you don’t really get audiences so much. But there are so many great musicians around and you can do whatever you want in terms of putting together a group. It’s a very fertile artistic environment,” Jones says.
Artistry and giving seem to go hand in hand. The Florence Folk Festival is more than an event that happens once a year. It is a showcase of the lifestyle that Florence fosters. An entire city full of neighbors may seem just like a nostalgic longing for most, but for the people of Florence it is a reality.

Gallery • 4 Photos

Folk of Florence