Story by Laura Hanson
Reunion photos courtesy of Laura Hanson
Photo by Branden Andersen 
The wagon camp awakens at the break of dawn. Families light their campfires and begin preparing breakfast. Once finished, women and children climb aboard wagons ready to roll out in an orderly line. Hours pass. The afternoon sun beats down. Dust covers everything. To ease the load of the animals, the women and children walk alongside their wagons, gathering wildflowers and buffalo chips as they go. In the late afternoon, before the sun sinks in the west, the families begin looking for a place to spend the night. They draw the wagons close together to form a circular barricade against the threat of an attack, be it from locals or thieves. Settled for the evening, camp members pull out musical instruments and begin to play, some singing, some dancing, some just listening.
This was the brief account of Mary (née Stevens) Smith who traveled the Oregon Trail in 1852 with my great-great-great-grandmother Rispa (née Stevens) Ringo, their parents—Hanson and Lavina Stevens—and six other siblings. No one in their wagon party kept a diary, so this story, told as a memory many years later, is the only “official” one my family has from the Trail. Mary was only four years old on the trip, but she grew up listening to her siblings reminisce about their journey so that in her old age she recounted this brief summary of the journey our family took to come west.
Hanson and Lavina Stevens left Keokuk, Iowa, in 1852 with their eight children to take the 2,000-mile cross-country journey in a covered wagon. They, like so many pioneers, left all they knew hoping for a better life and the opportunity to farm the land of Oregon. Decades after the family completed their trip, at the eldest sibling’s fiftieth birthday party, the eight children started a journal to record the past year’s important family events: births, deaths, marriages, and stories. Their descendants, of whom I am one, have continued to meet on the third Sunday of July for the ensuing 120 years.
I attended my first Reunion, as we call the event, when I was 11 months old. As a child, Reunion meant camping in a tent with my cousins the night before the meeting, eating s’mores around the campfire, and waking up, some years, to soggy sleeping bags from the uncharacteristic July rain. My cousins and I would trek across the state park or family farm, wherever that year’s Reunion was being hosted, to line up behind our parents to sign in a book they told us our parents and grandparents had been signing in since they were children. We would then be handed nametags listing our name and family branch (one of the remaining seven: Stevens, Ringo, McCubbins, Esson, Cahill, Mount, or Smith) before running off to cause the type of mischief only cousins can. One year we made a slingshot that would shoot rocks across a field—we got in huge trouble for that. Another year we managed to get stuck in the biggest tree in the yard. I have more than a few scars to account for the time I spent with my cousins at Reunion. After the traditional potluck lunch, we would escape to play games for the next few hours as the adults conducted the same meeting that the original eight siblings held for the first time in 1891.
Everything my family knows about our history is collected in a single book compiled from outside research supplemented with the notes taken at Reunion. Containing photographs, official land grants, and stories that used to live only in the family consciousness, the book, entitled Stevens Family History: A History of the Children of Hanson and Lavina, provides a resource for future family members while giving current descendents a tangible piece of history. While I have always known that my family has been around “forever,” I never truly grasped that idea until I held the book for the first time. After reading through over 400 pages about how the Stevens family started out in Oregon on a small family farm near Silverton, then spread all over the state and joined every possible industry and profession, I realized how intertwined my family is with Oregon’s history. My very determined ancestors were Oregonians seven years before our state was even a part of the Union.
They also lived through two world wars, the invention of the automobile, and the first landing on the moon, but unfortunately these major historical events often receive only a brief, summarizing sentence in the annual log. While one member or another of my family has been alive and recorded every major world event for the past 120 years, mentions of these events are heartbreakingly short: “Stories were told about the Trail;” “Guy Ringo gave rides in his automobile in February;” “Family members watched the moon landing together on television.”
These small notes are interesting, but to my family the quickly scribbled-in afterthoughts are glimpses into a past that we desperately wish had been better recorded. To be fair to those who wrote the snippets, the monumental events may not have seemed so monumental as they were happening. The fact that Guy owned the first automobile in the family and drove to Albany one spring to give rides to my great-great-grandmother and her sisters was of no importance to the secretary at that year’s Reunion. That person was preoccupied noting all of the significant happenings of a family growing bigger every year while also trying to enjoy an event he or she had been taught to respect since childhood.
It’s left to the older members of the family to breathe life into the small pieces of history we’re left with. One of my favorite stories comes from the reunion of 1969. That year, the third Sunday in July happened to fall on July 20, the same day the Apollo 11 landed on the moon. The minutes book states that “family members watched the moon landing together on television,” a short sentence that inspires a lengthy story from my grandmother, who was 39 that year. The family hosting Reunion, she says, placed four televisions throughout their farmhouse so that even though everyone was respecting the annual tradition, they could track the Apollo’s progress, along with the rest of the nation. All 100 or so family members crowded into the farmhouse to watch the spacecraft successfully land. I can imagine the children jostling in the front, being told to quiet down while the adults fill the hallway, a hundred collective breaths taken in as the moment unfolds.
The first year I remember truly paying attention to the proceedings of Reunion was the summer I turned 16. As that year’s Reunion president, I led the family count, a tradition that started between the original children to see who had the biggest family (a part of me knows that I inherited my competitive spirit from Rispa, who had 14 children). That summer served as my generation’s coming-of-age, the time when my “group” realized our new responsibilities. In the not too distant future, we will bring our children to Reunion, teaching them the family’s history and showing them how important this vast network of distant relations really is.
It falls to us younger members to pass on the stories that only exist in the minds of our grandparents. We record, record, record, but the point of Reunion, the point of meeting every single year, isn’t to try and assemble a coherent family history, one to be flipped through and understood in a single sitting, but to be a part of a family identity that has inspired hundreds of us to dedicate one day every year to meet with the furthest reaches of our family tree.
Reunion is often overwhelming to outsiders. Whenever I attempt to explain the tradition to friends I am met with confused responses, and both years that I have brought guests to the meeting, they have been surprised not only by the sheer number of people milling around and comfortably chatting, but by the apparent sense of togetherness. We are a huge group, which makes it very difficult for all 100 plus people to be completely involved in each person’s individual life, but at Reunion, the seven smaller branches of the family make a point to sit together. Side by side, all the Ringos—my brother, parents, grandmother, aunts, uncles, first cousins, second cousins, first cousins once removed, and I—share stories from the past year, supporting one another through the more difficult announcements. I’ll see them again after Reunion, perhaps at Christmas and birthdays, graduation parties and funerals, events members from other branches might also attend, but much like the original families in 1891, every branch remains a tight-knit group year-round.
Unfortunately, the couple that started it all, Hanson and Lavina, left us few mementos to treasure. Their wagon could fit nothing more than the essentials needed to sustain a family of ten for two months. And what they did pack ended up not being enough; the family story goes that when the Stevens arrived in Oregon, Hanson and the eldest son Isaac took one route with the cattle, while Lavina and the seven younger children took the wagon down the river on a raft guided by Native Americans. When friends went searching for the wagon party, they found Lavina and the children stranded on the banks of the Sandy River, without any food to spare as they waited for Hanson and Isaac to catch up.
The few things the family brought from Iowa included a spinning wheel, the family Bible, and, tucked under the wagon amongst the tools, a clipping of Lavina’s favorite rose. Against the odds, the rose survived the trip. Once in Oregon, Lavina nurtured the flower. Upon her death in 1859 a clipping was planted at her grave. In time, the rose in the graveyard was the only remaining offspring of the original.
In honor of our family’s hundredth reunion in 1991, we submitted a rose clipping to the Portland Rose Society. Imagine the shock of then receiving the news that our rose, the one with a single plant remaining, was the only one of its kind. Previously unnamed, we christened it the Bethany Rose, after the cemetery where Lavina and Hanson are buried. Clippings were distributed to every branch of the family with the original bloom left in the cemetery to continue growing alongside the grave of its beloved owner.
Then came the groundskeeper. Unaware of both the rose’s unique standing in the world and one-of-a-kind history, the cemetery’s newly assigned groundskeeper declared war on what he thought was a weed. Using clippers and weed killer, he brought our family rose down to its roots. Eventually, news of the attack reached our family. Needless to say, everyone was devastated to hear that the original rose clipping had been destroyed.
Or so we thought. During a recent project to renovate Hanson and Lavina’s gravesite, a small shoot was discovered pushing out of the ground at the corner of the grave. Decades had passed, poisons had been poured, roots had been ripped, but still the rose remained. The triumphant stock of a pioneering clipping grew back all on its own.
It comforts me to know that such a rose exists. Not only because it is a hardy and resilient plant that fought, and won, against the cemetery’s groundskeeper, but because it is the only aspect of the continuation of our history that my family really has control over. Yes, we have painstakingly maintained the tradition of Reunion and documented the stories that have been passed down in our journal, but we aren’t able to go back in time to beg our relatives to record their memories from the Trail. While I cannot speak for the hundreds of other members of the Stevens family, I can say that the Bethany Rose, despite a lifetime of Reunion memories, reassures me that our stubborn adherence to tradition and familial support can never disappear completely. Even if my great-great-great-grandchildren eventually stop attending Reunion and forget this story, the rose will continue to grow alongside Hanson and Lavina’s headstones, a symbol of our enduring love.

Gallery • 4 Photos

Rooted in Tradition