For decades, Oregon’s history books have been missing a monumental piece of the state’s past: the diversity hidden deep in the timber industry. A google search of “Oregon Logger” pulls up a vast array of images all depicting burly White men of the past and present, clad in flannel, sporting mustaches, smiling ear to ear with saws in hand. What’s missing from this narrative is the hundreds of loggers who are People of Color including Black, Japanese, Filipino and Greek men and their families.
A large part of this history lies in a small town in northern Wallowa County called Maxville. Maxville was home to an entire town of loggers and their families including a large community of Black loggers living, working and learning amongst the White loggers. The Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center, led by executive director Gwendolyn Trice, has unearthed this history and is sharing it with the world through a traveling “Timber Culture” exhibit in addition to a myriad of other programming.
“It’s the discovery of another voice, the discovery of something that existed that we didn’t know and thinking about why that is,” Suzanne Hanlon, advisor of the UO Visual Arts Committee, said. “Why didn’t we know that story and why did Gwen have to bring it forward? Why didn’t our history books?”
An installation of “Timber Culture” will be on display at the Erb Memorial Union in the Aperture Gallery on the University of Oregon campus until Nov. 6. Featuring six of the 21 photograph prints, the exhibit shows a sliver of the deep and incredible story behind Oregon’s logging industry. All of the black and white images on display are from Maxville in the early 1920s into the late 1930s, and each display a different aspect of Maxville’s story and its people.
The first image, “Maxville Friends,” is a beautiful portrait of two families, one Black and one White, sitting intermingled. Segregation rules were still in place all across the country including in Maxville itself, but nonetheless there was an abundance of interraical friendships amongst the townspeople. The image shows five women clustered together holding each other’s children smiling back at the camera happily.
“I hope the takeaway is for people to learn more about this history and then hopefully dig into it some more after seeing the photos and learn more about this diverse history of loggers in Oregon and the diverse history of Oregon in general,” Lily James, the social media coordinator for the UO Visual Arts Committee, said.
Two other images in the exhibition titled “White School” and “Black School” depict the two segregated schools of Maxville and all of the children who attended each one. Maxville’s schools were the only segregated schools in Oregon during that time period.
“My family members lived there in 1923 when it was on the books that it was illegal for Black people to live, work and own land on the records,” Trice, founder and executive director of the Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center and daughter of an original Maxville logger, said. “It wasn’t taken off the record until the end of 1926 so these men, women and children moved here before those laws were taken off, and they had their work cut out for them.”
To access the exhibit in the EMU, viewers need a UO ID, but the UO Visual Arts team also uploaded a video of the exhibit on their Facebook and Instagram. The entire exhibit is available for viewing on the Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center website along with their other educational and historical materials.
