The Register-Guard, Eugene, Lane Co., Ore., June 1962:
IOOF to Honor 11 Saturday
BY HELEN PETERSON
Register-Guard Correspondent
ELMIRA--Two septuagenarians, Farmer C. Hale of Noti and C. E. "Ernst" Duckworth of Elmira, are among 11 men to be honored for long memberships by Elmira IOOF Lodge 207 Saturday.
An IOOF jewels ceremony will cite Hale for 50 years and Duckworth for 60 years of membership in the lodge. Nine others will receive pins designating memberships ranging from 25 to 45 years.
Others to be honored Saturday are Hans Christainsen, Frank Deedon, Jess McCulloch, Carl Edmiston, Frank Riley, Paul Bloom, Eugene Snellstrom, Bill Fisher and Orville Spires.
The ceremony will be held after a potluck dinner at 6 p.m. standard, 7 p.m. daylight in the IOOF Hall. Ellsworth Robison, past grand master of the IOOF Lodge of Oregon, will give the presentation speech.
Hale and Duckworth, first cousins, were born near their communities. Their grandparents, Calvin T. and Millie Hale, settled on a donation land claim three miles west of Noti in 1853. The site was later called Hale and served as a stage coach stop and post office for many years.
Hale still lives on and farms 310 acres of this claim where he was born Jan. 2, 1890. His birthplace, built by his grandfather, was utilized from time to time as a post office, stage coach stop and telephone exchange.
Duckworth was born Nov. 14, 1879, just north of Elmira. After his father's death, he moved with his mother and three brothers and sisters into the Hale home.
A one-time stage coach driver for Bang's Delivery Co. in Eugene, Duckworth married Anna Deming in 1908 and the couple settle on their 186-acre farm on Deming Road where they still raise sheep and cattle.
Duckworth joined the IOOF Lodge at Mapleton in 1901 and is a past grand of that organization. he has been a member of the Rebekah Lodge for 41 years and is a grange member.
Hale joined the IOOF Lodge in Elmira in 1912. He has been a member of the Rebekah Lodge for 25 years and is a past grand of both. He was a grange member for a time and served on the local school board.
___________
Century Farms of Lane County, 1976, Eugene, Oregon, pp 9-21,24-25:
The Hale Farm
Calvin Hale, always called "Cap" because he was a captain of a wagon train, came across the plains with his wife in 1852. He claimed 320 acres west of the present town of Noti in the small valley first known as Elk Prairie and now called Hale Valley. The original farm of Cap Hale has been divided. The original homesite is now owned by Farmer Hale. His two cousins, Wayne and Gordon Hale, own the other half of the land. We talked to Farmer Hale, now eighty-six years old, who is a grandson of Calvin Hale. We also talked to Farmer's wife Edith and his son Jim.
Farmer Hale is very well know in the Noti area. He has been Grand Marshall of the Applegate Trail Days celebration, and in 1974 received the Pioneer Award from the West Lane Chamber of Commerce and the Lions Club for a long life of service to the community.
The Hales' present house was built in 1909. The lumber for the house was received in exchange for rough timber from the Hale property. The house has been both a stage stop and a post office in the past. Room numbers can still be found above the doorways upstairs, and some of the original wallpaper is still on the walls.
The top of their old woodshed was used as a community hall. Here, they used to hold dances. Inside the hall there was a very small triangular platform where musicians played. Now the Hales have old pictures, books and other things stored in the hall and also in the "antique room" upstairs in their house.
Farmer Hale began by telling us how Calvin "Cap" Hale, his grandfather, came to Oregon to settle. The Bristow family he mentions were among the first settlers of Lane County. Calvin Hale was nineteen when he first came to this area. Mr. Bristow, who was already settled at Pleasant Hill, hired Calvin Hale to accompany the rest of the Bristow family [wife and sons] across the plains by wagon train from Illinois to Oregon.
Farmer: "After he arrived here in 1848 with the rest of the Bristow family, my grandfather helped around the Bristow place. He stayed there at Bristows' that winter, and the next spring they had the 1849 gold strike down there in California, so he and a bunch of other guys went down there. I suppose he must have made some money, but he didn't get rich. Calvin Hale stayed there and worked in the mines a couple of years. After that he went back to the East coast on an old cattle schooner that came into San Francisco. It brought cattle around Cape Horn. He finally got back to Illinois in 1850."
After his return to Illinois, Calvin married Milla Mays. He had been corresponding with her during the three-year period he spent 'out West.' Farmer Hale has possession of the first letter Calvin wrote to Milla from the Platte River in the Nebraska Territory in 1848.
Farmer: "We've got a handwritten letter which my grandfather wrote back to his early love. They'd had a little breakup or something, I guess before he started, so he wrote her a letter. He was 1100 miles from home then. It impressed her quite a bit. I guess it said he might never get back alive."
Jim: "We have a record of three letters that he wrote in that three-year period, from 1848 t 1850. That was a different day and time, you know. She was quite a young girl when he married her. She was in her early teens when he began writing her letters. Girls waited for people with very little communication."
In 1852, Calvin Hale left Illinois again by wagon train bound for Oregon. It was on this second trip that he assumed the role of "captain."
That was in 1852, when they stared that next time. He must have made a little money because he got enough to buy him a good team and wagon and things he needed to have. [In the late 1860's and early '70's a good wagon cost from $150 to $200 or more, depending on where you bought it and how many extras were involved. The wagon cover was worth $10 to $12 and a springboard cost around $20. A loaf of bread was a nickel and beefsteak was ten cents or fifteen cents a pound. A wagon cost a lot of money compared to these items.]
"My grandfather started out with is wife Milla and her family. When they reached the Platte River in the Nebraska Territory, Milla Hale gave birth to a son. They named him Nebraska. That was quite a deal, I guess. Nebraska was their first child. The train 'laid over' one day, and then the next morning they started out and made her a bed in the wagon . . . she was a strong woman, must have been pretty wiry. a fellow wouldn't start out with a deal like that nowadays, with a pregnant woman. He would be sent to an asylum. It was different in those days. They just didn't have hospitals to go to anyway.
"When he came the first time, there was just that ol' man Skinner's shack up there where Eugene is now. It's developed since then. I don't know--maybe Eugene would have been better off it it stayed like it was."
Jim: "Cap Hale was a representative of the earlier settling pattern that you read about in history books, where the families come from Kentucky or Tennessee, and then from there to Indiana or Illinois, and then to Oregon."
Farmer: "When Cap Hale came here there was none of this second growth timber. It was all old growth. It had been growin' for 400 or 500 years, I guess. The Indians kept the underbrush burnt out so that they could get through it when they were hunting.
My grandfather came on horseback. He first settled up by Camas Swale in 1852, but he didn't like it there. The next spring he got out to look to see what he could find. He met a couple of fellows that had been comin' up through here on foot from the coast. They walked through here and told him about this valley. Cap described what he wanted and he thought he'd like this place, so he came on. They described how he would get here and this is where he settled.
"Well, that time when he came he could only get 320 acres. If he'd gotten here a little earlier, he could get 640 acres, but the idea of it was that 320 acres was quite a lot of land and there was nobody else to bother him for a long time. His family was known as the white family farthest west of any other family in Lane County, maybe Oregon.
"Everything was no fences, no bridges, no roads, no nothin' when they come. They just got up in the valley and they found this place up here where there's a little spring. I think they made a lean-to shack there and lived in it that winter of 1853, and the best you could fix up when you don't have lumber. You just had to make it out of anything you could get to make a shack with. Pretty rough deal. If these young folks or I had to do it in my time, it would have been pretty bad for me too. A few years later they got the orchard started. Then they got some trees; I don't know if they brought some trees with them."
Jim Hale told us how Farmer got his name.
Jim: "Dad is the man with the twenty dollar name. My grandfather had a friend, Carroll Farmer, who was a trapper and jack-of-all trades. He lived with Farmer's parents and worked for then. He didn't have any children and thought it would be nice to have someone named after him. He knew that my grandfather had a baby on the way, so if it was a boy he'd like to have it named after him and he'd give my grandfather twenty dollars to do it. A son was born so he gave my grandfather a twenty dollar goldpiece. Twenty dollars then is like talking about $200 or $300 now. Instead of naming him Carroll, which really didn't excite my grandmother too much, he named him Farmer."
Farmer grew up on the place he is living on now. He talked about his younger days when he went to school.
Farmer: "I didn't take to school too much. I went to the little one-room school right down there by Elmira. My aunt and cousin lived there on the place near the school and I went down there a term or two. Then I went to school over on Poodle Creek. We had a lot of fun, never learning very much. I wasn't much interested in books, so I quit school to do the farming. We raised grain and hay. Well, we had to have quite a lot of feed and there was always a lot of work to do on a ranch. I used to think I could kind of half-run it but now it's kind of running me, since I got older. But I like it yet, and I might as well put in time here than any other place, I guess."
Jim: "This was a stage stop. It became a stage stop, a place for travelers because it was just about in a good place. Because it was a stage stop, it was kind of like Noti is now. it was a place where people came to get their mail because the stage left the male. it became a post office. We had a post mark lying around which says 'HALE OREGON.' At any rate, they manned the post office here twenty-five years. Then the railroad came through the other side of Badger Mountain, south of Noti. The train began to carry the mail and this post office was closed out. the post office was relocated in Elmira, then came back to Noti. There were probably more people here fifty years ago than there are now. In good weather this place was a noon lunch stop on the way to Mapleton."
Mrs. Hale: "Farmer's mother just about cooked all the time, from one meal to the next. They could never tell how many they'd have for dinner. She was a wonderful cook too."
Jim" "In the wintertime the roads were much worse, of course, and this was a night stop. With a 6:00 a.m. start from Eugene, they'd get here in the evening and go on to Mapleton the next day."
Mrs. Hale: "The stagecoach drivers slept here. One would sleep here and another drive on. The stage company in Eugene kept horses here and they changed horses."
Farmer: "The cost for a traveler to stay here for one night was probably a dollar and a half which included two meals and a bed. If they had horses, they'd have to pay something for that."
Jim: "Traveling by stage was not a very fun thing. it used to be just a much-traveled road through the woods, you might say. It was not a stage like we have in our minds from westerns; it had no roof and the people wore ponchos in the wintertime; any kind of poncho that turned water, just a kind of thing where your head was out in the rain. Your body was covered by the poncho, but you were sweating so much inside that thing, you might as well be out in the rain."
Mrs. Hale: "In the summertime they wore what you might call dusters. It just wasn't much protection and the stage didn't have a cover on it. But later on they got a cover for them. When I came out here in 1924, they were running just a two-seater car from Noti to Eugene, in the way of a stage. This was a stage stop only until the railroad went through, and they took all the business away from the stage. Carried all the mail and everything else. I think it was 1914-15 when they brought the railroad as far as Noti and then it didn't reach Coos Bay until two years later. They took a long time to go through because they had to build a tunnel. They had to use animals to draw the carts out with dirt and rock. They came in from both ways, both directions, east and west, and then there wasn't more than an inch difference when they met. And that was way back when they didn't have all this fancy equipment that they have nowadays. So that was an interesting time. That was before I came here."
Farmer: "There really hadn't been much change up to the time the railroad was put in. Then after that, well, it was a different deal. A lot of new people. The country just changed, you might say overnight, from what it used to be up to the present time. It kept getting bigger and bigger. More people comin' in."
Mrs. Hale: "With the railroad, the farmers could ship their cattle or their beef to Portland. Before that, they had to make a wagon trip once a year to Oregon City to get their staples and provisions for the winter. They went once a year and they'd come back with the wagon loaded with sugar, flour and coffee and that sort of thing."
Farmer: "Before the railroad came, it took two weeks to make the trip to Oregon City. It would take a week to go one way, do their trading, and one week to come back. Back then it was an overnight trip to go into Eugene, do any business and get back."
Mrs. Hale: "I even rode the train out her one time when I was teaching."
Farmer: "I was chairman of the school board when she came out here to teach. I thought she might as well be working for me as teaching school, so I finally broke down and said yes, and she has had her way ever since."
Mrs. Hale (after protesting his version of their courtship): "We've been married fifty years last September."
We asked Mrs. Hale to tell us about the dairy they operated on their farm a number of years ago.
Mrs. Hale: "Farmer was selling milk in five gallon cans at the camp down here [at Star Mill one mile east] and there weren't too many people who had moved in yet, but as families moved in, they built cabins for them to live in right here below us. There was more demand for milk, so then we began to sell it in bottles. Later on we extended our business to Noti.
"Our milk room was in the corner of the woodshed. We had it fixed up pretty nice. Water was piped in from the springs on the hill and ran in and out over the bottles all day long, because when we first started, we didn't even have electricity here."
Farmer Hale: "We didn't get electricity until April Fool's Day, 1938."
Mrs. Hale: "The milk was strained into a big tank and from there flowed over both sides of the milk cooler which was a cylinder-like affair made of corrugated metal with a stream of cold water flowing through it. From the cooler the milk was poured into a separator tank and then bottled. That is the way we kept the morning milk until evening since we peddled milk just once a day. After supper it was a mad rush to load up the milk in the boxes. So the girls, when they were little, used to go with their father, and that would make it easier for him after working hard in the fields all day. He could sit and just drive and they would deliver the milk."
Jim called our attention to the old-fashioned cooler built into the wall in the corner of the kitchen, and Mrs. Hale described it.
Mrs. Hale: "The shelves were made of half-inch wide strips of wood about three feet long with one-inch spaces between them. These strips were treated with linseed oil so that you could clean them just by wiping them off. It was used as a cooler because there's a screen in the bottom on the floor, and one on the top opening out to the porch, and the air circulated through it. Another old cooling method involved putting a pan of water out on top of a tall box that had shelves fixed in it. Cloths were strung on the sides of the box and water from the pan would kind of bead down through the cloths keeping them wet. This arrangement helped to keep the inside of the box cool.
"In the room back here, there was an old flour box. That box was set up on legs. The box had lids that opened from the center out. Farmer's mother used the flour box to make pies or sour dough biscuits. She could slide the flour board inside the box from one side to the other to get what she needed. They could put flour in one side and sugar in the other. They could keep a lot of baking ingredients in it."
The Hales continued to point out and explain interesting family mementos and features of their farm. As this happened, Farmer Hale recalled more of his boyhood experiences.
Farmer: "I had a riding pony. I was never allowed to ride a saddle. I always had to ride bareback. I was raised on that old pony. I rode it ever since I was big enough to get it up to the rail fence where I could get on it. I didn't have many playmates when I was young. My uncle had one girl just a little younger than me and a boy who was about four years old at the time. Then there were other families up here, but the idea was that you had to walk if you wanted to see them. This old pony, I could walk miles to get to ride it over to the next house. I had to chase it over the hills before I could get it."
Farmer remembered a local incident that occurred in 1903 in which a Lane County sheriff was shot. The sheriff died shortly thereafter in the Hale home. Along with Farmer's recollections of the incident, we include the actual newspaper accounts at the time. [Note: Those newspaper articles may be found under William W. Withers and Elliot Lyons, who both died in 1903.]
Farmer: "I was about thirteen years old when the sheriff and his deputy came out from Eugene one day with a team and one-seated buggy. They came about three in the afternoon. My dad knew the sheriff real well, knew him ever since he was a kid. He used to go to school with him in Irving. My dad knew the fellow that shot him, too. Dad said that everybody liked the sheriff. He was a nice guy.
"The sheriff and his deputy came out to arrest a fellow over at Walton, a fellow by the name of Lyons who was in trouble in southern Oregon for stealing cattle or a horse or something. Ther sheriff went over there and he told my dad when he left the team here, 'Just leave the harness on 'em. I'll be back to pick 'em up after awhile. Fix me a lantern here where I can see to get out with 'em. You wouldn't need to get up to help me out.'
"So my dad left the harness on them and I could see the ol' deputies walking out across the field. I can see 'em plain yet. They went over there about eleven that night. Later on, when everybody had gone to sleep, they returned and knocked on the door. They hollered and got my dad woke up. There was the sheriff in the wagon, shot with a .22 pistol. The bullet was lodged right in his spinal cord. He was paralyzed from there down. He could talk, but he couldn't move a muscle. He told my dad, 'George, I guess they got me this time.' They fixed a bed for him, and they unloaded him here, and brought him in the house. They took my bed from upstairs. The sheriff was a tall fellow. He died right here in the house, after a second night, I think. At the time he died, there were almost more people here than there was in Eugene, comin' out to see about him. Posse came to catch this fellow. It was a pretty exciting time around here.
"The guy got away and got clear up to Creswell. He went to get on a freight train there. There was a posse there and they was watchin' the trains everywhere. All the roads in Lane County had someone watchin' 'em. He got clear up there [to Creswell] . . . They had double-barrel shotguns, all of 'em, looking for Lyons. Whey he went to get on the train, they told him to surrender, and he did. They got him into Eugene, put him in jail, had a trial and hung him, right there in the jailyard, right here in Eugene. My dad said if he got an invitation to go to the hangin', he was going to go. Sure enough he got one, but by that time he 'chickened out.' He didn't want to see anybody hung. We was glad he didn't."
Jim Hale guided us on a short tour of the Hale property. He pointed toward the hills across the valley from their farm and began to tell us something about the logging history of that area.
Jim Hale: "There was a logging company called Forcia and Larsen in this area. It had what was called the 'Star Mill' and the 'Star Camp,' which was a bunch of buildings owned by the company and used to house the people who worked there. They used that mill to cut all the old growth timber off all the way around the valley. in some places the second growth has also been taken, and is being replaced by 'new' or 'third' growth. That first time they brought the logs to the mill by a trestle railway down here at the south or east end of the valley. It ran all the way down the south side. There are traces of it still down there, just inside the trees.
"Dad and others hired out as drivers for a team to help them clear the roadway. That was quite a project. It took a long time to clear the roadway with the kind of logging methods they were using. In the earlier days they used to pull logs down the hill. Later on the 'donkey' was used to pull logs up to a landing on the top of the ridge."
Farmer and Mrs. Hale later explained that the 'donkey' was a steam engine that pulled the logs onto the landing where they were loaded on railway cars to be taken to the mill.
Mrs. Hale: "The lumber from the Star Mill was moved to the loading docks at Noti in a flume. The flume was a channel for water built on a trestle as high as seventy-five feet in some places. The flume was elevated slightly on the western end so as the keep the lumber moving along. Two men were hired to 'walk the flume' to keep the lumber from piling up."
Our visit to the Hale farm ended with Farmer telling us about an old storyteller who like to "play tricks" on people. Farmer was a young man when he first heard of this storyteller from the stagecoach drivers.
Farmer: Now this fellow was a great one to tell stories, this fellow up on the McKenzie. In the early days, the stage used to run up there and we called him Huckleberry Finn. He lived up there at Finn Rock, had a stage station of his own. Then there was another little fellow by the name of Pepeo who had another station, who lived just above him. So the passengers who went up there, they knew that this old fellow would give them a story. They weren't expecting the kind he gave them though. They got up there, you know, and she said, 'I'll tell you I would, but I'm just tired out this morning 'cause I sat up all night with this old man Pepeo who lives up there. The old fellow died about two o'clock this morning and I feel pretty bad about it, so I just don't feel like telling a story.' So the stage went on up the road, and there was old Pepeo up there. He hitched another team onto the stage. They got their story but they didn't know it. Yeah, that other fellow Pepeo was out there to greet them. Huckleberry Finn was a great storyteller, but that time he didn't give much warning about what he was going to tell them."
___________
Manena (Inman) Buchholz Obituary Scrapbook, p 113:
Dec. 7, 1985:
Descendant of Noti pioneers dies at 95
A funeral will be held Monday for Farmer Hale, 95, descendant of one of Lane County's oldest pioneer families. He died Thursday at the Eugene Hospital and Clinic.
Hale, of 21187 Highway 126, Noti, was a life-long resident of the Hale Ranch, which is part of the original donation land claim settled by his family in 1853 three miles west of Noti. For many years the Hale Ranch served as a post office and stage stop and is shown on old maps as Hale, Ore.
Hale was the grandson of William and Polly Miller Taylor and Calvin "Cap" and Milla Mays Hale. Cap Hale first came to Oregon in 1848 as a teamster for the family of Elijah Bristow, founder of Pleasant Hill.
Farmer Hale was born Jan. 2, 1890, the son of George Herbert and Mary Catherine Taylor Hale. he was a lifelong farmer, rancher and dairyman. He married Edith M. Brabham on Sept. 20, 1925.
Hale served as chairman of the Noti School District during the planning and construction of the Noti school in 1925 and was instrumental in the consolidation of small rural school districts in the area.
He was a charter member and frequent leader of the Route F Committee, a group of citizens who lobbied for more than 20 years for construction of Highway 126 from Eugene to Florence. The road was completed in the mid-1960s.
Hale was grand marshal of the first Applegate Trail Days parade and was the first recipient of the West Lane Chamber of Commerce Pioneer Award in 1974.
He was chairman of the Noti Election Board for many years and was a selective service registrar during WWII. He was a Lane County deputy assessor during the 1930s and helped to survey the Southern Pacific railroad in western Lane County.
Hale is survived by his wife, Edith; four children, Jean Norton and JoAnne Johnson, both of Myrtle Creek, Janet Barnes of Coos Bay and James Hale of Eugene; 11 grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren.
The funeral will be at 1 p.m. Monday at the Noti Church of Christ. Burial will be in Sailor Cemetery near Noti.
~~~
Note: Farmer Calvin Hale and Ruth Helen Hawkins were married on August 15, 1917 in Lane County, Oregon. They were divorced before 1925. They had no children and both were remarried to other people.
IOOF to Honor 11 Saturday
BY HELEN PETERSON
Register-Guard Correspondent
ELMIRA--Two septuagenarians, Farmer C. Hale of Noti and C. E. "Ernst" Duckworth of Elmira, are among 11 men to be honored for long memberships by Elmira IOOF Lodge 207 Saturday.
An IOOF jewels ceremony will cite Hale for 50 years and Duckworth for 60 years of membership in the lodge. Nine others will receive pins designating memberships ranging from 25 to 45 years.
Others to be honored Saturday are Hans Christainsen, Frank Deedon, Jess McCulloch, Carl Edmiston, Frank Riley, Paul Bloom, Eugene Snellstrom, Bill Fisher and Orville Spires.
The ceremony will be held after a potluck dinner at 6 p.m. standard, 7 p.m. daylight in the IOOF Hall. Ellsworth Robison, past grand master of the IOOF Lodge of Oregon, will give the presentation speech.
Hale and Duckworth, first cousins, were born near their communities. Their grandparents, Calvin T. and Millie Hale, settled on a donation land claim three miles west of Noti in 1853. The site was later called Hale and served as a stage coach stop and post office for many years.
Hale still lives on and farms 310 acres of this claim where he was born Jan. 2, 1890. His birthplace, built by his grandfather, was utilized from time to time as a post office, stage coach stop and telephone exchange.
Duckworth was born Nov. 14, 1879, just north of Elmira. After his father's death, he moved with his mother and three brothers and sisters into the Hale home.
A one-time stage coach driver for Bang's Delivery Co. in Eugene, Duckworth married Anna Deming in 1908 and the couple settle on their 186-acre farm on Deming Road where they still raise sheep and cattle.
Duckworth joined the IOOF Lodge at Mapleton in 1901 and is a past grand of that organization. he has been a member of the Rebekah Lodge for 41 years and is a grange member.
Hale joined the IOOF Lodge in Elmira in 1912. He has been a member of the Rebekah Lodge for 25 years and is a past grand of both. He was a grange member for a time and served on the local school board.
___________
Century Farms of Lane County, 1976, Eugene, Oregon, pp 9-21,24-25:
The Hale Farm
Calvin Hale, always called "Cap" because he was a captain of a wagon train, came across the plains with his wife in 1852. He claimed 320 acres west of the present town of Noti in the small valley first known as Elk Prairie and now called Hale Valley. The original farm of Cap Hale has been divided. The original homesite is now owned by Farmer Hale. His two cousins, Wayne and Gordon Hale, own the other half of the land. We talked to Farmer Hale, now eighty-six years old, who is a grandson of Calvin Hale. We also talked to Farmer's wife Edith and his son Jim.
Farmer Hale is very well know in the Noti area. He has been Grand Marshall of the Applegate Trail Days celebration, and in 1974 received the Pioneer Award from the West Lane Chamber of Commerce and the Lions Club for a long life of service to the community.
The Hales' present house was built in 1909. The lumber for the house was received in exchange for rough timber from the Hale property. The house has been both a stage stop and a post office in the past. Room numbers can still be found above the doorways upstairs, and some of the original wallpaper is still on the walls.
The top of their old woodshed was used as a community hall. Here, they used to hold dances. Inside the hall there was a very small triangular platform where musicians played. Now the Hales have old pictures, books and other things stored in the hall and also in the "antique room" upstairs in their house.
Farmer Hale began by telling us how Calvin "Cap" Hale, his grandfather, came to Oregon to settle. The Bristow family he mentions were among the first settlers of Lane County. Calvin Hale was nineteen when he first came to this area. Mr. Bristow, who was already settled at Pleasant Hill, hired Calvin Hale to accompany the rest of the Bristow family [wife and sons] across the plains by wagon train from Illinois to Oregon.
Farmer: "After he arrived here in 1848 with the rest of the Bristow family, my grandfather helped around the Bristow place. He stayed there at Bristows' that winter, and the next spring they had the 1849 gold strike down there in California, so he and a bunch of other guys went down there. I suppose he must have made some money, but he didn't get rich. Calvin Hale stayed there and worked in the mines a couple of years. After that he went back to the East coast on an old cattle schooner that came into San Francisco. It brought cattle around Cape Horn. He finally got back to Illinois in 1850."
After his return to Illinois, Calvin married Milla Mays. He had been corresponding with her during the three-year period he spent 'out West.' Farmer Hale has possession of the first letter Calvin wrote to Milla from the Platte River in the Nebraska Territory in 1848.
Farmer: "We've got a handwritten letter which my grandfather wrote back to his early love. They'd had a little breakup or something, I guess before he started, so he wrote her a letter. He was 1100 miles from home then. It impressed her quite a bit. I guess it said he might never get back alive."
Jim: "We have a record of three letters that he wrote in that three-year period, from 1848 t 1850. That was a different day and time, you know. She was quite a young girl when he married her. She was in her early teens when he began writing her letters. Girls waited for people with very little communication."
In 1852, Calvin Hale left Illinois again by wagon train bound for Oregon. It was on this second trip that he assumed the role of "captain."
That was in 1852, when they stared that next time. He must have made a little money because he got enough to buy him a good team and wagon and things he needed to have. [In the late 1860's and early '70's a good wagon cost from $150 to $200 or more, depending on where you bought it and how many extras were involved. The wagon cover was worth $10 to $12 and a springboard cost around $20. A loaf of bread was a nickel and beefsteak was ten cents or fifteen cents a pound. A wagon cost a lot of money compared to these items.]
"My grandfather started out with is wife Milla and her family. When they reached the Platte River in the Nebraska Territory, Milla Hale gave birth to a son. They named him Nebraska. That was quite a deal, I guess. Nebraska was their first child. The train 'laid over' one day, and then the next morning they started out and made her a bed in the wagon . . . she was a strong woman, must have been pretty wiry. a fellow wouldn't start out with a deal like that nowadays, with a pregnant woman. He would be sent to an asylum. It was different in those days. They just didn't have hospitals to go to anyway.
"When he came the first time, there was just that ol' man Skinner's shack up there where Eugene is now. It's developed since then. I don't know--maybe Eugene would have been better off it it stayed like it was."
Jim: "Cap Hale was a representative of the earlier settling pattern that you read about in history books, where the families come from Kentucky or Tennessee, and then from there to Indiana or Illinois, and then to Oregon."
Farmer: "When Cap Hale came here there was none of this second growth timber. It was all old growth. It had been growin' for 400 or 500 years, I guess. The Indians kept the underbrush burnt out so that they could get through it when they were hunting.
My grandfather came on horseback. He first settled up by Camas Swale in 1852, but he didn't like it there. The next spring he got out to look to see what he could find. He met a couple of fellows that had been comin' up through here on foot from the coast. They walked through here and told him about this valley. Cap described what he wanted and he thought he'd like this place, so he came on. They described how he would get here and this is where he settled.
"Well, that time when he came he could only get 320 acres. If he'd gotten here a little earlier, he could get 640 acres, but the idea of it was that 320 acres was quite a lot of land and there was nobody else to bother him for a long time. His family was known as the white family farthest west of any other family in Lane County, maybe Oregon.
"Everything was no fences, no bridges, no roads, no nothin' when they come. They just got up in the valley and they found this place up here where there's a little spring. I think they made a lean-to shack there and lived in it that winter of 1853, and the best you could fix up when you don't have lumber. You just had to make it out of anything you could get to make a shack with. Pretty rough deal. If these young folks or I had to do it in my time, it would have been pretty bad for me too. A few years later they got the orchard started. Then they got some trees; I don't know if they brought some trees with them."
Jim Hale told us how Farmer got his name.
Jim: "Dad is the man with the twenty dollar name. My grandfather had a friend, Carroll Farmer, who was a trapper and jack-of-all trades. He lived with Farmer's parents and worked for then. He didn't have any children and thought it would be nice to have someone named after him. He knew that my grandfather had a baby on the way, so if it was a boy he'd like to have it named after him and he'd give my grandfather twenty dollars to do it. A son was born so he gave my grandfather a twenty dollar goldpiece. Twenty dollars then is like talking about $200 or $300 now. Instead of naming him Carroll, which really didn't excite my grandmother too much, he named him Farmer."
Farmer grew up on the place he is living on now. He talked about his younger days when he went to school.
Farmer: "I didn't take to school too much. I went to the little one-room school right down there by Elmira. My aunt and cousin lived there on the place near the school and I went down there a term or two. Then I went to school over on Poodle Creek. We had a lot of fun, never learning very much. I wasn't much interested in books, so I quit school to do the farming. We raised grain and hay. Well, we had to have quite a lot of feed and there was always a lot of work to do on a ranch. I used to think I could kind of half-run it but now it's kind of running me, since I got older. But I like it yet, and I might as well put in time here than any other place, I guess."
Jim: "This was a stage stop. It became a stage stop, a place for travelers because it was just about in a good place. Because it was a stage stop, it was kind of like Noti is now. it was a place where people came to get their mail because the stage left the male. it became a post office. We had a post mark lying around which says 'HALE OREGON.' At any rate, they manned the post office here twenty-five years. Then the railroad came through the other side of Badger Mountain, south of Noti. The train began to carry the mail and this post office was closed out. the post office was relocated in Elmira, then came back to Noti. There were probably more people here fifty years ago than there are now. In good weather this place was a noon lunch stop on the way to Mapleton."
Mrs. Hale: "Farmer's mother just about cooked all the time, from one meal to the next. They could never tell how many they'd have for dinner. She was a wonderful cook too."
Jim" "In the wintertime the roads were much worse, of course, and this was a night stop. With a 6:00 a.m. start from Eugene, they'd get here in the evening and go on to Mapleton the next day."
Mrs. Hale: "The stagecoach drivers slept here. One would sleep here and another drive on. The stage company in Eugene kept horses here and they changed horses."
Farmer: "The cost for a traveler to stay here for one night was probably a dollar and a half which included two meals and a bed. If they had horses, they'd have to pay something for that."
Jim: "Traveling by stage was not a very fun thing. it used to be just a much-traveled road through the woods, you might say. It was not a stage like we have in our minds from westerns; it had no roof and the people wore ponchos in the wintertime; any kind of poncho that turned water, just a kind of thing where your head was out in the rain. Your body was covered by the poncho, but you were sweating so much inside that thing, you might as well be out in the rain."
Mrs. Hale: "In the summertime they wore what you might call dusters. It just wasn't much protection and the stage didn't have a cover on it. But later on they got a cover for them. When I came out here in 1924, they were running just a two-seater car from Noti to Eugene, in the way of a stage. This was a stage stop only until the railroad went through, and they took all the business away from the stage. Carried all the mail and everything else. I think it was 1914-15 when they brought the railroad as far as Noti and then it didn't reach Coos Bay until two years later. They took a long time to go through because they had to build a tunnel. They had to use animals to draw the carts out with dirt and rock. They came in from both ways, both directions, east and west, and then there wasn't more than an inch difference when they met. And that was way back when they didn't have all this fancy equipment that they have nowadays. So that was an interesting time. That was before I came here."
Farmer: "There really hadn't been much change up to the time the railroad was put in. Then after that, well, it was a different deal. A lot of new people. The country just changed, you might say overnight, from what it used to be up to the present time. It kept getting bigger and bigger. More people comin' in."
Mrs. Hale: "With the railroad, the farmers could ship their cattle or their beef to Portland. Before that, they had to make a wagon trip once a year to Oregon City to get their staples and provisions for the winter. They went once a year and they'd come back with the wagon loaded with sugar, flour and coffee and that sort of thing."
Farmer: "Before the railroad came, it took two weeks to make the trip to Oregon City. It would take a week to go one way, do their trading, and one week to come back. Back then it was an overnight trip to go into Eugene, do any business and get back."
Mrs. Hale: "I even rode the train out her one time when I was teaching."
Farmer: "I was chairman of the school board when she came out here to teach. I thought she might as well be working for me as teaching school, so I finally broke down and said yes, and she has had her way ever since."
Mrs. Hale (after protesting his version of their courtship): "We've been married fifty years last September."
We asked Mrs. Hale to tell us about the dairy they operated on their farm a number of years ago.
Mrs. Hale: "Farmer was selling milk in five gallon cans at the camp down here [at Star Mill one mile east] and there weren't too many people who had moved in yet, but as families moved in, they built cabins for them to live in right here below us. There was more demand for milk, so then we began to sell it in bottles. Later on we extended our business to Noti.
"Our milk room was in the corner of the woodshed. We had it fixed up pretty nice. Water was piped in from the springs on the hill and ran in and out over the bottles all day long, because when we first started, we didn't even have electricity here."
Farmer Hale: "We didn't get electricity until April Fool's Day, 1938."
Mrs. Hale: "The milk was strained into a big tank and from there flowed over both sides of the milk cooler which was a cylinder-like affair made of corrugated metal with a stream of cold water flowing through it. From the cooler the milk was poured into a separator tank and then bottled. That is the way we kept the morning milk until evening since we peddled milk just once a day. After supper it was a mad rush to load up the milk in the boxes. So the girls, when they were little, used to go with their father, and that would make it easier for him after working hard in the fields all day. He could sit and just drive and they would deliver the milk."
Jim called our attention to the old-fashioned cooler built into the wall in the corner of the kitchen, and Mrs. Hale described it.
Mrs. Hale: "The shelves were made of half-inch wide strips of wood about three feet long with one-inch spaces between them. These strips were treated with linseed oil so that you could clean them just by wiping them off. It was used as a cooler because there's a screen in the bottom on the floor, and one on the top opening out to the porch, and the air circulated through it. Another old cooling method involved putting a pan of water out on top of a tall box that had shelves fixed in it. Cloths were strung on the sides of the box and water from the pan would kind of bead down through the cloths keeping them wet. This arrangement helped to keep the inside of the box cool.
"In the room back here, there was an old flour box. That box was set up on legs. The box had lids that opened from the center out. Farmer's mother used the flour box to make pies or sour dough biscuits. She could slide the flour board inside the box from one side to the other to get what she needed. They could put flour in one side and sugar in the other. They could keep a lot of baking ingredients in it."
The Hales continued to point out and explain interesting family mementos and features of their farm. As this happened, Farmer Hale recalled more of his boyhood experiences.
Farmer: "I had a riding pony. I was never allowed to ride a saddle. I always had to ride bareback. I was raised on that old pony. I rode it ever since I was big enough to get it up to the rail fence where I could get on it. I didn't have many playmates when I was young. My uncle had one girl just a little younger than me and a boy who was about four years old at the time. Then there were other families up here, but the idea was that you had to walk if you wanted to see them. This old pony, I could walk miles to get to ride it over to the next house. I had to chase it over the hills before I could get it."
Farmer remembered a local incident that occurred in 1903 in which a Lane County sheriff was shot. The sheriff died shortly thereafter in the Hale home. Along with Farmer's recollections of the incident, we include the actual newspaper accounts at the time. [Note: Those newspaper articles may be found under William W. Withers and Elliot Lyons, who both died in 1903.]
Farmer: "I was about thirteen years old when the sheriff and his deputy came out from Eugene one day with a team and one-seated buggy. They came about three in the afternoon. My dad knew the sheriff real well, knew him ever since he was a kid. He used to go to school with him in Irving. My dad knew the fellow that shot him, too. Dad said that everybody liked the sheriff. He was a nice guy.
"The sheriff and his deputy came out to arrest a fellow over at Walton, a fellow by the name of Lyons who was in trouble in southern Oregon for stealing cattle or a horse or something. Ther sheriff went over there and he told my dad when he left the team here, 'Just leave the harness on 'em. I'll be back to pick 'em up after awhile. Fix me a lantern here where I can see to get out with 'em. You wouldn't need to get up to help me out.'
"So my dad left the harness on them and I could see the ol' deputies walking out across the field. I can see 'em plain yet. They went over there about eleven that night. Later on, when everybody had gone to sleep, they returned and knocked on the door. They hollered and got my dad woke up. There was the sheriff in the wagon, shot with a .22 pistol. The bullet was lodged right in his spinal cord. He was paralyzed from there down. He could talk, but he couldn't move a muscle. He told my dad, 'George, I guess they got me this time.' They fixed a bed for him, and they unloaded him here, and brought him in the house. They took my bed from upstairs. The sheriff was a tall fellow. He died right here in the house, after a second night, I think. At the time he died, there were almost more people here than there was in Eugene, comin' out to see about him. Posse came to catch this fellow. It was a pretty exciting time around here.
"The guy got away and got clear up to Creswell. He went to get on a freight train there. There was a posse there and they was watchin' the trains everywhere. All the roads in Lane County had someone watchin' 'em. He got clear up there [to Creswell] . . . They had double-barrel shotguns, all of 'em, looking for Lyons. Whey he went to get on the train, they told him to surrender, and he did. They got him into Eugene, put him in jail, had a trial and hung him, right there in the jailyard, right here in Eugene. My dad said if he got an invitation to go to the hangin', he was going to go. Sure enough he got one, but by that time he 'chickened out.' He didn't want to see anybody hung. We was glad he didn't."
Jim Hale guided us on a short tour of the Hale property. He pointed toward the hills across the valley from their farm and began to tell us something about the logging history of that area.
Jim Hale: "There was a logging company called Forcia and Larsen in this area. It had what was called the 'Star Mill' and the 'Star Camp,' which was a bunch of buildings owned by the company and used to house the people who worked there. They used that mill to cut all the old growth timber off all the way around the valley. in some places the second growth has also been taken, and is being replaced by 'new' or 'third' growth. That first time they brought the logs to the mill by a trestle railway down here at the south or east end of the valley. It ran all the way down the south side. There are traces of it still down there, just inside the trees.
"Dad and others hired out as drivers for a team to help them clear the roadway. That was quite a project. It took a long time to clear the roadway with the kind of logging methods they were using. In the earlier days they used to pull logs down the hill. Later on the 'donkey' was used to pull logs up to a landing on the top of the ridge."
Farmer and Mrs. Hale later explained that the 'donkey' was a steam engine that pulled the logs onto the landing where they were loaded on railway cars to be taken to the mill.
Mrs. Hale: "The lumber from the Star Mill was moved to the loading docks at Noti in a flume. The flume was a channel for water built on a trestle as high as seventy-five feet in some places. The flume was elevated slightly on the western end so as the keep the lumber moving along. Two men were hired to 'walk the flume' to keep the lumber from piling up."
Our visit to the Hale farm ended with Farmer telling us about an old storyteller who like to "play tricks" on people. Farmer was a young man when he first heard of this storyteller from the stagecoach drivers.
Farmer: Now this fellow was a great one to tell stories, this fellow up on the McKenzie. In the early days, the stage used to run up there and we called him Huckleberry Finn. He lived up there at Finn Rock, had a stage station of his own. Then there was another little fellow by the name of Pepeo who had another station, who lived just above him. So the passengers who went up there, they knew that this old fellow would give them a story. They weren't expecting the kind he gave them though. They got up there, you know, and she said, 'I'll tell you I would, but I'm just tired out this morning 'cause I sat up all night with this old man Pepeo who lives up there. The old fellow died about two o'clock this morning and I feel pretty bad about it, so I just don't feel like telling a story.' So the stage went on up the road, and there was old Pepeo up there. He hitched another team onto the stage. They got their story but they didn't know it. Yeah, that other fellow Pepeo was out there to greet them. Huckleberry Finn was a great storyteller, but that time he didn't give much warning about what he was going to tell them."
___________
Manena (Inman) Buchholz Obituary Scrapbook, p 113:
Dec. 7, 1985:
Descendant of Noti pioneers dies at 95
A funeral will be held Monday for Farmer Hale, 95, descendant of one of Lane County's oldest pioneer families. He died Thursday at the Eugene Hospital and Clinic.
Hale, of 21187 Highway 126, Noti, was a life-long resident of the Hale Ranch, which is part of the original donation land claim settled by his family in 1853 three miles west of Noti. For many years the Hale Ranch served as a post office and stage stop and is shown on old maps as Hale, Ore.
Hale was the grandson of William and Polly Miller Taylor and Calvin "Cap" and Milla Mays Hale. Cap Hale first came to Oregon in 1848 as a teamster for the family of Elijah Bristow, founder of Pleasant Hill.
Farmer Hale was born Jan. 2, 1890, the son of George Herbert and Mary Catherine Taylor Hale. he was a lifelong farmer, rancher and dairyman. He married Edith M. Brabham on Sept. 20, 1925.
Hale served as chairman of the Noti School District during the planning and construction of the Noti school in 1925 and was instrumental in the consolidation of small rural school districts in the area.
He was a charter member and frequent leader of the Route F Committee, a group of citizens who lobbied for more than 20 years for construction of Highway 126 from Eugene to Florence. The road was completed in the mid-1960s.
Hale was grand marshal of the first Applegate Trail Days parade and was the first recipient of the West Lane Chamber of Commerce Pioneer Award in 1974.
He was chairman of the Noti Election Board for many years and was a selective service registrar during WWII. He was a Lane County deputy assessor during the 1930s and helped to survey the Southern Pacific railroad in western Lane County.
Hale is survived by his wife, Edith; four children, Jean Norton and JoAnne Johnson, both of Myrtle Creek, Janet Barnes of Coos Bay and James Hale of Eugene; 11 grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren.
The funeral will be at 1 p.m. Monday at the Noti Church of Christ. Burial will be in Sailor Cemetery near Noti.
~~~
Note: Farmer Calvin Hale and Ruth Helen Hawkins were married on August 15, 1917 in Lane County, Oregon. They were divorced before 1925. They had no children and both were remarried to other people.
The Register-Guard, Eugene, Lane Co., Ore., June 1962:
IOOF to Honor 11 Saturday
BY HELEN PETERSON
Register-Guard Correspondent
ELMIRA--Two septuagenarians, Farmer C. Hale of Noti and C. E. "Ernst" Duckworth of Elmira, are among 11 men to be honored for long memberships by Elmira IOOF Lodge 207 Saturday.
An IOOF jewels ceremony will cite Hale for 50 years and Duckworth for 60 years of membership in the lodge. Nine others will receive pins designating memberships ranging from 25 to 45 years.
Others to be honored Saturday are Hans Christainsen, Frank Deedon, Jess McCulloch, Carl Edmiston, Frank Riley, Paul Bloom, Eugene Snellstrom, Bill Fisher and Orville Spires.
The ceremony will be held after a potluck dinner at 6 p.m. standard, 7 p.m. daylight in the IOOF Hall. Ellsworth Robison, past grand master of the IOOF Lodge of Oregon, will give the presentation speech.
Hale and Duckworth, first cousins, were born near their communities. Their grandparents, Calvin T. and Millie Hale, settled on a donation land claim three miles west of Noti in 1853. The site was later called Hale and served as a stage coach stop and post office for many years.
Hale still lives on and farms 310 acres of this claim where he was born Jan. 2, 1890. His birthplace, built by his grandfather, was utilized from time to time as a post office, stage coach stop and telephone exchange.
Duckworth was born Nov. 14, 1879, just north of Elmira. After his father's death, he moved with his mother and three brothers and sisters into the Hale home.
A one-time stage coach driver for Bang's Delivery Co. in Eugene, Duckworth married Anna Deming in 1908 and the couple settle on their 186-acre farm on Deming Road where they still raise sheep and cattle.
Duckworth joined the IOOF Lodge at Mapleton in 1901 and is a past grand of that organization. he has been a member of the Rebekah Lodge for 41 years and is a grange member.
Hale joined the IOOF Lodge in Elmira in 1912. He has been a member of the Rebekah Lodge for 25 years and is a past grand of both. He was a grange member for a time and served on the local school board.
___________
Century Farms of Lane County, 1976, Eugene, Oregon, pp 9-21,24-25:
The Hale Farm
Calvin Hale, always called "Cap" because he was a captain of a wagon train, came across the plains with his wife in 1852. He claimed 320 acres west of the present town of Noti in the small valley first known as Elk Prairie and now called Hale Valley. The original farm of Cap Hale has been divided. The original homesite is now owned by Farmer Hale. His two cousins, Wayne and Gordon Hale, own the other half of the land. We talked to Farmer Hale, now eighty-six years old, who is a grandson of Calvin Hale. We also talked to Farmer's wife Edith and his son Jim.
Farmer Hale is very well know in the Noti area. He has been Grand Marshall of the Applegate Trail Days celebration, and in 1974 received the Pioneer Award from the West Lane Chamber of Commerce and the Lions Club for a long life of service to the community.
The Hales' present house was built in 1909. The lumber for the house was received in exchange for rough timber from the Hale property. The house has been both a stage stop and a post office in the past. Room numbers can still be found above the doorways upstairs, and some of the original wallpaper is still on the walls.
The top of their old woodshed was used as a community hall. Here, they used to hold dances. Inside the hall there was a very small triangular platform where musicians played. Now the Hales have old pictures, books and other things stored in the hall and also in the "antique room" upstairs in their house.
Farmer Hale began by telling us how Calvin "Cap" Hale, his grandfather, came to Oregon to settle. The Bristow family he mentions were among the first settlers of Lane County. Calvin Hale was nineteen when he first came to this area. Mr. Bristow, who was already settled at Pleasant Hill, hired Calvin Hale to accompany the rest of the Bristow family [wife and sons] across the plains by wagon train from Illinois to Oregon.
Farmer: "After he arrived here in 1848 with the rest of the Bristow family, my grandfather helped around the Bristow place. He stayed there at Bristows' that winter, and the next spring they had the 1849 gold strike down there in California, so he and a bunch of other guys went down there. I suppose he must have made some money, but he didn't get rich. Calvin Hale stayed there and worked in the mines a couple of years. After that he went back to the East coast on an old cattle schooner that came into San Francisco. It brought cattle around Cape Horn. He finally got back to Illinois in 1850."
After his return to Illinois, Calvin married Milla Mays. He had been corresponding with her during the three-year period he spent 'out West.' Farmer Hale has possession of the first letter Calvin wrote to Milla from the Platte River in the Nebraska Territory in 1848.
Farmer: "We've got a handwritten letter which my grandfather wrote back to his early love. They'd had a little breakup or something, I guess before he started, so he wrote her a letter. He was 1100 miles from home then. It impressed her quite a bit. I guess it said he might never get back alive."
Jim: "We have a record of three letters that he wrote in that three-year period, from 1848 t 1850. That was a different day and time, you know. She was quite a young girl when he married her. She was in her early teens when he began writing her letters. Girls waited for people with very little communication."
In 1852, Calvin Hale left Illinois again by wagon train bound for Oregon. It was on this second trip that he assumed the role of "captain."
That was in 1852, when they stared that next time. He must have made a little money because he got enough to buy him a good team and wagon and things he needed to have. [In the late 1860's and early '70's a good wagon cost from $150 to $200 or more, depending on where you bought it and how many extras were involved. The wagon cover was worth $10 to $12 and a springboard cost around $20. A loaf of bread was a nickel and beefsteak was ten cents or fifteen cents a pound. A wagon cost a lot of money compared to these items.]
"My grandfather started out with is wife Milla and her family. When they reached the Platte River in the Nebraska Territory, Milla Hale gave birth to a son. They named him Nebraska. That was quite a deal, I guess. Nebraska was their first child. The train 'laid over' one day, and then the next morning they started out and made her a bed in the wagon . . . she was a strong woman, must have been pretty wiry. a fellow wouldn't start out with a deal like that nowadays, with a pregnant woman. He would be sent to an asylum. It was different in those days. They just didn't have hospitals to go to anyway.
"When he came the first time, there was just that ol' man Skinner's shack up there where Eugene is now. It's developed since then. I don't know--maybe Eugene would have been better off it it stayed like it was."
Jim: "Cap Hale was a representative of the earlier settling pattern that you read about in history books, where the families come from Kentucky or Tennessee, and then from there to Indiana or Illinois, and then to Oregon."
Farmer: "When Cap Hale came here there was none of this second growth timber. It was all old growth. It had been growin' for 400 or 500 years, I guess. The Indians kept the underbrush burnt out so that they could get through it when they were hunting.
My grandfather came on horseback. He first settled up by Camas Swale in 1852, but he didn't like it there. The next spring he got out to look to see what he could find. He met a couple of fellows that had been comin' up through here on foot from the coast. They walked through here and told him about this valley. Cap described what he wanted and he thought he'd like this place, so he came on. They described how he would get here and this is where he settled.
"Well, that time when he came he could only get 320 acres. If he'd gotten here a little earlier, he could get 640 acres, but the idea of it was that 320 acres was quite a lot of land and there was nobody else to bother him for a long time. His family was known as the white family farthest west of any other family in Lane County, maybe Oregon.
"Everything was no fences, no bridges, no roads, no nothin' when they come. They just got up in the valley and they found this place up here where there's a little spring. I think they made a lean-to shack there and lived in it that winter of 1853, and the best you could fix up when you don't have lumber. You just had to make it out of anything you could get to make a shack with. Pretty rough deal. If these young folks or I had to do it in my time, it would have been pretty bad for me too. A few years later they got the orchard started. Then they got some trees; I don't know if they brought some trees with them."
Jim Hale told us how Farmer got his name.
Jim: "Dad is the man with the twenty dollar name. My grandfather had a friend, Carroll Farmer, who was a trapper and jack-of-all trades. He lived with Farmer's parents and worked for then. He didn't have any children and thought it would be nice to have someone named after him. He knew that my grandfather had a baby on the way, so if it was a boy he'd like to have it named after him and he'd give my grandfather twenty dollars to do it. A son was born so he gave my grandfather a twenty dollar goldpiece. Twenty dollars then is like talking about $200 or $300 now. Instead of naming him Carroll, which really didn't excite my grandmother too much, he named him Farmer."
Farmer grew up on the place he is living on now. He talked about his younger days when he went to school.
Farmer: "I didn't take to school too much. I went to the little one-room school right down there by Elmira. My aunt and cousin lived there on the place near the school and I went down there a term or two. Then I went to school over on Poodle Creek. We had a lot of fun, never learning very much. I wasn't much interested in books, so I quit school to do the farming. We raised grain and hay. Well, we had to have quite a lot of feed and there was always a lot of work to do on a ranch. I used to think I could kind of half-run it but now it's kind of running me, since I got older. But I like it yet, and I might as well put in time here than any other place, I guess."
Jim: "This was a stage stop. It became a stage stop, a place for travelers because it was just about in a good place. Because it was a stage stop, it was kind of like Noti is now. it was a place where people came to get their mail because the stage left the male. it became a post office. We had a post mark lying around which says 'HALE OREGON.' At any rate, they manned the post office here twenty-five years. Then the railroad came through the other side of Badger Mountain, south of Noti. The train began to carry the mail and this post office was closed out. the post office was relocated in Elmira, then came back to Noti. There were probably more people here fifty years ago than there are now. In good weather this place was a noon lunch stop on the way to Mapleton."
Mrs. Hale: "Farmer's mother just about cooked all the time, from one meal to the next. They could never tell how many they'd have for dinner. She was a wonderful cook too."
Jim" "In the wintertime the roads were much worse, of course, and this was a night stop. With a 6:00 a.m. start from Eugene, they'd get here in the evening and go on to Mapleton the next day."
Mrs. Hale: "The stagecoach drivers slept here. One would sleep here and another drive on. The stage company in Eugene kept horses here and they changed horses."
Farmer: "The cost for a traveler to stay here for one night was probably a dollar and a half which included two meals and a bed. If they had horses, they'd have to pay something for that."
Jim: "Traveling by stage was not a very fun thing. it used to be just a much-traveled road through the woods, you might say. It was not a stage like we have in our minds from westerns; it had no roof and the people wore ponchos in the wintertime; any kind of poncho that turned water, just a kind of thing where your head was out in the rain. Your body was covered by the poncho, but you were sweating so much inside that thing, you might as well be out in the rain."
Mrs. Hale: "In the summertime they wore what you might call dusters. It just wasn't much protection and the stage didn't have a cover on it. But later on they got a cover for them. When I came out here in 1924, they were running just a two-seater car from Noti to Eugene, in the way of a stage. This was a stage stop only until the railroad went through, and they took all the business away from the stage. Carried all the mail and everything else. I think it was 1914-15 when they brought the railroad as far as Noti and then it didn't reach Coos Bay until two years later. They took a long time to go through because they had to build a tunnel. They had to use animals to draw the carts out with dirt and rock. They came in from both ways, both directions, east and west, and then there wasn't more than an inch difference when they met. And that was way back when they didn't have all this fancy equipment that they have nowadays. So that was an interesting time. That was before I came here."
Farmer: "There really hadn't been much change up to the time the railroad was put in. Then after that, well, it was a different deal. A lot of new people. The country just changed, you might say overnight, from what it used to be up to the present time. It kept getting bigger and bigger. More people comin' in."
Mrs. Hale: "With the railroad, the farmers could ship their cattle or their beef to Portland. Before that, they had to make a wagon trip once a year to Oregon City to get their staples and provisions for the winter. They went once a year and they'd come back with the wagon loaded with sugar, flour and coffee and that sort of thing."
Farmer: "Before the railroad came, it took two weeks to make the trip to Oregon City. It would take a week to go one way, do their trading, and one week to come back. Back then it was an overnight trip to go into Eugene, do any business and get back."
Mrs. Hale: "I even rode the train out her one time when I was teaching."
Farmer: "I was chairman of the school board when she came out here to teach. I thought she might as well be working for me as teaching school, so I finally broke down and said yes, and she has had her way ever since."
Mrs. Hale (after protesting his version of their courtship): "We've been married fifty years last September."
We asked Mrs. Hale to tell us about the dairy they operated on their farm a number of years ago.
Mrs. Hale: "Farmer was selling milk in five gallon cans at the camp down here [at Star Mill one mile east] and there weren't too many people who had moved in yet, but as families moved in, they built cabins for them to live in right here below us. There was more demand for milk, so then we began to sell it in bottles. Later on we extended our business to Noti.
"Our milk room was in the corner of the woodshed. We had it fixed up pretty nice. Water was piped in from the springs on the hill and ran in and out over the bottles all day long, because when we first started, we didn't even have electricity here."
Farmer Hale: "We didn't get electricity until April Fool's Day, 1938."
Mrs. Hale: "The milk was strained into a big tank and from there flowed over both sides of the milk cooler which was a cylinder-like affair made of corrugated metal with a stream of cold water flowing through it. From the cooler the milk was poured into a separator tank and then bottled. That is the way we kept the morning milk until evening since we peddled milk just once a day. After supper it was a mad rush to load up the milk in the boxes. So the girls, when they were little, used to go with their father, and that would make it easier for him after working hard in the fields all day. He could sit and just drive and they would deliver the milk."
Jim called our attention to the old-fashioned cooler built into the wall in the corner of the kitchen, and Mrs. Hale described it.
Mrs. Hale: "The shelves were made of half-inch wide strips of wood about three feet long with one-inch spaces between them. These strips were treated with linseed oil so that you could clean them just by wiping them off. It was used as a cooler because there's a screen in the bottom on the floor, and one on the top opening out to the porch, and the air circulated through it. Another old cooling method involved putting a pan of water out on top of a tall box that had shelves fixed in it. Cloths were strung on the sides of the box and water from the pan would kind of bead down through the cloths keeping them wet. This arrangement helped to keep the inside of the box cool.
"In the room back here, there was an old flour box. That box was set up on legs. The box had lids that opened from the center out. Farmer's mother used the flour box to make pies or sour dough biscuits. She could slide the flour board inside the box from one side to the other to get what she needed. They could put flour in one side and sugar in the other. They could keep a lot of baking ingredients in it."
The Hales continued to point out and explain interesting family mementos and features of their farm. As this happened, Farmer Hale recalled more of his boyhood experiences.
Farmer: "I had a riding pony. I was never allowed to ride a saddle. I always had to ride bareback. I was raised on that old pony. I rode it ever since I was big enough to get it up to the rail fence where I could get on it. I didn't have many playmates when I was young. My uncle had one girl just a little younger than me and a boy who was about four years old at the time. Then there were other families up here, but the idea was that you had to walk if you wanted to see them. This old pony, I could walk miles to get to ride it over to the next house. I had to chase it over the hills before I could get it."
Farmer remembered a local incident that occurred in 1903 in which a Lane County sheriff was shot. The sheriff died shortly thereafter in the Hale home. Along with Farmer's recollections of the incident, we include the actual newspaper accounts at the time. [Note: Those newspaper articles may be found under William W. Withers and Elliot Lyons, who both died in 1903.]
Farmer: "I was about thirteen years old when the sheriff and his deputy came out from Eugene one day with a team and one-seated buggy. They came about three in the afternoon. My dad knew the sheriff real well, knew him ever since he was a kid. He used to go to school with him in Irving. My dad knew the fellow that shot him, too. Dad said that everybody liked the sheriff. He was a nice guy.
"The sheriff and his deputy came out to arrest a fellow over at Walton, a fellow by the name of Lyons who was in trouble in southern Oregon for stealing cattle or a horse or something. Ther sheriff went over there and he told my dad when he left the team here, 'Just leave the harness on 'em. I'll be back to pick 'em up after awhile. Fix me a lantern here where I can see to get out with 'em. You wouldn't need to get up to help me out.'
"So my dad left the harness on them and I could see the ol' deputies walking out across the field. I can see 'em plain yet. They went over there about eleven that night. Later on, when everybody had gone to sleep, they returned and knocked on the door. They hollered and got my dad woke up. There was the sheriff in the wagon, shot with a .22 pistol. The bullet was lodged right in his spinal cord. He was paralyzed from there down. He could talk, but he couldn't move a muscle. He told my dad, 'George, I guess they got me this time.' They fixed a bed for him, and they unloaded him here, and brought him in the house. They took my bed from upstairs. The sheriff was a tall fellow. He died right here in the house, after a second night, I think. At the time he died, there were almost more people here than there was in Eugene, comin' out to see about him. Posse came to catch this fellow. It was a pretty exciting time around here.
"The guy got away and got clear up to Creswell. He went to get on a freight train there. There was a posse there and they was watchin' the trains everywhere. All the roads in Lane County had someone watchin' 'em. He got clear up there [to Creswell] . . . They had double-barrel shotguns, all of 'em, looking for Lyons. Whey he went to get on the train, they told him to surrender, and he did. They got him into Eugene, put him in jail, had a trial and hung him, right there in the jailyard, right here in Eugene. My dad said if he got an invitation to go to the hangin', he was going to go. Sure enough he got one, but by that time he 'chickened out.' He didn't want to see anybody hung. We was glad he didn't."
Jim Hale guided us on a short tour of the Hale property. He pointed toward the hills across the valley from their farm and began to tell us something about the logging history of that area.
Jim Hale: "There was a logging company called Forcia and Larsen in this area. It had what was called the 'Star Mill' and the 'Star Camp,' which was a bunch of buildings owned by the company and used to house the people who worked there. They used that mill to cut all the old growth timber off all the way around the valley. in some places the second growth has also been taken, and is being replaced by 'new' or 'third' growth. That first time they brought the logs to the mill by a trestle railway down here at the south or east end of the valley. It ran all the way down the south side. There are traces of it still down there, just inside the trees.
"Dad and others hired out as drivers for a team to help them clear the roadway. That was quite a project. It took a long time to clear the roadway with the kind of logging methods they were using. In the earlier days they used to pull logs down the hill. Later on the 'donkey' was used to pull logs up to a landing on the top of the ridge."
Farmer and Mrs. Hale later explained that the 'donkey' was a steam engine that pulled the logs onto the landing where they were loaded on railway cars to be taken to the mill.
Mrs. Hale: "The lumber from the Star Mill was moved to the loading docks at Noti in a flume. The flume was a channel for water built on a trestle as high as seventy-five feet in some places. The flume was elevated slightly on the western end so as the keep the lumber moving along. Two men were hired to 'walk the flume' to keep the lumber from piling up."
Our visit to the Hale farm ended with Farmer telling us about an old storyteller who like to "play tricks" on people. Farmer was a young man when he first heard of this storyteller from the stagecoach drivers.
Farmer: Now this fellow was a great one to tell stories, this fellow up on the McKenzie. In the early days, the stage used to run up there and we called him Huckleberry Finn. He lived up there at Finn Rock, had a stage station of his own. Then there was another little fellow by the name of Pepeo who had another station, who lived just above him. So the passengers who went up there, they knew that this old fellow would give them a story. They weren't expecting the kind he gave them though. They got up there, you know, and she said, 'I'll tell you I would, but I'm just tired out this morning 'cause I sat up all night with this old man Pepeo who lives up there. The old fellow died about two o'clock this morning and I feel pretty bad about it, so I just don't feel like telling a story.' So the stage went on up the road, and there was old Pepeo up there. He hitched another team onto the stage. They got their story but they didn't know it. Yeah, that other fellow Pepeo was out there to greet them. Huckleberry Finn was a great storyteller, but that time he didn't give much warning about what he was going to tell them."
___________
Manena (Inman) Buchholz Obituary Scrapbook, p 113:
Dec. 7, 1985:
Descendant of Noti pioneers dies at 95
A funeral will be held Monday for Farmer Hale, 95, descendant of one of Lane County's oldest pioneer families. He died Thursday at the Eugene Hospital and Clinic.
Hale, of 21187 Highway 126, Noti, was a life-long resident of the Hale Ranch, which is part of the original donation land claim settled by his family in 1853 three miles west of Noti. For many years the Hale Ranch served as a post office and stage stop and is shown on old maps as Hale, Ore.
Hale was the grandson of William and Polly Miller Taylor and Calvin "Cap" and Milla Mays Hale. Cap Hale first came to Oregon in 1848 as a teamster for the family of Elijah Bristow, founder of Pleasant Hill.
Farmer Hale was born Jan. 2, 1890, the son of George Herbert and Mary Catherine Taylor Hale. he was a lifelong farmer, rancher and dairyman. He married Edith M. Brabham on Sept. 20, 1925.
Hale served as chairman of the Noti School District during the planning and construction of the Noti school in 1925 and was instrumental in the consolidation of small rural school districts in the area.
He was a charter member and frequent leader of the Route F Committee, a group of citizens who lobbied for more than 20 years for construction of Highway 126 from Eugene to Florence. The road was completed in the mid-1960s.
Hale was grand marshal of the first Applegate Trail Days parade and was the first recipient of the West Lane Chamber of Commerce Pioneer Award in 1974.
He was chairman of the Noti Election Board for many years and was a selective service registrar during WWII. He was a Lane County deputy assessor during the 1930s and helped to survey the Southern Pacific railroad in western Lane County.
Hale is survived by his wife, Edith; four children, Jean Norton and JoAnne Johnson, both of Myrtle Creek, Janet Barnes of Coos Bay and James Hale of Eugene; 11 grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren.
The funeral will be at 1 p.m. Monday at the Noti Church of Christ. Burial will be in Sailor Cemetery near Noti.
~~~
Note: Farmer Calvin Hale and Ruth Helen Hawkins were married on August 15, 1917 in Lane County, Oregon. They were divorced before 1925. They had no children and both were remarried to other people.
IOOF to Honor 11 Saturday
BY HELEN PETERSON
Register-Guard Correspondent
ELMIRA--Two septuagenarians, Farmer C. Hale of Noti and C. E. "Ernst" Duckworth of Elmira, are among 11 men to be honored for long memberships by Elmira IOOF Lodge 207 Saturday.
An IOOF jewels ceremony will cite Hale for 50 years and Duckworth for 60 years of membership in the lodge. Nine others will receive pins designating memberships ranging from 25 to 45 years.
Others to be honored Saturday are Hans Christainsen, Frank Deedon, Jess McCulloch, Carl Edmiston, Frank Riley, Paul Bloom, Eugene Snellstrom, Bill Fisher and Orville Spires.
The ceremony will be held after a potluck dinner at 6 p.m. standard, 7 p.m. daylight in the IOOF Hall. Ellsworth Robison, past grand master of the IOOF Lodge of Oregon, will give the presentation speech.
Hale and Duckworth, first cousins, were born near their communities. Their grandparents, Calvin T. and Millie Hale, settled on a donation land claim three miles west of Noti in 1853. The site was later called Hale and served as a stage coach stop and post office for many years.
Hale still lives on and farms 310 acres of this claim where he was born Jan. 2, 1890. His birthplace, built by his grandfather, was utilized from time to time as a post office, stage coach stop and telephone exchange.
Duckworth was born Nov. 14, 1879, just north of Elmira. After his father's death, he moved with his mother and three brothers and sisters into the Hale home.
A one-time stage coach driver for Bang's Delivery Co. in Eugene, Duckworth married Anna Deming in 1908 and the couple settle on their 186-acre farm on Deming Road where they still raise sheep and cattle.
Duckworth joined the IOOF Lodge at Mapleton in 1901 and is a past grand of that organization. he has been a member of the Rebekah Lodge for 41 years and is a grange member.
Hale joined the IOOF Lodge in Elmira in 1912. He has been a member of the Rebekah Lodge for 25 years and is a past grand of both. He was a grange member for a time and served on the local school board.
___________
Century Farms of Lane County, 1976, Eugene, Oregon, pp 9-21,24-25:
The Hale Farm
Calvin Hale, always called "Cap" because he was a captain of a wagon train, came across the plains with his wife in 1852. He claimed 320 acres west of the present town of Noti in the small valley first known as Elk Prairie and now called Hale Valley. The original farm of Cap Hale has been divided. The original homesite is now owned by Farmer Hale. His two cousins, Wayne and Gordon Hale, own the other half of the land. We talked to Farmer Hale, now eighty-six years old, who is a grandson of Calvin Hale. We also talked to Farmer's wife Edith and his son Jim.
Farmer Hale is very well know in the Noti area. He has been Grand Marshall of the Applegate Trail Days celebration, and in 1974 received the Pioneer Award from the West Lane Chamber of Commerce and the Lions Club for a long life of service to the community.
The Hales' present house was built in 1909. The lumber for the house was received in exchange for rough timber from the Hale property. The house has been both a stage stop and a post office in the past. Room numbers can still be found above the doorways upstairs, and some of the original wallpaper is still on the walls.
The top of their old woodshed was used as a community hall. Here, they used to hold dances. Inside the hall there was a very small triangular platform where musicians played. Now the Hales have old pictures, books and other things stored in the hall and also in the "antique room" upstairs in their house.
Farmer Hale began by telling us how Calvin "Cap" Hale, his grandfather, came to Oregon to settle. The Bristow family he mentions were among the first settlers of Lane County. Calvin Hale was nineteen when he first came to this area. Mr. Bristow, who was already settled at Pleasant Hill, hired Calvin Hale to accompany the rest of the Bristow family [wife and sons] across the plains by wagon train from Illinois to Oregon.
Farmer: "After he arrived here in 1848 with the rest of the Bristow family, my grandfather helped around the Bristow place. He stayed there at Bristows' that winter, and the next spring they had the 1849 gold strike down there in California, so he and a bunch of other guys went down there. I suppose he must have made some money, but he didn't get rich. Calvin Hale stayed there and worked in the mines a couple of years. After that he went back to the East coast on an old cattle schooner that came into San Francisco. It brought cattle around Cape Horn. He finally got back to Illinois in 1850."
After his return to Illinois, Calvin married Milla Mays. He had been corresponding with her during the three-year period he spent 'out West.' Farmer Hale has possession of the first letter Calvin wrote to Milla from the Platte River in the Nebraska Territory in 1848.
Farmer: "We've got a handwritten letter which my grandfather wrote back to his early love. They'd had a little breakup or something, I guess before he started, so he wrote her a letter. He was 1100 miles from home then. It impressed her quite a bit. I guess it said he might never get back alive."
Jim: "We have a record of three letters that he wrote in that three-year period, from 1848 t 1850. That was a different day and time, you know. She was quite a young girl when he married her. She was in her early teens when he began writing her letters. Girls waited for people with very little communication."
In 1852, Calvin Hale left Illinois again by wagon train bound for Oregon. It was on this second trip that he assumed the role of "captain."
That was in 1852, when they stared that next time. He must have made a little money because he got enough to buy him a good team and wagon and things he needed to have. [In the late 1860's and early '70's a good wagon cost from $150 to $200 or more, depending on where you bought it and how many extras were involved. The wagon cover was worth $10 to $12 and a springboard cost around $20. A loaf of bread was a nickel and beefsteak was ten cents or fifteen cents a pound. A wagon cost a lot of money compared to these items.]
"My grandfather started out with is wife Milla and her family. When they reached the Platte River in the Nebraska Territory, Milla Hale gave birth to a son. They named him Nebraska. That was quite a deal, I guess. Nebraska was their first child. The train 'laid over' one day, and then the next morning they started out and made her a bed in the wagon . . . she was a strong woman, must have been pretty wiry. a fellow wouldn't start out with a deal like that nowadays, with a pregnant woman. He would be sent to an asylum. It was different in those days. They just didn't have hospitals to go to anyway.
"When he came the first time, there was just that ol' man Skinner's shack up there where Eugene is now. It's developed since then. I don't know--maybe Eugene would have been better off it it stayed like it was."
Jim: "Cap Hale was a representative of the earlier settling pattern that you read about in history books, where the families come from Kentucky or Tennessee, and then from there to Indiana or Illinois, and then to Oregon."
Farmer: "When Cap Hale came here there was none of this second growth timber. It was all old growth. It had been growin' for 400 or 500 years, I guess. The Indians kept the underbrush burnt out so that they could get through it when they were hunting.
My grandfather came on horseback. He first settled up by Camas Swale in 1852, but he didn't like it there. The next spring he got out to look to see what he could find. He met a couple of fellows that had been comin' up through here on foot from the coast. They walked through here and told him about this valley. Cap described what he wanted and he thought he'd like this place, so he came on. They described how he would get here and this is where he settled.
"Well, that time when he came he could only get 320 acres. If he'd gotten here a little earlier, he could get 640 acres, but the idea of it was that 320 acres was quite a lot of land and there was nobody else to bother him for a long time. His family was known as the white family farthest west of any other family in Lane County, maybe Oregon.
"Everything was no fences, no bridges, no roads, no nothin' when they come. They just got up in the valley and they found this place up here where there's a little spring. I think they made a lean-to shack there and lived in it that winter of 1853, and the best you could fix up when you don't have lumber. You just had to make it out of anything you could get to make a shack with. Pretty rough deal. If these young folks or I had to do it in my time, it would have been pretty bad for me too. A few years later they got the orchard started. Then they got some trees; I don't know if they brought some trees with them."
Jim Hale told us how Farmer got his name.
Jim: "Dad is the man with the twenty dollar name. My grandfather had a friend, Carroll Farmer, who was a trapper and jack-of-all trades. He lived with Farmer's parents and worked for then. He didn't have any children and thought it would be nice to have someone named after him. He knew that my grandfather had a baby on the way, so if it was a boy he'd like to have it named after him and he'd give my grandfather twenty dollars to do it. A son was born so he gave my grandfather a twenty dollar goldpiece. Twenty dollars then is like talking about $200 or $300 now. Instead of naming him Carroll, which really didn't excite my grandmother too much, he named him Farmer."
Farmer grew up on the place he is living on now. He talked about his younger days when he went to school.
Farmer: "I didn't take to school too much. I went to the little one-room school right down there by Elmira. My aunt and cousin lived there on the place near the school and I went down there a term or two. Then I went to school over on Poodle Creek. We had a lot of fun, never learning very much. I wasn't much interested in books, so I quit school to do the farming. We raised grain and hay. Well, we had to have quite a lot of feed and there was always a lot of work to do on a ranch. I used to think I could kind of half-run it but now it's kind of running me, since I got older. But I like it yet, and I might as well put in time here than any other place, I guess."
Jim: "This was a stage stop. It became a stage stop, a place for travelers because it was just about in a good place. Because it was a stage stop, it was kind of like Noti is now. it was a place where people came to get their mail because the stage left the male. it became a post office. We had a post mark lying around which says 'HALE OREGON.' At any rate, they manned the post office here twenty-five years. Then the railroad came through the other side of Badger Mountain, south of Noti. The train began to carry the mail and this post office was closed out. the post office was relocated in Elmira, then came back to Noti. There were probably more people here fifty years ago than there are now. In good weather this place was a noon lunch stop on the way to Mapleton."
Mrs. Hale: "Farmer's mother just about cooked all the time, from one meal to the next. They could never tell how many they'd have for dinner. She was a wonderful cook too."
Jim" "In the wintertime the roads were much worse, of course, and this was a night stop. With a 6:00 a.m. start from Eugene, they'd get here in the evening and go on to Mapleton the next day."
Mrs. Hale: "The stagecoach drivers slept here. One would sleep here and another drive on. The stage company in Eugene kept horses here and they changed horses."
Farmer: "The cost for a traveler to stay here for one night was probably a dollar and a half which included two meals and a bed. If they had horses, they'd have to pay something for that."
Jim: "Traveling by stage was not a very fun thing. it used to be just a much-traveled road through the woods, you might say. It was not a stage like we have in our minds from westerns; it had no roof and the people wore ponchos in the wintertime; any kind of poncho that turned water, just a kind of thing where your head was out in the rain. Your body was covered by the poncho, but you were sweating so much inside that thing, you might as well be out in the rain."
Mrs. Hale: "In the summertime they wore what you might call dusters. It just wasn't much protection and the stage didn't have a cover on it. But later on they got a cover for them. When I came out here in 1924, they were running just a two-seater car from Noti to Eugene, in the way of a stage. This was a stage stop only until the railroad went through, and they took all the business away from the stage. Carried all the mail and everything else. I think it was 1914-15 when they brought the railroad as far as Noti and then it didn't reach Coos Bay until two years later. They took a long time to go through because they had to build a tunnel. They had to use animals to draw the carts out with dirt and rock. They came in from both ways, both directions, east and west, and then there wasn't more than an inch difference when they met. And that was way back when they didn't have all this fancy equipment that they have nowadays. So that was an interesting time. That was before I came here."
Farmer: "There really hadn't been much change up to the time the railroad was put in. Then after that, well, it was a different deal. A lot of new people. The country just changed, you might say overnight, from what it used to be up to the present time. It kept getting bigger and bigger. More people comin' in."
Mrs. Hale: "With the railroad, the farmers could ship their cattle or their beef to Portland. Before that, they had to make a wagon trip once a year to Oregon City to get their staples and provisions for the winter. They went once a year and they'd come back with the wagon loaded with sugar, flour and coffee and that sort of thing."
Farmer: "Before the railroad came, it took two weeks to make the trip to Oregon City. It would take a week to go one way, do their trading, and one week to come back. Back then it was an overnight trip to go into Eugene, do any business and get back."
Mrs. Hale: "I even rode the train out her one time when I was teaching."
Farmer: "I was chairman of the school board when she came out here to teach. I thought she might as well be working for me as teaching school, so I finally broke down and said yes, and she has had her way ever since."
Mrs. Hale (after protesting his version of their courtship): "We've been married fifty years last September."
We asked Mrs. Hale to tell us about the dairy they operated on their farm a number of years ago.
Mrs. Hale: "Farmer was selling milk in five gallon cans at the camp down here [at Star Mill one mile east] and there weren't too many people who had moved in yet, but as families moved in, they built cabins for them to live in right here below us. There was more demand for milk, so then we began to sell it in bottles. Later on we extended our business to Noti.
"Our milk room was in the corner of the woodshed. We had it fixed up pretty nice. Water was piped in from the springs on the hill and ran in and out over the bottles all day long, because when we first started, we didn't even have electricity here."
Farmer Hale: "We didn't get electricity until April Fool's Day, 1938."
Mrs. Hale: "The milk was strained into a big tank and from there flowed over both sides of the milk cooler which was a cylinder-like affair made of corrugated metal with a stream of cold water flowing through it. From the cooler the milk was poured into a separator tank and then bottled. That is the way we kept the morning milk until evening since we peddled milk just once a day. After supper it was a mad rush to load up the milk in the boxes. So the girls, when they were little, used to go with their father, and that would make it easier for him after working hard in the fields all day. He could sit and just drive and they would deliver the milk."
Jim called our attention to the old-fashioned cooler built into the wall in the corner of the kitchen, and Mrs. Hale described it.
Mrs. Hale: "The shelves were made of half-inch wide strips of wood about three feet long with one-inch spaces between them. These strips were treated with linseed oil so that you could clean them just by wiping them off. It was used as a cooler because there's a screen in the bottom on the floor, and one on the top opening out to the porch, and the air circulated through it. Another old cooling method involved putting a pan of water out on top of a tall box that had shelves fixed in it. Cloths were strung on the sides of the box and water from the pan would kind of bead down through the cloths keeping them wet. This arrangement helped to keep the inside of the box cool.
"In the room back here, there was an old flour box. That box was set up on legs. The box had lids that opened from the center out. Farmer's mother used the flour box to make pies or sour dough biscuits. She could slide the flour board inside the box from one side to the other to get what she needed. They could put flour in one side and sugar in the other. They could keep a lot of baking ingredients in it."
The Hales continued to point out and explain interesting family mementos and features of their farm. As this happened, Farmer Hale recalled more of his boyhood experiences.
Farmer: "I had a riding pony. I was never allowed to ride a saddle. I always had to ride bareback. I was raised on that old pony. I rode it ever since I was big enough to get it up to the rail fence where I could get on it. I didn't have many playmates when I was young. My uncle had one girl just a little younger than me and a boy who was about four years old at the time. Then there were other families up here, but the idea was that you had to walk if you wanted to see them. This old pony, I could walk miles to get to ride it over to the next house. I had to chase it over the hills before I could get it."
Farmer remembered a local incident that occurred in 1903 in which a Lane County sheriff was shot. The sheriff died shortly thereafter in the Hale home. Along with Farmer's recollections of the incident, we include the actual newspaper accounts at the time. [Note: Those newspaper articles may be found under William W. Withers and Elliot Lyons, who both died in 1903.]
Farmer: "I was about thirteen years old when the sheriff and his deputy came out from Eugene one day with a team and one-seated buggy. They came about three in the afternoon. My dad knew the sheriff real well, knew him ever since he was a kid. He used to go to school with him in Irving. My dad knew the fellow that shot him, too. Dad said that everybody liked the sheriff. He was a nice guy.
"The sheriff and his deputy came out to arrest a fellow over at Walton, a fellow by the name of Lyons who was in trouble in southern Oregon for stealing cattle or a horse or something. Ther sheriff went over there and he told my dad when he left the team here, 'Just leave the harness on 'em. I'll be back to pick 'em up after awhile. Fix me a lantern here where I can see to get out with 'em. You wouldn't need to get up to help me out.'
"So my dad left the harness on them and I could see the ol' deputies walking out across the field. I can see 'em plain yet. They went over there about eleven that night. Later on, when everybody had gone to sleep, they returned and knocked on the door. They hollered and got my dad woke up. There was the sheriff in the wagon, shot with a .22 pistol. The bullet was lodged right in his spinal cord. He was paralyzed from there down. He could talk, but he couldn't move a muscle. He told my dad, 'George, I guess they got me this time.' They fixed a bed for him, and they unloaded him here, and brought him in the house. They took my bed from upstairs. The sheriff was a tall fellow. He died right here in the house, after a second night, I think. At the time he died, there were almost more people here than there was in Eugene, comin' out to see about him. Posse came to catch this fellow. It was a pretty exciting time around here.
"The guy got away and got clear up to Creswell. He went to get on a freight train there. There was a posse there and they was watchin' the trains everywhere. All the roads in Lane County had someone watchin' 'em. He got clear up there [to Creswell] . . . They had double-barrel shotguns, all of 'em, looking for Lyons. Whey he went to get on the train, they told him to surrender, and he did. They got him into Eugene, put him in jail, had a trial and hung him, right there in the jailyard, right here in Eugene. My dad said if he got an invitation to go to the hangin', he was going to go. Sure enough he got one, but by that time he 'chickened out.' He didn't want to see anybody hung. We was glad he didn't."
Jim Hale guided us on a short tour of the Hale property. He pointed toward the hills across the valley from their farm and began to tell us something about the logging history of that area.
Jim Hale: "There was a logging company called Forcia and Larsen in this area. It had what was called the 'Star Mill' and the 'Star Camp,' which was a bunch of buildings owned by the company and used to house the people who worked there. They used that mill to cut all the old growth timber off all the way around the valley. in some places the second growth has also been taken, and is being replaced by 'new' or 'third' growth. That first time they brought the logs to the mill by a trestle railway down here at the south or east end of the valley. It ran all the way down the south side. There are traces of it still down there, just inside the trees.
"Dad and others hired out as drivers for a team to help them clear the roadway. That was quite a project. It took a long time to clear the roadway with the kind of logging methods they were using. In the earlier days they used to pull logs down the hill. Later on the 'donkey' was used to pull logs up to a landing on the top of the ridge."
Farmer and Mrs. Hale later explained that the 'donkey' was a steam engine that pulled the logs onto the landing where they were loaded on railway cars to be taken to the mill.
Mrs. Hale: "The lumber from the Star Mill was moved to the loading docks at Noti in a flume. The flume was a channel for water built on a trestle as high as seventy-five feet in some places. The flume was elevated slightly on the western end so as the keep the lumber moving along. Two men were hired to 'walk the flume' to keep the lumber from piling up."
Our visit to the Hale farm ended with Farmer telling us about an old storyteller who like to "play tricks" on people. Farmer was a young man when he first heard of this storyteller from the stagecoach drivers.
Farmer: Now this fellow was a great one to tell stories, this fellow up on the McKenzie. In the early days, the stage used to run up there and we called him Huckleberry Finn. He lived up there at Finn Rock, had a stage station of his own. Then there was another little fellow by the name of Pepeo who had another station, who lived just above him. So the passengers who went up there, they knew that this old fellow would give them a story. They weren't expecting the kind he gave them though. They got up there, you know, and she said, 'I'll tell you I would, but I'm just tired out this morning 'cause I sat up all night with this old man Pepeo who lives up there. The old fellow died about two o'clock this morning and I feel pretty bad about it, so I just don't feel like telling a story.' So the stage went on up the road, and there was old Pepeo up there. He hitched another team onto the stage. They got their story but they didn't know it. Yeah, that other fellow Pepeo was out there to greet them. Huckleberry Finn was a great storyteller, but that time he didn't give much warning about what he was going to tell them."
___________
Manena (Inman) Buchholz Obituary Scrapbook, p 113:
Dec. 7, 1985:
Descendant of Noti pioneers dies at 95
A funeral will be held Monday for Farmer Hale, 95, descendant of one of Lane County's oldest pioneer families. He died Thursday at the Eugene Hospital and Clinic.
Hale, of 21187 Highway 126, Noti, was a life-long resident of the Hale Ranch, which is part of the original donation land claim settled by his family in 1853 three miles west of Noti. For many years the Hale Ranch served as a post office and stage stop and is shown on old maps as Hale, Ore.
Hale was the grandson of William and Polly Miller Taylor and Calvin "Cap" and Milla Mays Hale. Cap Hale first came to Oregon in 1848 as a teamster for the family of Elijah Bristow, founder of Pleasant Hill.
Farmer Hale was born Jan. 2, 1890, the son of George Herbert and Mary Catherine Taylor Hale. he was a lifelong farmer, rancher and dairyman. He married Edith M. Brabham on Sept. 20, 1925.
Hale served as chairman of the Noti School District during the planning and construction of the Noti school in 1925 and was instrumental in the consolidation of small rural school districts in the area.
He was a charter member and frequent leader of the Route F Committee, a group of citizens who lobbied for more than 20 years for construction of Highway 126 from Eugene to Florence. The road was completed in the mid-1960s.
Hale was grand marshal of the first Applegate Trail Days parade and was the first recipient of the West Lane Chamber of Commerce Pioneer Award in 1974.
He was chairman of the Noti Election Board for many years and was a selective service registrar during WWII. He was a Lane County deputy assessor during the 1930s and helped to survey the Southern Pacific railroad in western Lane County.
Hale is survived by his wife, Edith; four children, Jean Norton and JoAnne Johnson, both of Myrtle Creek, Janet Barnes of Coos Bay and James Hale of Eugene; 11 grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren.
The funeral will be at 1 p.m. Monday at the Noti Church of Christ. Burial will be in Sailor Cemetery near Noti.
~~~
Note: Farmer Calvin Hale and Ruth Helen Hawkins were married on August 15, 1917 in Lane County, Oregon. They were divorced before 1925. They had no children and both were remarried to other people.
Family Members
Sponsored by Ancestry
Advertisement
Explore more
Sponsored by Ancestry
Advertisement
