She worked in a logging camp as a young girl
Alice Jemima Carter, was born in Myrtle Point, Oregon. She was named Jemima after her grandmother Rachael Jemima Brown. She was just child of five, when her mother died. She had 11 sisters and 3 brothers. (No wonder her mother died!) When she was born, she had sisters that were old enough to be her mother, and I'm sure, nieces and nephews that were older than she was.
She told how she worked as a young girl in the logging camp kitchen. She had to bake so many loaves of bread for the loggers, and how her eyes were so horribly burned by the sulfur that was in the flour. When she would open the door to the old wood cook stove oven, the sulfur fumes would boil out and burn her eyes. I think she suffered from that for the rest of her life.
It must have been in the logging camp that she met Otto Muetzel. She married him when she was but 16 years old. He was 23. He probably swept her off her feet, as the saying goes, as he was quite the ladies man.
When Earla and Kermit were very small, and they lived in the Roseburg area, she caught a ride on the mail wagon that was traveling to Myrtle Point. That is where her dad was living and they were going for a visit. Anyway, going down what is now Highway 42, was a horrible trip. She was scared to death, at the rocking and lunging of the wagon and horses trying to manuever through the mud and ruts going down through the canyon. She was so afraid that she and the babies were going to be thrown out of the wagon and killed. The road followed along the Middle Fork of the Coquille River and was at times, on the very edge of it.
She was in a wheelchair, from the middle 1940's until she died. No one could say for sure, why she was in that chair. I think she must have been crippled up with rhumatoid arthritis. I seem to remember as a child, that her fingers were crooked. Of course, that could have just been from osteoarthritis too. I never knew her to be out of her chair. I remember one time, in the late 1950's when she was visiting us, my father, picked her up out of the car, and carried her into the house. I don't think she weighed very much.
When I was about three years old.....perhaps about 1953, I had gotten a new pair of underpanties with ruffles on the bottom, and I remember her asking about my new panties, and I bending over and showing my ruffles to her. She admired them very much! She told me that she wished she had a pair as pretty as that.
I also was told that when I was just a baby and almost dying of pneumonia or whooping cough, (I had both and don't remember which it was at the time), she held and comforted me and told my parents that since I was so limp, I was very near death. Luckly I survived. Perhaps it was with her help, that I lived.
She was a very nice woman, and very quiet. Of course, after Otto died, she lived the rest of her life, with either Earla or Willamae, and those two women, could talk the socks off a horse! Perhaps she never got a chance to talk much!
When Otto was alive, and they had their sawmill running, she was in charge of feeding quite a few people. She rarely had less than a dozen people around her table at once. Many times there were 20 or more. She fed the hired hands, and any single guys that followed the sawmill. Otto would pack up the mill and take it where ever there was timber to be cut. Years and years after her passing, old men, that had worked with the Muetzels, remember her in the kitchen and never complaining about having to feed them all. She was always so generous and kind to them, and welcomed each and everyone. Some never had homes or families except for this one.
They never lived very rich. Life was pretty hard and rough for Alice. Most times, she would give her list of supplies to Otto and he would drive to town, and pick up everything.
She had 7 children. Her first, Florentina died when about 2 months old. The baby is supposed to be buried in the Lookingglass Cemetery, Douglas Co. Oregon. There is no headstone, and no record in the cemetery map, so we aren't sure where the grave could be. At the time of the baby's death, Alice and Otto lived on a ranch in Happy Valley, near Roseburg.
I never knew Grandma Muetzel very well. I wish now, that I had more chances to see and know her. From what my mother tells me, she was a very kind and gentle person, and on the shy side. She died when I was almost 12 years old. It was three weeks after my sister, Nancy, had died, that she passed away. She never knew that Nancy had died. They didn't want to tell her. What a sad time in my dad's life...to lose his daughter and his mother within three weeks of each other.
On Thanksgiving of 2,008, I was showing my aunt Ariel Muetzel Goold some pictures that I had copied, and she saw one of her mother, Alice Jemima standing with her sisters, and she remarked, "Oh, poor Mama's foot". I asked her why she said that, and she said that when her mother was just a small child, about five years old, she took the ax and tried to cut kindling, and the ax slipped and hit her in the foot and cut it badly. It never healed well, and always after that she had a swelled up ankle, and her foot pained her always. I wanted to add this before I too forget some of the stories......
Alice died January 11, 1962. She is buried beside Otto, in the Tenmile Methodist Cemetery, Tenmile, Oregon.

Alice Jemima Carter and Otto Muetzel, early in their marriage. I think she must have been expecting at this time, as her dress is so bulky.