One of my very favorite things these days is having my interest piqued at the mention of some local history that I had not been aware of until now. It’s fun to have the time and energy to delve into research that might help me to understand a bit better what happened in our local communities many years ago. Life has changed so drastically in the last 100 years. I’ve witnessed almost 80 of them myself.
When I was born, there were cars, but many farmers were still using teams of horses to harvest their crops. The man-in-the-moon was something we looked for as kids when the full moon was shining down on us. (I always saw a rabbit more than the man’s face, though.) But, the thought of someone actually traveling there and walking on the moon was sheer fantasy in those days. Airplane travel was available to us when I was a child. I remember that my first airplane ride was on a plane which took off from a small airport on Catalina Island where my family had gone by boat, enjoying the sea spray and watching flying fish sail along beside the boat. The airplane take-off was the highlight of the trip, however, when the runway went right off the top of a steep cliff. We were suddenly airborne.
There was no internet or cell phones even dreamed of in those days. We had party-lines on our home phones where we had one special ring (i.e. two shorts) and the neighbors had, maybe, a short and a long; or two longs. There were no secrets if you mentioned them during a phone call in those days because the neighbors were usually listening in.
I actually tend to miss those days before technology took over. I dislike automated answering systems and having to press numbers one or two or try to convey what I am calling about to a robotic voice that has no idea what I’m needing to say; I like to talk to real people who are local … many of whom I knew their names.
Recently, I was contacted by a gentleman who had come to the Lorane/Crow area from out-of-state in search of a boulder with petroglyphs on it that was described in a history book I was unfamiliar with. The author of the book mentioned that he had seen the boulder in 1967 in the community of Hadleyville, located between Lorane and Crow, on what was the Briley Ranch. Hadleyville once had a post office and a school in the early 1900s. The school was at the junction of Territorial Highway and Briggs Hill Road south of the Sweet Cheeks and Silvan Ridge Wineries.
While visiting, he drove all over the area that surrounds the former Hadleyville community on maps, but could not find the boulder. I have never heard of it; it was never mentioned to me or my co-authors in interviews we did in the 1980s for our book on the history of Lorane.
So now I’m curious: If any of our readers have heard of any petroglyphs (Native American drawings) in Lane County – and especially in the Lorane/Crow areas, I would like to suggest that they contact the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oregon. If there is such an artifact in the area, it most likely is on private property and its whereabouts should probably not be publicized. The University of Oregon has, in the past, done studies on Oregon Petroglyphs and if a property owner is not comfortable with it being on their property, steps should be taken to contact the UO in order to protect it.
In the meantime, I just want to remind everyone of the upcoming Crow Grange’s Chicken barbecue that will be held on Aug. 6. For more info, contact Connie at 541-556-2609. A reminder for Lorane’s upcoming events will be in next week’s column.
I hope everyone enjoyed the hot weather we had this past week; I’m afraid that we didn’t. Our 18-year-old heat pump with AC gave out on us just in time for the heat wave.
