(gentle music) - [Narrator] Gwen Trice
was born and raised in La Grande, Oregon. (gentle music) One of the seven children
of Dorothy and Lafayette, better known as Lucky.
(gentle music) - My dad came from Pine Bluff, Arkansas. My mom came from Valdosta, Georgia, that's where she was born. They had met when she
worked at the PX in Florida and he was in the Army. And so when they hooked up and he brought her out to eastern Oregon. - [Narrator] Lucky was
much older than his wife and had been living in Oregon since long before World War II. - I remember hearing a story
when I was a little girl. I, he was changing his clothes,
and I saw this big scar on his shoulder and I said, "Well, dad, what happened there?" And he said, "Oh, I was
in a logging accident." And I remember looking at it
and tracing my hand over it, and thinking, "Wow, that must have hurt." But he never really
elaborated on his lifestyle or what he did back then. Over the last few years, I discovered that my father
got here in a box car. He traveled here when he was
26 years old with his father and they came here to be railroad loggers. - [Narrator] Lucky Trice had
come to nearby Wallowa County to live and work in a
small logging community, long since gone, called Maxville. - Well, it was little different
than a typical logging camp because families were there. (upbeat music) - [Narrator] Maxville's
distinction though lay elsewhere. - It was very unusual that
they would have black people in Oregon, actually. - They had the black school
and the white school. They didn't go to the
same schools, I know that. - Wallowa had a baseball team. Troy had a baseball team. Maxville had two baseball teams, a white team and a black team. - They were friends. They worked together well. - It was economics. Dad couldn't get a job as a salesman. Logging was his way of making
a living for his family. - I wondered how my dad
felt to have come to a place that was unknown,
completely unknown to him. And then to be in this
spot that's so remote. Against all odds, trying
something brand new. (gentle music) (bright classical music) (bright classical music continues) (bright classical music continues) - [Announcer] Funding for
Oregon experience is provided by the James F and Marion
L Miller Foundation, the Ann and Bill Swindells
Charitable Trust, the Oregon Cultural Trust,
and from viewers like you. Thank you. - My dad, to me as a little
kid was 10 feet tall, and everyone knew him. His name was Lucky.
(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Lucky
Trice owned a succession of small businesses. He commanded the local
American Legion Post. He was an active conservationist
and an avid outdoorsman. - I was raised on elk and
venison and pheasant and crappie that my dad would fish for. - [Narrator] And he just
plain loved to fish. - Vacation was, we'd take
the kids and then he'd fish. - [Narrator] Lucky broke new
ground for African-Americans in an almost all white part of the state, but he never told Gwen
much about his early years. - He was 56 when I was born. He had had this life that
I knew nothing about. I think probably the best years were really like first
grade or second grade. And I think that was before
I really kind of knew that there was a difference between me and the other kids that I grew up with. For the most part I had
some really great friends, but some parents said, "You can't play with her
because she's black." As soon as I got outta high
school, I figured I would go and find out what my future
would be in the city. - [Narrator] After high
school, Gwen moved to Seattle where she lived and worked
for nearly 30 years. - I thought I would never leave that town. I thought that that was gonna be the place I would find my answers. But what I realized is I felt like I really didn't quite fit in. (upbeat music) - [Narrator] So recently,
she moved back to Oregon to rural Wallowa County. She learned about an old
logging town called Maxville. African-American loggers had lived there up in the hills near Promise. - I'd never even heard of Promise. Someone back home said, "Well, you know, your people are from up there. You should go up to that reunion." And I thought, "Well, what
do they mean by my people? What does that mean?" (upbeat music) - Wallowa County was not discovered by the homesteaders until about 1870. (gentle music) - [Narrator] This part of
Northeastern Oregon is remote, isolated by mountains.
(gentle music) Winters can be long and harsh. Life has never been easy for the farmers and ranchers who settled here. The hills were thick with
tall old pines and fir trees, but the timber business
was all very local, until the railroad came. - The railroad really expanded
the economy of the valley and the railroad was built into
the Wallowa Valley in 1908. - [Narrator] Lumber companies
bought up and logged much of the homesteaded land. A Missouri company, Bowman-Hicks Lumber, acquired a large tract of
timberland out near Promise. Workers laid railroad
tracks up into the hills, brought in small mobile
houses, and built a town. They named it Maxville.
(gentle music) Then Bowman-Hicks imported hundreds of workers from the southern states. - There were both colored
and white that came out. (gentle music) - That was in 1923. - Over here, this is all Bishop Meadow, and this is the place they
found to be the permanent spot to place the town that
used to be Maxville. - [Narrator] Maxville became
one of the largest towns in the county.
(gentle music) The only African-Americans
in the county lived here, some 50 or 60 at one time. Their children attended
Oregon's only segregated school. Housing was segregated too. - The African Americans, they all stayed on this side of the track. And then the, the majority
of the town Maxville was back over here.
(gentle music) - [Narrator] Yet in the woods, the black loggers fell trees
side by side with the white. - Here's the thing is they worked it out. They worked it out without
having to, for the most part, do bodily harm to one another. You needed to work side
by side with that man because he may save your life. (gentle music) - [Narrator] Maxville is a unique but poorly documented
chapter in Oregon history. And this is where Lucky
Trice and his father, two skilled Arkansas loggers, first traveled out West
to work some 80 years ago. - I am just now beginning
to understand how they came to be here. But there's a group of
people that still exist that know the story.
(gentle music) - [Narrator] Promise
existed before Maxville and it endured years longer.
(gentle music) Promise people still gather
here at the Old Grange for an annual reunion. These are the people who
best remember Maxville. And this is the community
where Maxville made its mark. So Gwen began to talk
with them on videotape about those old days. And she asked about Maxville, which had sprung up in their midst. - I just knew I needed
to record these voices and I needed to have their
stories in a permanent spot. And so I just started talking, and asking questions, and visiting people. What do you remember about Lucky Trice? - He used to come get my wood in for me. - My husband was very, very fond of him. They logged together. - Lucky was a real good man. As things were bubbling over, he kind of kept the lid on them. - A snag fell over and hit
my husband on the back, cut his back up, but
didn't break anything. And Lucky picked him up and packed him. I don't know, ran with him quite a ways because to get him where they
could take him to the doctor. (gentle music) - I'm just Orlin Barton. - And I'm Norman Barton, his
older brother. (chuckles) - That's my dad and my uncle. They came all the way from
Fayetteville, West Virginia to cut logs here. - Well, I was happy
about living in Promise. Hell, that was the
happiest time of my life. Well, there's a lot of things to do. (gentle music) Hunt, hunt mushrooms or whatever. - Go fishing. - Chased rattlesnakes and whatever else. - Back then, in those days, nobody knew what a no
trespassing sign was. - Everybody helped everybody.
(gentle music) - I'm Sylvia Alberta Carper-Prince. I was born and raised
here in Wallowa County. Mama had all of her children
at home and had old midwives. And if they didn't make it in time, Papa took care of the deal. - I'm Orvalla Hafer. My dad was a rancher, ran cattle, farmed. (gentle music) - So did your father work at Maxville? - When he was cutting logs,
he rode with the black men in the candy wagon into the
woods to do the, their sawing. The expression candy
wagon came from the fact that they were all, it
was to haul the black men. And apparently it came from the fact that the white sawyers called
them chocolate drops. I think it was just an
expression that came with the company from the South. - Those people were from
the South, you know? And they were prejudice. - [Gwen] For many people
in Wallowa County, these would be the first African-Americans they would ever meet. So what was the general feeling of the local people when you
had a group that was diverse? It was the colored folks that moved in. - Everybody was good, everybody was nice, and the colored people were
just as white as we were. We never showed partiality with nobody. They come and visit us
and we visited them. - We had a good friend,
his name was Nigger Bob, and I don't think anybody
here named him that. I think it was just a
name that came with him. - Oftentimes the terms that are used for African-American people, that's just the way that it was, you know, back during that time. And for me, that's really
an honor that they, that the folks are comfortable enough and willing to tell the
story like it happened and not doctor it up. (gentle music) - [Narrator] The timber
industry was alive and well in the South. From here, more than 400
loggers, railroad men, and family members came to Maxville. They brought their culture and traditions - Colored boys fell the trees. Some of the white men cut it
up so they could be loaded on the trains, and white
men also loaded the trains. (gentle music) - The adjustments that were
made by the minorities there were that you did what
you were supposed to do. You keep your mouth closed
and not step out of line, and you'd get along fairly well. And these were hardworking people. And this was a chance
to make the money here that you couldn't make in the South and try to better yourself. (gentle music) - [Narrator] Maxville
generated plenty of new work for local people too, in the woods and at the mills,
and in other ways as well. - That was a new market that didn't exist for the farms and ranchers
until Maxville came in, and there was a lot of population there. My dad and his brother would
haul a wagon load of produce to Maxville to pedal to the
people that lived there. - [Narrator] But the story
of Maxville, a company town, has proved difficult to illustrate. - Some people came from
Arkansas, Mississippi, Florida, wherever they came from, they
left a lot of their family and possibly their
family records with them. - [Narrator] Like families everywhere, the established families here
photographed mostly relatives. - That's been my biggest
challenges is finding photographs of Maxville and what it
looked like and the homes and the African-Americans that lived here. (gentle music) - [Narrator] The only map
of the town is a modern one, pieced together from memories. - And so you thought
the school was up here? - The school was up, yeah, up in here. - [Narrator] Alvie Marsh
lives in Texas now, but back in the day he lived
and cut logs at Maxville. - [Gwen] Did you have
plumbing in the house? - No, we didn't. They didn't have no
plumbing in the house there. They didn't have no lights either. - [Narrator] Alvie's nephew,
Frank, now a Californian, lived in Maxville as a small child. - That's what her dad
did, we were loggers. It was difficult. I remember my mom, she
would have to go out and harvest the wood and bring the wood in because dad would be out logging. She kept the house warm at all times so that my brother and
myself would remain warm. - When I lived in Oregon I said, "Now, it was nice for work." But I said, "It wasn't
no place for pleasure." Boy, you looking for pleasure
you got to go somewhere else. - Well, I'm Ada Mersopulos, age 96. - [Narrator] As a local teenager, Ada married Angel Metsopulos, one of the Greek men who
maintained the Maxville trains. She and Angel lived in Maxville. - [Ada] Well, I'll tell
you the worst thing. You want the worst?
- Yeah, I want the worst. - Okay, well I had
cornflakes for breakfast and I was eating away,
you know, and breathing. And when I got down to
the bottom, guess what? You can you guess, what was it? - [Gwen] I can't even imagine what! To the bottom of the bowl? - The bottom of the bowl. Bedbugs!
(Gwen gasps) - [Gwen] And was that a problem? - Was that a problem? Bedbugs were a terrible problem up there. - [Narrator] Mattie Wilfong
lived in Maxville for one year. - It was rugged. Yes, it was. It was a, it was rugged. I had to go out and pack water
while my husband went out in the woods to cut logs. It was a small place and
it was just like shacks or something to me. In fact, about the worst
place I ever lived in. - [Narrator] Madeline
Riggles husband worked as a crew boss at Maxville. - They would close down the work, and let the people have
a couple of days to hunt, that was either canned or
dried or smoked or something. And you know, I don't know how we lived. I really don't. Those were hard times, I tell you. (gentle music) - [Narrator] The Wallowa town doctor sometimes braved fierce weather to make house calls out in the woods. And he saw plenty of logging casualties. (gentle music) - There was broken legs, broken bones, injuries of the different kinds, and they brought them in. - When you in the logging woods, you was always in a dangerous situation every day you go down there. (gentle music) (gentle music continues) - So did you ever hear of any,
the logging accidents were, did they happen often or did they...? - Oh, they happened quite a bit back then. - And what kind of
accidents would those be? Do you-- - Certainly a snag falling
and hitting a log cutter. - What is a snag?
- It's a dead tree. - I saw dead tree coming down
right on me and him both. It would've killed both of us. Just as dead as we ever had to die. And I didn't have time to tell him "move," but he was just like, where you is and I was over here cutting the cutoff. And I just hollered at him and he went. He moved one way and I moved the other way and that tree fell right where me and both of him was sitting. (gentle music) (upbeat music) - [Narrator] Over time,
Bowman-Hicks and others built a network of logging railroads through this ponderosa pine country, with many tall trestles
to bridge the canyons. - This area here is, as you
can see, it's raised up a bit. This is where the track was laid. (upbeat music) I see a structure over there,
but I can't tell what it is. (upbeat music) Did you hunt? - Deer hunting a little bit, but too many people got
killed deer hunting out there. Them people from Portland,
Oregon would come down there deer hunting, every time a bush would
shake they'd shoot. About more people gonna
killed than did deer. (upbeat music) - I can remember when
Maxville and Promise, and here in Wallowa they
all had baseball teams. And they would all play each other. - Maxville had two baseball teams, a white team and a black team. - During times when they were competing against other groups inside of the county they would team together and
make sort of a super team. - And the colored boys
and the white boys decided they were gonna have a baseball game and they got a little white lightning and put some of it behind first base and some behind third base. And if you got to that base,
you could have a drink. Well, they got going along and pretty soon they started jumping into each other, and they had some broken
bones out of that deal. My father put an end to the baseball game. - [Narrator] Today at Maxville,
only one structure remains. - The big large building is still there. Biggest gathering was a
taffy pull on that they had. Oh there was taffy pulled across the backs of chairs and tables. My god, can you imagine pulling taffy and you don't know how many
of them washed their hands. (gentle music) - [Narrator] The Great Depression hit the timber industry hard
and by the early '30s the Bowman-Hicks Lumber
Company had cut most of its holdings here. It began to dismantle
the town of Maxville. - [Orvalla] They took
the houses to Wallowa and made homes out of them
or made shops out of them. (gentle music) The town just disappeared. - [Narrator] The company pulled
up its tracks to Maxville, sold its mill in Wallowa, and moved on. So did most of the Southern
workers and their families. - When the black families
begin to move out, somebody told my mom
that one of the ladies had a piano for sale and
that she would want it. So my mom and dad and
we kids got in the wagon pulled by a team of horses
and drove to Maxville. There's two black ladies there. And one of them said,
"Well, you need to play it and make sure you like it."
(gentle piano music) And I remember mom sat down to the piano and she began to play, "Lord,
Lift Me Onto Higher Ground." And both of these black ladies jumped up and started singing, just sang
to the top of their voice. Beautiful singing.
(gentle piano music) - [Narrator] Several
families did stay on though in what was left of Maxville. Many fewer children lived here now. And with the company town gone, they all went to the same school where Madeline Riggles taught. - It was international, they called it. And it was black and white, both. They made no difference. There was no question of color. (gentle music) - Oh, man.
(gentle music) Wow, look at that.
(gentle music) This is the old trestle. This is the last big remnant of that era of the railroad loggers in this area. Look at that.
(gentle music) My dad may have been standing
right at this very spot and this was his life. And I get to be in that same space and just maybe be a little closer to the man that I really didn't
know till later in his life. (gentle piano music) (gentle piano music continues) - [Narrator] But what
started out as a quest for her family history
has become something more. - What I thought was going to be my story is really the community's story. To be at the grocery
store, the hardware shop. People come up and they say, "You know, I've got a story for you." And so you're often
hearing different pieces of how your story may fit into theirs. (gentle music) History's really valuable
to the community here and they are really
proud of their histories. (gentle music) I'm gonna try to have a Maxville reunion-- - Oh, wouldn't that be nice.
- In a couple of years. - Oh good.
- That'd be fun. - Yeah.
- Maybe sooner if I can get every, you
know, things in order. - Sooner is the better.
- Yeah. (ladies laughing) - [Announcer] There's more
about "The Loggers Daughter" on "Oregon Experience" online. To learn more or to order a
DVD of the show, visit opb.org. (gentle classical music) (gentle classical music continues) (gentle classical music continues) Funding for "Oregon
Experience" is provided by the James F and Marion
L Miller Foundation, the Ann and Bill Swindells
Charitable Trust, the Oregon Cultural Trust,
and from viewers like you. Thank you.
(gentle music)
