Honoring African American loggers' Oregon roots

[Blue_Tires]

WALLOWA -- Everybody knows loggers shout "Timber!"

But African American lumberjacks who worked in northeast Oregon in the 1920s had other ideas. They gave a distinctive "whoop and a holler," says researcher and videographer Gwen Trice, whose father and grandfather were among the loggers.

"That's what I really want to hear, is what that sounded like," said Trice, 50.

If Trice has her way, she and others will learn that and more about the little-known group of about 60 men who brought their families from the South in 1923 to the now-empty hamlet of Maxville.

Coming on the heels of "The Logger's Daughter," her recent Oregon Public Broadcasting documentary about life in Maxville and her family's roots, Trice hopes to create an interpretive center at an abandoned U.S. Forest Service compound in Wallowa.


Mary Oberst, wife of Gov. Ted Kulongoski, supports the bill, and Wallowa officials have agreed to let Trice run the center. Trice recently founded the nonprofit Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center with hopes of creating a museum, archaeological field school and research headquarters; she estimates she'd need to raise about $300,000 to refurbish the compound's buildings.

http://www.oregonlive.com/news/index.ssf/2009/06/honoring_african_american_logg.html

[Brewman_Jax]

1. Black people have done so much that is so overlooked

which is the main reason for the Black History that doesn't make it into the history books thread. I had never heard of black loggers in the pacific northwest. :shrug:

[firedupdem]

2. Thanks Blue Tires..

Interesting article. That makes me want to learn more about it. The last sentence was sad...but not surprising.