New archaeology at abandoned Oregon town reveals hidden lives of Black logging families

Archaeologist Sophia Tribelhorn holds in her hand pieces of charred animal bones, decorated glass and a Levi Strauss workwear rivet.

It may not seem like much, but these tiny unearthed artifacts represent a big milestone in the rediscovery of Black history at Maxville, a former timber company town near Wallowa in northeastern Oregon.

Tribelhorn is part of a state-funded team from Southern Oregon University and Eastern Oregon University tasked with limited excavation at the first confirmed location of a Black family’s former home in Maxville.

The Missouri-based Bowman-Hicks Lumber Company set up the town in 1923, bringing in skilled loggers from the American South. About 40 to 60 Black people would eventually come to live and work in Maxville as part of a total population of approximately 400 people.

Those lives, however, were segregated along typical early-20th-century color lines.

“Maybe without even thinking, the overseers designed their town to reflect Jim Crow segregation,” said Mark Tveskov, professor of anthropology at Southern Oregon University and co-director of the archaeological investigation.

“White families were placed in one area, single men were placed in another and the Black families were placed in another.”

Maxville’s Black community lived in a marginal area of the town, literally across the tracks, in mass-produced dwellings that were carried into the forest via railroad. White loggers and their families lived in more carefully constructed houses.

After the Bowman-Hicks Lumber Company closed Maxville in 1933, a severe winter storm in 1946 caused most of the remaining town structures to collapse. The exact location of where the Black families lived was lost.

In the early 2000s, Gwen Trice — the daughter of Black Maxville logger Lafayette “Lucky” Trice — began oral history research with other living descendants to resurrect the nearly forgotten story of the timber town.

Her efforts culminated in the creation of the Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center, which continues to spearhead initiatives to rediscover more of Maxville’s past.

Over the course of two weeks in September 2024, the center’s premier archaeological initiative struck a proverbial goldmine of historic artifacts.

All the small things

Fragments of vinyl records. An 1887 Indian Head penny. A jingle bell from a horse harness. These are some of the many domestic objects carefully pulled out of the earth where a Black family once lived at Maxville.

“When you excavate a site like this, the artifacts are often not very dramatic, but they speak to people’s day-to-day lives,” Tveskov said. Reaching into a soil sifting screen, he pulls out an intact safety pin — most likely for baby diapers.

Clothing artifacts especially are illuminating, revealing a stark contrast between the hard labor of timber extraction and softer private lives eked out in the seams of the grind.

The team found buttons emblazoned with insignias of companies manufacturing industrial workwear at the time: Levi Strauss company of San Francisco and King of the Road brand of denim. The same site also contained decorative materials like dress snaps and glass beads. “This was the 1920s, and all of our minds go to beautiful flapper dresses,” Tveskov said. “And we know from the oral history of Maxville that they had dances.”

Century-old “middens” (the archaeological term for kitchen trash) also provide insight into how Black Southern families adapted to the new Oregonian environment with new dietary resources.

“We found some deer, showing they’re hunting local food,” said Elliot Helmer, as they were exposing a large deer bone in the soil.

“They weren’t from here originally, but they built a real connection to the landscape. It’s really kind of a testament to how people do things outside of the industrial capitalist structure.”

‘There was a house right in this spot’

Getting to the precise location of the Black logging family’s former house wasn’t easy. In fact, it took three years of archaeological and geophysical research.

“The stereotype of archeology is this ‘Indiana Jones’ trope. Modern archeology is a very different kind of enterprise that employs an array of scientific techniques and social science techniques,” said Tveskov.

He and Rory Becker, associate professor of anthropology at Eastern Oregon University and the other co-director of the archaeological investigation, needed to create an accurate cartographic map of Maxville using a town layout drawn from the oral histories and old aerial photographs.

They first did a magnetometer survey: a high-end metal detector survey of different parcels of land that can detect house foundations under the ground without disturbing them.

Then, Tveskov and Becker registered position information for archeological remains on the ground against a series of aerial photos taken between 1946 to 1972, using a high precision GPS unit that marks to within 5-10 centimeters of the actual location of the spot.

“We want to go from being able to say ‘Maxville’s here’ and wave our hands across the site to saying, well, there was a house for the African American folks right in this spot,” Becker said.

Creating history together

The evening after the main dig was complete, the Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center held a public informational event at a nonprofit space in Enterprise, about 30 miles from the dig site.

Project co-director Tveskov gave a recap presentation while his team displayed the found artifacts and fielded questions from guests. Oftentimes the answer was, in paraphrase, “We need to run lab tests to know what this item actually is.”

Good archaeology is methodical and time-consuming. Arriving at a more complete picture of Maxville’s past will undoubtedly require more excavations, advanced tools and continued funding.

In a long game, however, a good pep talk by a visionary coach can be all it takes to push the play forward. When Gwen Trice took the podium, the original spark for the Maxville initiative reminded the community of the "why" behind this multi-decades work.

“This moment right now really witnesses the next chapter of what we do here. Bringing science in. Bringing the tools in and the people that know how to interpret that space,” Trice said addressing the audience.

“So right now, this moment, we’re all creating history.”

Learn more about Maxville’s early preservation efforts

• Before there was the Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center, it was just Gwen Trice doggedly documenting the stories of living descendants as an oral history project.
• Watch “The Logger’s Daughter” for the genesis story of one of Oregon’s most unique heritage sites.