Students learn archaeology by digging and cataloging artifacts at former Black Oregon logging town

Over 100 years ago, a Missouri-based lumber company built what became known as Maxville, a segregated logging town in northeastern Oregon. In September, archaeologists and students from Southern Oregon University dug to find artifacts from the town’s lost Black neighborhood. Now, the students are working to process and understand what they found. Mark Axel Tveskov is a professor of anthropology at Southern Oregon University who ran the dig this summer. His former student Sophia Tribelhorn was there, and is helping to catalog the finds. We are also joined by Gwendolyn Trice, founder and executive director of Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center, which collects, preserves and interprets the history of the site.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Over 100 years ago, a Missouri-based lumber company built what became known as Maxville, a segregated logging town in Northeastern Oregon. In 2008, Gwendolyn Trice founded the Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center to preserve and share that history. We are now poised to learn a lot more about the site. In September, archeologists and students from Southern Oregon University (SOU) dug to find artifacts in the town’s lost Black neighborhood. Mark Axel Tveskov is a professor of anthropology at SOU who ran the dig this summer. His former student Sophia Tribelhorn was there, and is helping to catalog the finds now. They both join us, along with Gwendolyn Trice. Welcome to all three of you.

Gwendolyn Trice: Thank you for having us. This is great.

Mark Axel Tveskov: Yeah, thank you.

Sophia Tribelhorn: Thank you.

Miller: Gwendolyn, first. It’s been eight years since we visited you at the interpretive center that you opened in Joseph. And I’m sure that a lot of listeners either didn’t hear that or have forgotten some of the basics of this story. So remind us, first, what Maxville was.

Trice: So Maxville was a multiracial timber town in the northeast tip of the state of Oregon. It existed from about 1923 to 1933 under the Bowman-Hicks Lumber Company, which had holdings in Missouri and in Louisiana. And Maxville lingered a little after Bowman-Hicks left until around 1946. Some of the people still resided there and then it was closed due to a large snowstorm that collapsed the last of the buildings.

Miller: Why has this overtaken a lot of your life in the last, what … more than 15 years now?

Trice: Yes, I didn’t even know that my dad was a logger until 2003. So it was really transformative for me to understand another facet of why we were born and raised up in the northeast tip of the state. There were no kids that looked like me in any of my school rooms from 1st to 12th grade. And I just didn’t have any idea about this background of our history that he, along with many other African American men that were experienced, were recruited to this area in 1923.

Miller: What have you been able to uncover about this history since then, since 2003 or 2008?

Trice: It’s just exploded. There’s so many stories of the people that lived during the time of Maxville. And when I first discovered it, it was really critical that I captured those stories right then. A lot of the people, the primary people that I interviewed were in their 90s, in their mid and late 90s, and they still had their stories. So I did a lot of traveling throughout the state, a lot of interviews in the county. And I went to Texas for one of the last voices of the African American loggers that was still living to tell the story.

Miller: So time and age, it seems like a really big thing. So what are the limitations of what you could learn?

Trice: And there’s the limitation of, again, that there aren’t many perspectives to pull from that. So most of the stories I’ve gotten have been from the white loggers, and the shopkeepers, and people that supported the site. I went to the educational institutes around the Pacific Northwest, to people that were experts in the field, and no one knew anything about Black loggers in this region.

Miller: Mark Axel Tveskov, this gets us to you. How did you get involved in literally, and also figuratively, excavating this history?

Tveskov: I got involved because I served on a state committee with Gwen and we got to know each other. She told me about Maxville and I’ve been doing the archaeology of Oregon for 30 years now, focused on stories that haven’t percolated to the top of our historical narratives. And this just seemed like a really wonderful opportunity.

Miller: What specifically got you interested in this story?

Tveskov: It’s such a crucial untold story. I mean, the story of logging in the Pacific Northwest defines our identities in many ways. But to have the idea that there were Black people from the south as part of that in rural areas of Oregon, that is not the way that the narrative has traditionally been told. And in fact, the presence of Latino, Black, Chinese, people of many different identities out there in the woods were systematically erased. So just earlier, you were talking about the limitations, and archaeology is really well suited to addressing some of those limitations. So it was just a terrific opportunity.

Miller: How did you all decide where to dig? It’s a big deal to set out those lines, and actually very carefully dig, make measurements and write down where exactly something came from. So you have to be pretty sure you’re in the right place before you start. How did you do that?

Tveskov: Well, that’s part of the erasure of the Maxville story. I mean, we have oral history of the place and we have pretty good documentation of where the white people lived at Maxville. But by nature of their segregated position in the community, their houses were portable houses put on railroad cars. So when the Bowman-Hicks Lumber Company left, there were virtually no remains of them. We could see the foundations of the white folks’ houses.

So, the answer to your question – I have a colleague, Rory Becker from Eastern Oregon University who works with this. He’s my colleague on this project, and he specializes on geophysical survey using various techniques like ground penetrating radar. And we worked together to reconcile all the information and the oral history, the geophysical survey and other things. That allowed us to pinpoint our best educated guess. And then this past summer, we tested that guess and we managed to find one of the homes of one of the Black logging families at Maxville.

Miller: And am I right, that it wasn’t a sure thing until you started digging, that you knew you were in the right place?

Tveskov: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. It was a really cool experience and a testament to Rory’s ability. I mean, we literally could see the foundation of one of the white family’s houses because we do it comparatively. So we just knew where to dig. In this case, it was a matter of using this kind of scientific information and to select the spot. And then we did what you said, we did careful excavation in that spot and we hit that deposit.

Miller: Sophia Tribelhorn, what was the dig like for you?

Tribelhorn: Yeah, it was a really wonderful experience. And honestly, something I never thought I would get to do this soon out of school. But, yeah, it was incredible. I learned a lot about just kind of basic techniques of archaeology and got a lot of really good hands-on experience right away. And the other thing that was really exciting about it was that I was working with a team of other people who had formerly attended SOU, had been Mark’s students and like several generations of his students. And so I got to learn a lot from them and learn a lot about the story, which is really exciting.

Miller: Gwendolyn, what do you most remember from the days of the dig?

Trice: It was a little bit windy that day. And what I noticed, as I watched all of the archaeologists and folks that I actually knew and had spent time with, [was] that there were people from our community and the neighboring community that had volunteered to help and be a part of. And one of them used to work for the newspaper in our county and I see her doing this thing and I’m like, how are you doing? How are you feeling? She goes, “I’d rather not be any other place than this,” as all this dust is flying around her and everyone’s covered. And she finds an artifact, just carefully takes it over to Mark and says, “OK, here’s this piece.” So this constant discovery of different elements. And for me, it made me so excited because it brings me closer to the experience of my family that was there. My father, grandfather, grandmother, my uncles and cousins that were part of it. It helps me to really bring that alive, that experience that they had.

Miller: That’s interesting because I mean, as you said, you went all over the region, you went to Texas to talk to people. So it was different to actually see, say, a button that was left from someone’s jeans.

Trice: From Levi jeans.

Miller: There was a Levi Strauss button – that’s one of the things that was found, or a rivet, maybe?

Trice: It was a rivet from some clothing. And years before Levi Strauss had actually called and said, “Hey, do you think any of the African American men wore Levi Strauss?”

Miller: Wait, literally the company called you to ask you that question?

Trice: The museum called me to find that out. And I thought, wow, I can call him back and say, hey, I’ve got some evidence now to be able to make that connection and to enrich the story.

Miller: Mark, can you give us a sense for just the scale of the artifacts that you found?

Tveskov: The scale, we found probably three to 400 artifacts associated with one of the Black family’s houses and one of the white family’s houses.

Miller: Is that a lot?

Tveskov: Yes, it is a lot. I mean, one of the great opportunities of this project is that we were able to do a larger scale excavation. And archaeology generally tries to be careful these days about disturbing archaeological sites. But this was an opportunity, thanks to the funding we got from the state, to open up a wider area and get a really good sample of artifacts from these families’ experiences.

Miller: Can you give us a sense for the breadth of the artifacts that you found, examples of them?

Tveskov: Yeah. In both cases, they express really prosaic things, like the structural remains of the houses, nails, fragments of a cast iron stove. And then the little detritus that speaks to people’s daily lives, in this particular kind of setting, like ceramics that were imported by the company in mass, like mass produced commercial ceramics. But then each family also had selections of artifacts that reflected their choices and also their opportunities, like the white family had fairly expensive made-in-Japan hand painted ceramics. And then in the Black logger’s house, there was a scatter of Prince Albert tobacco cans. So like these little vignettes of their experience in that setting.

Miller: Were there other examples in the architectural finds that show the more marginalized lived existence among the Black loggers or their families? I mean, are there telltale signs in these tiny pieces that can show you class distinctions or segregation?

Tveskov: Yeah, I mean, the perceived value, the market value of things like the ceramics and other kinds of household items is greater in the white neighborhood. And this kind of domestic segregation was the way that Jim Crow segregation worked, by a company enforcing that, by having a group of people in one neighborhood literally on the wrong side of the tracks, and another in a nicely built house.

But it’s also important and to the spirit of your question, you also see people’s humanity and resistance and resilience play out, too. Like in the Black families’ houses, we saw fragments of jewelry and beads, like little, tiny glass beads. And we don’t know if this is literally true, but we imagine like a flapper style dress from the 1920s or the 1930s, which matches to oral history of some of the vibrancy of the daily life as an act of passive resilience against that segregation.

Miller: Sophia, part of your job now is to catalog all this, if I understand correctly. So you have all these tiny pieces of things and carefully labeled plastic bags saying where they came from. What kind of drudgery follows a dig like that?

Tribelhorn: So, the first basic step after we have everything out of the ground is to get everything kind of cleaned up and get all the dirt off of it, so that it’s easy to see all the different details and diagnostic features of it. And then we go through this really long, sometimes tedious process of organizing everything into basic categories. So we have all the glass together, all the ceramics, all the nails, things like that. And we have to go through and count every single one of them, get various measurements about all of them and then make sure we really carefully record all of that information. So that later on in the process, when we’re doing more kind of careful analysis and looking stuff up about these artifacts, we make sure we know exactly where they came from and exactly where they were in the site.

Miller: Has this experience given you any more information about what you’d like to do for a career? I guess I’m wondering if you’d like to pursue archaeology, after having taken part in this dig?

Tribelhorn: Yes, absolutely. I definitely am on my way into a career in archaeology, and especially museum and kind of curational work. I really do like the kind of lab ends of this process and the tediousness of it, but also the meticulous detail, really showing a lot of care for these artifacts and making sure that they get preserved in the long term. I think this project has been really incredible for getting to have a really long term experience with that and get to go through the beginning to end of this project, and see all the steps of the process and I’ve really fallen in love with it. So, yeah, I will definitely be doing this in the future.

Miller: Gwendolyn, have you gained any kind of a different understanding of Maxville yet, from this dig? And my understanding is there’s more digs to come, and we’re talking about smallish bits from daily life or architectural life. I’m wondering if it’s changed in any way, the way you think about this town?

Trice: Well, it definitely is informing me about life there and I don’t see that there are any surprises that are coming up. I was born and raised in that region, and so I really understand how things … going to school in the ‘60s and the ‘70s, and what was going on during that time. So there’s not surprises in that way. But what it is, is the intersection of the past, the present and future with the people that are there, that are involved, that are a part of that. We are helping to instill that engagement into finding out and telling an American narrative that’s inclusive. So I’m finding that that’s rippling through the space, that there’s a lot of youth that are in the space. It’s a part of that dream of framing the work and the elements of the site to tell the story in this informed manner, and also bring in this youth leadership into the next generations to come, and to see how it can continue to flourish 50 years from now.

Miller: Gwendolyn, Sophia and Mark, thanks very much.

All: Thank you.

Miller: Gwendolyn Trice is the founder and executive director of the Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center. Mark Axel Tveskov is a professor of anthropology at Southern Oregon University. He was in charge of the recent dig at the Maxville Logging Camp site, along with one of his former students Sophia Tribelhorn.

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