Personal History II. Glenwood, the Place Where I Was Raised

II. Glenwood, the Place Where I Was Raised
    I was raised in Glenwood Valley, in the State of Washington.  Glenwood was a tiny farming and logging community in the Cascade Range of mountains   These mountains run north and south from the province of British Columbia, fully across Washington and Oregon, and then down into California where they become called the Sierra Nevadas.  They split the states east and west, westward being very wet and the east being somewhat dry.  Glenwood valley was just barely on the east slope of these mountains.  Most of these hills in this Range are heavily forested.  On the east slope of the Cascades the trees were Ponderosa Pine and some Douglas Fir  rather than Cedar, Spruce, and Hemlock, and various Firs.  The pine forests tended to be open with little underbrush and the ground or floor  usually had a coating of pine needles.  Twenty miles to west of us the forest foliage changed, the trees were the second group and there were a lot of bushes and undergrowth. 
    The Cascades also had some threat or history of volcanic eruptions.  Mount St. Helens blew its top in 1980 while my parents were still living in the area.  It was 50 or so miles west of us.  Most of the hills and ridges in the Cascade Range topped out in the 5000-6000 feet range, but it is also punctuated by a series of high (at one time) volcanic peaks, that are snow capped and much taller, rising high above the forested foothills. 
    In Glenwood we were blessed to have the second tallest peak in the State of Washington, Mt. Adams,  in immediate view.  It rose directly on the northwest side of the valley.  Glenwood had an elevation of about 2000 feet and Mt. Adams was 10,000 feet taller.  Mt. Adams has been identified as a stratovolcano, which means that it has many layers built up of hardened lava, pumice and ash.   It could have a violent eruption, but has probably been dormant for many centuries.  It was snow capped or glacier coverede the year round and dominated all of our scenery.  The 12,280 foot peak of Mt. Adams is less than 20 miles from the town of Glenwood.  We also could see another high peak out our front windows, the very top of Mt. Hood, the highest point in Oregon.
    Beside the dominating view of Mt. Adams, Glenwood valley was a beautiful flat green valley surrounded by heavily timbered ridges.  Before civilization came it was probably an open prairie, and in fact an early name for the valley was Camas Prairie.  The Camas name (called Kamas in Utah) was for a wildflower with an edible bulb.  Several creeks drained into the valley and culminated in a large lake area in the southwest portion (sometimes called Conboy Lake–the Conboys were early settlers there).  The lake mostly dried up in the summer time, and early farmers (the first settlers came after about 1870) found that a wild hay grass grew naturally that could be used as a feed for livestock.  When I worked summers as a teenage in the haying for several farmers, I found this grass to grow to as much as 4 feet tall and to produce an immense amount of feed.  Early settlers also dug a canal to speed and extend the Spring drainage of the lake, so as to maximize the amount of wild hay that could be harvested.  The canal outlet was at the very east part of Glenwood valley and emptied into the Klickitat River, which ran just east of the valley and drained the entire southeast portion of Mt. Adams.  When the A. G. Lewis family first arrived in Glenwood Valley in 1908 from Virginia, they rented a house and small farm at a place called Snake Island which was on the very east end of the lake area right at the point where the drainage canal started.  In the summers, people used to fish the canal for catfish.  I have a happy memory of the lake filling and freezing in the wintertime, giving us miles and miles of clear ice for skating.  I don’t remember any place where the lake got very deep, maybe 5 or 6 feet at most, and I never felt unsafe when I skated.  Conboy Lake usage has changed and is now preserved primarily as a national wildlife refuge under the supervision of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.
    I would like to describe further how a person might come to or go from the isolation of Glenwood Valley.  First, about the surrounding hills.  There was a timbered ridge to the west of us that formed the barrier between Glenwood Valley and the valley immediately to the west, Trout Lake.  This ridge extended southward from Mt. Adams itself.  At the north end was a large domed forested hill we called Kings Peak or Kings Mt.  Then further along this ridge southward was Twin Buttes and then Meadow Butte.  The latter had a fire lookout at its top with a small cabin and the lookout itself (a small house or room with windows on all sides) was about 45 or 50 feet up the trunk of a huge pine tree.)  It had been constructed and was operated by the U. S. Forest Service and was usually manned (should I say womanned?) by a young women of college age for the summer fire season.  Dorothy’s good  friend Juanita Ward did this for summer employment and Dorothy sometimes would stay with her or sub for her when she needed a break.  You accessed the station by climbing up a ladder and entering though an opening in the floor of the lookout room.  The lookout person would spend the day in the lookout reading a book or whatever and from time to time gazing in all directions to detect smoke from a start of a forest fire.  They had the capability of radio contact with the Forest Service if smoke was spotted. 
    There also was a ridge extending eastward from Mt. Adams that was rocky and above the tree line.  It had two peaks along it, called Little Mt. Adams and the Goat Rocks. 
    There also was a wooded ridge running along the south side of the Glenwood Valley, but angling further south as it went westward.  I don’t think any part of this ridge was named except for a little mound toward the southwest end that also had a lookout on it, called Diamond Gap, where Dorothy had also spent some time with Juanita summers.
    There were several roads to access Glenwood Valley from the outside, but only one was paved when I was a boy.  This was the highway to BZ Corners.  It went across the valley south from Glenwood town, crossing the outlet canal from Conboy Lake, then to the edge of the wooded ridge on the south side of the valley, then followed the edge of the ridge in a southwest direction until it left the valley.  It traversed sone low foothills, passing over The Summit (which was treacherous in snowy winters), descended into Gilmer Valley, which was the home and headquarters of the Russell Kreps cattle ranch where my dad worked in his later years, and then followed a canyon down to BZ Corners which was on the White Salmon to Trout Lake highway.
    Trout Lake valley was in a similar position to Mt. Adams as Glenwood, but in a  southwest direction from the peak. The White Salmon River ran through Trout Lake from its origins on the southwest slopes of Mt. Adams and drained southward after leaving Trout Lake through a narrow valley and then a canyon into the Columbia River.  The town of White Salmon sat on a bluff just east of this overlooking the Columbia and had a companion town, Bingen, at the bottom of the bluff at river level.  Bingen got its name from a German immigrant, named after the German city Bingen-on-the-Rhine, except it hadn’t retained the German pronunciation.  The locals gave the G in Bingen a J sound.  Grandpa Lewis had his Grocery and Feed Store, Lewis’s Red and White, in Bingen and my Davenport ancestors also were living there during the period 1928 to about 1941.
    The city of White Salmon was an important resource for people of Glenwood and our family.  This was the location of our medical doctor, our dentist, and the nearest hospital.  It had the nearest movie theatre, the Cameo. Based on current numbers, the combined population of White Salmon and Bingen might have been about 3000 persons in those days, with about 2000 in White Salmon.  When TV became available in 1953, our dad had to go down to Hiway Hardware in Bingen to buy a set and the antenna in order to get reception.   The nearest branch of the Church was in White Salmon starting about 1950, first meeting in a Grange Hall and then in an old dance hall the members purchased (the Leaky Tepee).
    There were other roads to and from Glenwood.  There was a dirt road to Trout Lake that passed just below Meadow Butte. 
    The road to the county seat in Goldendale was graveled and not very inviting.  The Klickitat River ran through a deep gorge a few miles east of us.  It had its origins in the Cascades northeast of Mt. Adams, and ran southward into the Columbia at Lyle, which was about a dozen miles east of Bingen.  It drained most all of the east side of Mt. Adams, including Glenwood valley.  All of the waters in the valley (Bird Creek, Conboy Lake, Frazier Creek) flowed toward what was called Outlet Creek, which then ran north and eastward to the Klickitat River.  There was a lovely waterfall called Outlet Falls near where Outlet Creek emptied into the Klickitat about 5 miles east of the town.
    The road to Goldendale was gravel and graded and about 30 miles .  It descended into the canyon of the Klickitat, crossed the river and then meandered for miles getting up and out of the canyon.  We didn’t go there very often.
    Another poorly maintained gravel road went southward into a high plateau toward the areas called Snowden and Appleton and came out eventually at the towns of Klickitat, Lyle or White Salmon.  In both of these areas there were scattered farms and some logging operations.   In Appleton as one neared White Salmon, there were nice orchards.
    There was a dirt road that went northward from Glenwood into the Yakima Indian Reservation several miles north of town, but I do not know where it led.  I learned recently that there was some controversy with the Yakima nation over ownership of most of Glenwood Valley, which apparently fell within the designated original reservation area.  But mistakenly, this was not recognized and deeds were granted to non members of the tribe for most all of the land in the valley.  Eventually a compromise was worked out that provided the tribe with some financial compensation from the federal government.
    There was also a dirt road that went northeasterly from Glenwood toward Mt. Adams.  It gave access to picnic and camping areas and eventually ended up just below the mountain in an extraordinarily scenic area called Bird Creek Meadows.
    My grandparents, Aubrey Gordon Lewis and wife India Agee Lewis, migrated in 1908 from Floyd County, Virginia.  There were some others who came to Glenwood from this same place.  One of the first to come was my grandmother India’s older sister Olivia, and her husband Ben O’Neal.  They were married in Floyd County, Virginia in February 1893 and came west almost immediately, because their oldest child, Fred, was born in Glenwood that November.  My grandparents followed them some fifteen years later. 
    It appeared that there was a perception in their Virgina community that things were better financially out west away from the Blue Ridge.  I recall that my grandfather originally made his  living in Virginia (probably a marginal one), by loading goods on a wagon to peddle as he traveled to farms in neighboring communities.  He seemed to have acquired a belief that to be truly successful financially, a man needed to own and run his own farm.  Perhaps that was not possible where they came from, but he soon acquired farm land in Glenwood Valley.  But he also wavered throughout his life between farming and retail business.  My dad thought that the latter was his father’s true calling.  Early in his time in Glenwood he partnered in the ownership of a grocery store with Ty Bolt.  Ty also had migrated from the same area of Virginia, and married one of Olivia’s older daughters, Lilivan.
    Then A. G. moved the family to Centralia, Washington, for several years where he also managed a grocery store.  Centralia is a community west of the mountains and about half way on the direct route between Portland and Seattle.  According to my dad, his father had this pattern of succeeding financially with a grocery business and then using up his gains on the farm in Glenwood, then getting back in the grocery business to recoup his losses.  About the time that my Dad graduated from Glenwood High school (1924?), his father acquired a grocery and feed store in Bingen, Washington, leaving the farm to be run by a O’Neal relative.  (Bingen is located about 30 miles away from Glenwood on the Columbia River, and was also where my mother’s family, the Davenports, were living.  My dad helped run the store.  Then when my parents got married (1931), A. G. asked them to manage the farm.  After several years he decided he wanted the farm again, and my parents were able to acquire a small farm of their own in Glenwood, where we lived through all my growing up years.
    There were several other families in the area who had come originally from the Blue Ridge area of Virginia, living either in the Glenwood area or in Yakima Valley.  I remember our family attending a yearly Virginia picnic in a park just north of Goldendale on the highway to Yakima.  The meal was “Pot-luck” which meant that each family brought one main course item and one dessert.  My main recollection of the meal was the abundance of fried chicken.
    We also saw people of our Virginia connection on Mother’s Day.  There was a tradition that no church meetings were held in the Glenwood Community Church on that day, but rather there were special services held at an old unused church building in an area called Lakeside.  It was on property owned by the Hathaway family, who were among those who had a Virginia connection.  This church was about 5 miles south of the town o f Glenwood at the spot that highway from White Salmon turned north away from the wooded hillside and then passed by the Conboy Lake and drainage canal in the direction of Glenwood. 
    The meeting was usually conducted by people from a church from Yakima valley.  I recall the agenda being first, a Sunday school at about 10 am, then a preaching service, and then finally in the early afternoon, the inevitable pot-luck dinner with a lot of adult visiting time.  There seemed to not be a lot of pressure on the youth to be in the church, especially when the preaching service was happening, so there was time for an extended baseball game until and after the food was ready.
    The preaching was usually performed by ministers from the church attended by Aunt Olivia.  She and several of her children had moved to Sunnyside, in the Yakima valley, one of whom became a minister, and was on the faculty of Biola University in California.  The denomination was called the Church of the Brethren or the Dunkards.  This church was brought to America by German immigrants and also sometimes called German Baptist Brethren.  They were conservative, Calvinistic and strict in their beliefs and practices.  The word dunkards (dunkers/tunkers) referred to their insistence on baptism by immersion. 
    It was interesting that some of the Virginia relatives would affiliate with Dunkards.  In their Virginia origins the Agees were Primitive Baptists.  Earlier the Agees were Huguenot settlers in Manakin Town, Virginia, coming to Virginia through England and Holland after being driven from France by conflict with the Catholics.  The Huguenots were originally Calvinist Protestants in France.  Some of the family also had Scots-Irish ancestry.  The Scots-Irish came to this country as members of the Scottish national kirk, or  Presbyterians, again a Protestant variation of Calvinism, but gravitated toward being Baptists in this country.
    Primitive Baptists, sometimes called “Hard-shell” Baptists, were likewise conservative and strict and Calvinistic in their beliefs and practices.  This denomination probably originated in America, was followed largely in the upland south, and became differentiated from missionary Baptist churches, who were less strict in practice, and emphasizing proselytizing the world.
    I suspect that the O’Neals probably could not discern much difference between the beliefs and practices of the Dunkards versus the Hard-Shell Baptists and affiliated with whatever church that was available in Sunnyside, Washington.
    Going back to the origins of Glenwood Valley people, the 1910 census showed the population to be very diverse in its origins.  Reviewing census numbers for that year, there were 566 persons living in the Camas Prairie Precinct of Klickitat County, Washington (that is, Glenwood Valley).  Of the 206 adults, 42 (20.4%) were born in foreign countries, including 26 (12.6%) from Germany.  Of the 164 who born in the United States, only 38 had their births in Washington (22) or Oregon (16).  The numbers born in Illinois (21) and Virginia (20) were approximately the same as those born locally in the State of Washington.
    Those who were immigrants from Germany were interesting.  I do not recall hearing about their motivation to come to America, except I perceive that it was not religious.  Perhaps like our ancestors, they were trying to better themselves economically or maybe they were escaping from a situation that was oppressive politically.  I do question the latter, however, because I have recollections that several of these persons had difficulty in siding with their adopted country in its decision to enter either of the World Wars. There seemed to be some German pride or sympathy remaining.
    My dad thought there was a divide in the community between those of German ancestry and others.  He was on the Glenwood School Board just prior to the second World War, and the board felt the need to have a bond passed to make some physical improvements in the school.  The German element in the community seemed to be the place where the most of the opposition to this proposal was generated.  They seemed to have less commitment to the educating of their children.  When the bond election passed, my Dad called it “the year we licked the Germans.”
     There is a fun and fascinating story about some marriages in the German community in Glenwood, that was part of the community folklore.  There was the time when three bachelors in the group wanted to marry, Oscar Bleiler, William Schweighoefer, and Max Ladiges.  The latter was an uncle of Hank Ladiges, who married our Aunt Lorene.  For their own reasons they wanted to marry German girls, and were able to do a sort of “mail order” back to the old country to get three women sent to them to marry.  The year was 1906.  The day for the ladies to arrive was approaching and a decision needed to be made as which girl would become the bride of which man.  The three got together and reached the decision that they would run a race.  The finish order of the race would determine who got to pick first, second and third.  Why the other two agreed upon a footrace was always a mystery to me.  I would have suggested a hand of pinocle.  Anyway, Max (pronounced Mox) was younger than the other two and more fit and so won the race.   He still wanted other advantages.  So he traveled down to the town of Lyle (I suppose by horse or buggy) a day early and caught the east bound passenger train. Lyle was the closest station then of the S P & S (Spokane, Portland and Seattle) railroad which ran along the north side of the Columbia River.  The ladies had traveled from Hamburg, Germany, across the ocean on steamship to New York, then by train to Chicago, then to Spokane, and finally to Lyle    Max met the women some hours before and got acquainted with them as they approached the Lyle station.  I understand that he selected the youngest and prettiest to be his bride.  After arriving at Lyle, the three couples then took passage on a stern wheeler that used to ply the Columbia River before the dams were built, and rode down to Stevenson where the marriages were performed.  When I was a little boy, the couples were a part of the community and these marriages were still intact.