Sunday, March 1, 2009

May 14, 2007

May 14 column
East county towns may be lost, but their history is never forgotten

Water skiers skimming over the glassy blue surface of Riffe Lake may never realize that beneath the deep waters once resided the citizens of Kosmos, Fulton, Nesika and Riffe.

An exhibit that opened Saturday and runs until October at the Lewis County Historical Museum focuses on stories from the east end of the county. Since the museum is in Chehalis, sometimes people in the outlying areas of the county may feel their history is ignored or forgotten. That’s one reason the museum is hosting the exhibit, called “If Towns and Dams Could Talk.”

It’s admirable to reach out to the smaller communities and display their histories in the museum, which bears the name “Lewis County” Historical Museum. History is worth preserving, whether it’s an individual’s, a community’s, a city’s or that of a metropolis. Is Seattle’s history more important to preserve than that of Centralia or Chehalis, just because more people live there? The display on the East End stories is likely to be followed by exhibits highlighting the southern part of the county, the western part and other small communities.

Put together by volunteer curator and museum board member Margie Koher-Lloyd, the exhibit features a display board noting the location of many small communities east of Cinebar and Salkum that were started by early settlers in the late 1800s.

Visitors to the museum will see the wood-framed front door of Joseph and Alice Chilcoat, the first family to settle in the Big Bottom. They’ll see old boxes that once held letters delivered to the Glenoma Post Office; a telephone switchboard discarded as trash by the Eatonville Telephone Co. and retrieved by Van McDaniel’s father, who refurbished it for use in the McDaniel Telephone Co.; and one of the first automatic answering machines—a laptop-sized thee-inch-high Code-A-Phone that debuted in 1957 and weighs nearly 50 pounds.

Artist Sylvia Livermore of Cinebar painted a beautiful winter mountain scene of White Pass as a backdrop for a mannequin on snowshoes with old-fashioned skis and antique sled beside him.

Center stage is an official soap box derby car driven by Harry Richard Hall of Morton in the 1957 Tacoma Soap Box Derby. The green car, which promotes the Morton Loggers Jubilee in red lettering highlighted with yellow shadows, weighed 249½ pounds with Harry at the wheel, while the limit for derby entries was 250 pounds. Behind the car sits the “Fast Time” trophy won by the 14-year-old boy.

Tacoma Power loaned the museum its six-by-six-foot octagon replica of the Mossyrock Dam, which was built in 1968 and backed up the Cowlitz River to create Riffe Lake above the former communities. The utility company purchased the land from property owners and Koher-Lloyd said most of the homes were moved, burned or destroyed. From a boat launch at Riffe Lake, she said, you can still see a cement slab or two and one of the streets of Kosmos (pronounced Koz-mus).

But the highlight for me sat behind glass, a beautiful pink friendship quilt painstakingly pieced together in 1930 by 20 members of the Ladies Aid of the Randle Methodist Church. In April 1930, the society decided to create the friendship quilt to raise money for needy children and families as well as the minister’s $10 monthly fee.

Each of the 20 blue, gray, orange and other colorful squares bears the embroidered name of the person who created it. Looking at the names, I could envision the women—and one man, Forest Service worker John Kirkpatrick—gathered together stitching the fabric and friendships as they worked. One of the women was Koher-Lloyd’s grandmother, Bertha Machill Koher, a German immigrant who married another German immigrant in North Dakota and settled in the Big Bottom Valley in 1890. Working beside her on the quilt were two daughters, Mae Koher Moore and Ella Koher Green, and a daughter-in-law, Ola Jordan Koher.

The ladies sold tickets for the raffle, raising two dollars, but then Max Ogen bought the hand-tied quilt outright for $25. It remained in his family for years, until his daughter, Dorothy Ogen Chubbuck, who lived in California at the time, gave it to a friend who might appreciate it—June Gerwig. After examining it, Gerwig recognized the names of Koher-Lloyd’s relatives, so she gave the quilt to her.

Now Koher-Lloyd, a native of Glenoma who graduated from the White Pass High School in 1964 but now lives in Chehalis, said she plans to donate the friendship quilt to the White Pass Country Historical Society’s museum when it opens, hopefully this summer in the old Packwood Grade School.

The beautiful old quilt, which has been displayed at the State Capitol Museum in Olympia as well as in Spokane, will remain in the Packwood museum permanently as testimony to a friendship knitted together in a small rural community.

Julie McDonald Zander is a personal historian and former journalist who lives in Toledo. She owns Chapters of Life, a company dedicated to preserving the past, one family’s story at a time. Her Web site is www.chaptersoflife.com She can be reached at memorybooks@chaptersoflife.com

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