05/05/2012
Great article about Wendling, written in 2001
Eugene Register Guard
2-6-2001
Bob Welch
Town lives on in recollection
Marcola – A FEW days before his 77th birthday, Ron Byers gets out of his pickup and peers into a grove of 50-foot-high trees.
What I see is just that – trees.
But what he sees is a country store and Curley Bailey’s picket fence and the swimming hold in Mill Creek and his father heading to work at the same lumber mill where nearly everybody’s father worked.
Like a surprising number of people of his generation, Ron Byers still quietly celebrates a town that has been swallowed by trees and time: Wendling.
In 1896, the Booth-Kelly Lumber Co. bought about 40,000 acres of land about four miles from Marcola. It built a steam-powered mill that would product enough lumber to build more houses than Lane County has today. It built a community, a company town.
Then, in 1946, after nearly half a century of nurturing the people who called it home, the town folded with the suddenness of a power outage. The old growth timber that had been Wendling’s lifeblood was gone; replanted clear-cuts weren’t mature enough to log. The mill closed. Everyone left.
Byers and others of his generation returned from serving in World War II like relatives called home to be at the bedside of a dying parent.
Today, Wendling isn’t even a ghost town. The only remnants that suggest it even existed are a scattered house here and there, and the concrete vault of the Wendling General Store.
But it lives on in a way that frankly, amazes me – in the memories of people who cling to them with passion. “Remembering the Wendling of our childhoods is like hugging a favorite teddy bear,” Byers says.
Today, for example, about 40 people who either lived in Wendling or married someone who did are expected to gather at the Springfield Elks Club for a monthly luncheon.
Thursday, I joined 14 Wendling lovers for their weekly – yes, weekly – breakfast, this time at Lyon’s Restaurant on Franklin Boulevard.
Then of course, there’s the Polar Bear Outdoor Potluck each winter and a summer picnic.
Byers is in his 13th year of publishing the Wendling Conveyor, a newsletter that goes out to about 250 members of the Wendling Preservation Association. (“Published every once in a while by a few of us guys.”)
Considering that, at its peak, the town had a population of only 1,000 and that the Conveyor’s list of deceased “Wendling friends” is growing fast, having 250 members is incredible. Particularly because Wendling, on the surface, would seem to have nothing to preserve.
“But if we don’t preserve it now, this Wendling history is gone,” Byers says. “Our group runs on food, birthdays and memories.”
“Mohawk High made it special,” Erma Ratterree says. “We all went there.”
And so they gather, not only to update each other on present-day lives, but to return to past lives. You sit with them at Lyon’s and are struck by how rare this is: people in their 70s who once played together as kids gathering as grandparents and great-grandparents.
Don’t picture a group of cane-carrying codgers hobbling their way through some mundane ritual. These folks act like there’s no place they’d rather be – unless it were, say, back in Wendling building a “Go-Devil” go-cart taking turns riding the Aldous family bicycle or dancing at the 4L Hall (Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen).
They exchange gifts, pull pranks and rib each other relentlessly. When Ike Thomas is introduced as an honorary member of the Wendling Preservation Association, Lorraine Byers can’t help herself.
“Make that ornery member,” she says with Letterman aplomb.
The stories return each year like spring birds: the many fires that swept through town, including one that leveled the mill six months after it shut down … the time Byers and three buddies witnessed the town’s only real crime: the fatal shooting of the sheriff after a dispute between two neighbors involving chicken manure … the rough-hewn part of town called “Battle Row” and “Silk Stocking Row,” where mill managers lived.
“We may have left Wendling, but Wendling never left us”, Ron Byers says.
In “Landscapes of the Soul,” Robert Hamma write eloquently of the meaning of “place” in our lives. He contends that, as a culture, we’re becoming more fixated on time than on place.
“We must remind ourselves of the power of place,” he writes. “Place triggers memories of the past, it impels us to act in the present and it spurs us to hope for the future.”
Even if, like Wendling, the place no longer exists, and even if there’s nobody to pass on the memories, “This is the last Wendling generation right here,” says Byers, glancing at his fellow breakfast-eaters. “After this group is gone, that’s it.
How strange to think that an entire town could, in just a few generations, be lost – even to memory. But how heartening that so many have ridden the winds of Wendling for so long.
