Sisters shed is a piece of history

A little piece of Sisters history. The owners of this shed are offering it to the City of Sisters. It was originally a

logging camp cook shack used by Brooks-Scanlon Lumber Company. photo by Jim Mitchell Though he lives in Rome, New York, Orville Carroll owns a piece of Sisters history -- in fact, several pieces.

Investigation of an offer to donate a "historic" shed to the City of Sisters turned up a wealth of Sisters history dating back to the 1930s.

Recently, Carroll offered the City of Sisters the 13-by-16-foot "shed" located on his property in the center of Sisters. He says the shed was originally used as a cook shack by the Brooks-Scanlon Lumber Company and may have some historic significance.

There is no foundation, the floor has pretty well rotted away, but the siding could be used in another structure or for "rustic" décor. Orville Carroll's letter asked the City of Sisters "To issue me a demolition permit in the event no party responds to my donation offer."

According to Orville's sister, Naomi Smith, the family first settled on Squaw Creek in 1933. Shortly thereafter Orville's father, George, bought a full city block of Sisters (eight lots) for $35 per lot. Actually, she noted, the higher priced corner lots were $45 each.

George's first structure, a house still standing on the corner of Spruce Street and Jefferson Avenue, was built and used as a barracks by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in Camp Sherman from 1937 to 1942 and then moved to its present site.

Through the years, part of the Carroll property has sold, but four lots are still owned by family members. Orville, now a retired historic architect living in Rome, New York, has owned two lots since 1945. One lot includes the shed and a small house built by his father for his uncle Will (William Thomas Edgar Wilson).

Naomi said, "He was an old fellow that lived here for awhile and he didn't have a home, wasn't married. My Dad then sold the house to Orville."

Another brother, Blaine, now lives in that house.

According to Naomi, her present house has a long history. The small original house was moved to its present site. Then her father added three bedrooms, using the lumber from several abandoned homesteads in the Camp Polk area. Blaine remembers pulling nails to salvage the lumber from the buildings.

Naomi said, "The house might be 100 years old -- in parts."

Both Naomi and Blaine vividly recall much of the last 70 years of Sisters history. In fact, Naomi wrote The Nugget in 2001, to correct the date of the construction of Sisters Middle School, described as being 70 years old.

She wrote, "The only school at that time (when she moved to Sisters in 1933) was a two-story, frame building attached to the existing gymnasium. I attended the eighth grade through four years of high school in this building, graduating in 1938."

She added that her two oldest children graduated from the high school in 1958 and 1959. From that she figured the middle school was 46 years old.

Eventually Naomi was to raise six children and several foster children in her piecemeal house. She lives there today, surrounded by memorabilia of her past.

Naomi remembers that the people who worked in Sisters in the 1930s and 1940s worked in sawmills and other occupations where they didn't expect to stay a long time. So most of the buildings were shacks with no foundations -- intended for short-term use.

Some are still in use, but she says, "They are gradually getting removed."

There were six siblings in Naomi's family. Naomi is the oldest. Her little sister died at birth. A brother, George, died last year at age 82.

She proudly gives the ages of her remaining siblings: Orville 80, Blaine 81, a sister, Kathleen, 78. Naomi is not shy about her own age -- 85.

She says, "If my sister makes it, we will all be in our 80s."

Naomi's husband, Ray, died in 1970. She said, "I've been alone a long time."

She takes comfort in the fact that her "bosom-buddy" Georgia Gallagher lives just a block away. They attended the old high school together and have remained friends since.

Blaine filled in any blanks Naomi had missed. He told about their trip to Sisters, "August 3, 1930. My dad ran out of gas about two miles out on the McKenzie Highway and he didn't have any money, so he borrowed a dollar's worth of piggy bank pennies from Naomi. He walked into town to get gas, then had a flat tire when he got back. Gas was 15 cents a gallon then."

He talked about his Uncle Will delivering lumber to Prineville -- a three-day journey by horse-drawn freight wagon.

Later, in 1946, he said 26 sawmills were operating in the Sisters area and described the locations of many of them.

Blaine said Uncle Will owned six mills, operated by Will's brother. But his brother kept falling asleep and burning the mills down.

Blaine also described the stills operated by Uncle Will on Pole Creek.

For a while Blaine and his father made a living cutting and selling firewood. Blaine said that the loggers only took the prime lower part of the trees. He got permission to cut the upper part and the limbs for firewood.

He said, "We got $3.50 a cord for body wood, $2 a cord for limbs. Slab was going for $1.50."

They provided wood for the restaurants and hotel rooms in town.

He finished with an interesting tidbit: Many have wondered where the small log structure sitting at the city's east entrance, at Hood and Cascade, came from. According to Blaine, it was built out on Three Creek Lake Road by his nephew as a playhouse. The nephew donated it to the city on the pretense that it was an historic and authentic trapper's cabin.

Asked about the coming of a McDonald's, Naomi laughed, "I don't care. But why another gas station? I don't get it."

The most dramatic change she has seen in Sisters? "Growth. Being here for so many years, Sisters didn't do anything, then it exploded, especially the last few years."

Anyone interested in the shed --intact or board-by-board -- may contact City Hall at 549-6022.