The Gribble Prairie

Jeffrey Butts

Well, it happened again. I was going to go for a ride on a recent Friday and I wanted to get a fairly early start so that I could make it on my tour of the Middle East. If you bip on up the Willamette Valley and catch Highway 22 East, you can turn onto Highway 226 south along the banks of the Jordan Creek to the community of Jordan. Continue up the valley and you will run into Lebanon. I'm not looking for Iraq, though. Like I said, that trip will have to wait for another day because I got to fartin' around the house and didn't really get out with a whole lot of time to spare. Then, once finally rolling, I get caught up in a monumental traffic jam on the Interstate. I can't get off the freeway because by the time I work my way around the local communities, I will have expended more energy and made up no time in comparison to the stop and go crawl. Ooooommmmm. It takes me nearly an hour to go about five miles but finally the logjam breaks. With the amount of daylight left I will have to push hard to get my loop done. Since that tactic generally deteriorates into a different kind of trip, not altogether unpleasant in its' own right, I call an audible and immediately exit towards Canby.

Canby is one of those little communities that subside primarily on agriculture. The town dates from the 1870's and the area around the old downtown is a mixture of older and newer architecture. There are plenty of homes that are as old as the town though, and some of them have been very well cared for. Oddly enough, unlike some Oregon pioneer towns, Canby is not named for the founder but an Army general, a veteran of the Mexican, Civil, and Indian wars. The town has done a little better than General Canby, who finally met his demise at the hands of the Modoc. An interesting fact about the town is the street layout. The founder, a settler named Philander Lee, had relocated from Oregon City (the "end", or one of them, of the Oregon Trail). He felt cramped there and laid out the streets with dimensions generous enough for an ox team to turn around in (80 feet). The old part of town retains streets with these super-sized dimensions. As I was experimenting with my U-turns in the 911, again I found myself delayed. I had to wait for a very long Union Pacific freight before I could get moving once again. Check out the photo on the left, snapped while I waited for the southbound freight. You can see from my position in the left turn lane that there is considerable room in the opposite lane. Double that and you get an idea of the scale of the streets.

Heading due south out of town on the Canby-Marquam Road, scenery this afternoon is wonderful. This area is known as the Gribble Prairie (not very imaginatively named after the primary settler) and is softly lit by the afternoon sun. I stopped at a nice filbert orchard near the wide spot in the road that was once the location of a town named Lone Elder. There's a better name for you. I wonder what happened at their church? A slight detour to Macksburg, another wide spot, to see if there might be a Mack truck photo op (kidding). A hundred years ago this was a good-sized community, sporting a couple of churches (one remains), a store, post office and schools. Although most of that is gone now, there is a different kind of community here. Along a stretch of Gribble Road the houses are on big lots, probably about an acre each, and they have big sheds in the back. There are about eight or ten homes and they share a common back yard that runs parallel to the road. That's the cool part. The sheds are actually airplane hangers and the back yard is a grass airstrip. I stopped and talked to one of the residents and was invited back to see it first hand. The windsock hung limply and the smell of freshly mown grass was heavy in the air. At the other end of the strip one of the locals was "trimming" the E-W runway. Each of the driveways is a taxiway to the main strip. I stayed for ten minutes hoping someone would be flying in with a Stearman or something but I guess the guy on the tractor knew when he could safely mow.

With my original itinerary in shambles, I was now driving to spots on the map defined by airstrips or inventive names. To my good fortune, this area is rich with both. I headed for Dryland on (what else) Dryland Road but was unable to find any remnants of the town. This barn was about where the town had been. When I got home I went through my collection of local history books and searched the internet to no avail. I did find the community of Needy though. Settled about the same time as Canby, Needy had its own Post Office in the middle of the 19th century. This accompanied the usual small town layout of store, blacksmith, homes, etc. It is noted that there was a dance hall above the store but the town went bust and all the buildings finally disappeared. Just west of Needy is Whiskey Hill. A good juxtaposition in both geography and syntax I think and that may be why Whiskey Hill remains. I stopped at the store, Whiskey Hill being more than just an intersection, to use the restroom and buy a bottle of water. The clerk, a bored teen with more metal in her face than there was change in my pocket, said that they didn't have a restroom. Clearly I must have looked like some threat, a balding, gray-haired guy in jeans and a t-shirt. That pissed me off, almost literally, until I noticed that the school across the street was still open. I was able to use the "faculty" restroom much to my relief. The school is named "The 91 School." That's got to have a story too, I thought. So, much more relaxed after draining my tank, I went to the office and talked to the school secretary. Ninety-One School is a K-8 facility. In the early 1900's, there were an abundance of small schools in the farming communities and it was not a cost effective situation for the Districts. The local boards decided that a larger school made for better economy of scale and they combined their resources to consolidate. The story was told much better than I can relate it here but the gist of the tale is that, while they were agreed that the name Whiskey Hill School was totally inappropriate, they were unable to reach a compromise so they settled on Ninety One, which was the official school district number. The original school was where the store is now (and vice versa). The current building was built in the 1940's. To round out this little adventure, there is another of those cool little grass airstrips right next to the school.

A quick drive west brings you to Highway 99E, one of two major N-S thoroughfares that predates I-5. [Sidebar: When my brother and sister recently visited, she and I went into an antique store in Washington. There I found old roadmaps for $3 each. I picked up a 1950's vintage Western States and a 1940's vintage Oregon. There have got to be some cool trips waiting for me to discover between the creases]. Up 99E to Aurora where the road runs alongside today's third airport, Aurora municipal. Unlike the airstrips in Macksburg and Whiskey Hill, Aurora has a 5,000 foot paved runway. This airport is the home of Columbia Helicopters, a company nearly 50 years old that was started by a guy who initially sold rides at the county fair. Most famous for helicopter logging, this company now employees over 500 people worldwide. By now the rain is splattering my windshield and I hop back on the Interstate for the ride home. All in all, another trip that didn't work out...but really did.