Voices from the Valley: Residents Describe Cottage Grove

Changes

Isabelle Woolcott

On Saturdays, a lot of the stores aren't even open on Saturdays now, but Saturdays were one of the biggest days my dad had. He'd wait until the show got out at 9:00 and a lot of people would come and buy their meat for Sunday, you know, and Saturday night was a big day or big night in Cottage Grove and now there's just nobody downtown on Saturday night. We used to go to the show for a dime and if we had a dime left over we'd go down to Mrs. How's confectionery and get a milkshake for ten cents. She had milkshakes for ten cents and they were good.

Downtown Cottage Grove in January 2000. Courtesy Katy Barber.

Evelynne Plueard

The main part of town has changed a lot. Because the grocery stores and things have moved out around the outside edge of town, you know. We have Walmart and Bimart and Safeway and Price Choppers and so there isn't any stores like that downtown. It's mostly, oh, second hand stores and places like that. There's a jewelry store and a couple of drug stores on the main street downtown but the restaurants and things are more out on the fringes too.

Juanita Hensley

Juanita Hensley has lived in the Cottage Grove area for her entire life and now lives in a home her parents built. Her father was the logging superintendent and partner in Rickini Lumber Company, Inc. Hensley also worked as a bookkeeper at Rickini during the company's first years of operation. After her children were grown, she operated her own bookkeeping and tax service.

Downtown's kind of becoming just Goodwill and St. Vincent De Paul and taverns and a drug store and furniture store and that's about all that's downtown anymore. Well, gift shops.

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I mean it used to be lively downtown.

Marie Geer

How has Cottage Grove changed?

Well it's so much larger for one thing. It stretches out so much. Of course, when we were young there was just old Highway 99. There was no freeway. So, all this across toward the freeway wasn't there. Farmer's fields and the little town's grocery store right down on Main Street, Short's grocery store, and a few restaurants, and a clothing store – Peterson's Clothing Store.

Carol Logan is a self described survivor who grew up on the Grand Ronde Reservation. She calls herself "Indigenous to the land" and the Grand Ronde an "earth people." She is now raising her grandchildren in Springfield, Oregon and is active in the wider Willamette Valley community.

I noticed in the Cottage Grove area and below that down around Yoncalla there used to be a lot of tall grass. It used to be really green. I mean, there used to be a lot of water there. It was what they called prime farmland. There used to be a lot of eagles there. You go there now, it's all dried up . . . . With all the farming and the logging they created that place down there to dry up.