Voices from the Valley: Residents Describe Cottage Grove

The Early Years

Isabelle Woolcott came to Cottage Grove in 1919 when she was four years old. Her father relocated the family to open a meat market downtown. Woolcott went to business college in Portland and then returned to work as a bookkeeper at Dougherty Lumber Company in 1939. Eighteen years later, she changed jobs to join the South Lane School District where she worked for twenty years. She now lives in the center of Cottage Grove and is the chair of the Cottage Grove Museum Committee.

What was Cottage Grove like when you were a kid?

Well, when we moved here we had about 2,500 people living here [the population now numbers over 8,000] and the streets were all mud and gravel and the walks were all wooden sidewalks. It wasn't until the 1950s that they made curbs and concrete sidewalks and put in blacktop. So many years of growing up after the depression, we just didn't have any money. Nobody had any money and my brother, my older brother would make us stilts and we'd get out under the street light at night and play all kinds of games.

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We didn't have a whole lot of anything. I remember my sisters and I would, we had two trees in front of our house and my mother did a lot of sewing. She made all of our clothes and she would have wooden spools and we'd take one spool for an earphone and one for our mouthpiece and then we'd string string between the two trees and we'd take our sandwich up there and have lunch and spend all day playing in a tree talking back and forth on our telephones.

The Cottage Grove Museum. Courtesy of Katy Barber.

Marie Geer grew up in Hebron, a small community a few miles south of Cottage Grove that the Corps dispersed to make way for Cottage Grove Dam in the 1940s. Her father, Arch Gilham, helped construct the Woodard flume which was removed to make way for the Cottage Grove Dam. Mrs. Geer's husband, Roy Geer, was the final person to travel the flume before the lumber company dismantled it. The Geers used lumber from the flume as sub-flooring in their home.

If somebody came in from outside looking for work and really were needy, everyone in the community would help them in one way or another. My mother and dad had a milk route that they took to the camps and places around. They would let people who had children have milk no matter whether they thought they'd get paid for it or not. We always raised a big garden and neighbors were welcome to come in and get some food. That went without saying. When somebody had a baby neighbor women went in and if there wasn't enough warm blankets and things they took some things from home. When somebody was sitting up with someone who was very ill or expected to die, neighbor people took turns going in and spending day or night to relieve the family. We did everything together.

Claire Dross and her husband moved to Cottage Grove in 1991 from Santa Rosa, California. Both are retired and active on the museum board, in Habitat for Humanity and with the Humane Society.

I belong to a friendship club. This is an interesting group. They've been in existence for 75 years, continuous. It's called Silk Creek Neighbors Friendship Club and it originally started 75 years ago with neighbors all out in this area because there's a creek out here that flows into Coast Fork of the Willamette. An shortly after I moved here someone told someone who was in the club that they should call me and they invited me to the group, as they do anyone who in the neighborhood even though I don't think there are any charter members left but a lot of them have been in the group for a long time. And it's certainly, they love to have new people get involved. Once you attend a meeting you become a member. They have no real goals other than just meeting and visiting and we just kind of look after each other… That was kind of amazing to me that a group of people have been able to keep that going for that many years.