SOU receives grant for archaeological project at African-American logging town of Maxville
(Ashland, Ore.) — A recent $20,000 grant from the Oregon State Historic Preservation Office will enable staff and students from the Southern Oregon University Sociology and Anthropology Program to conduct archaeological investigations at the northeast Oregon town of Maxville – a logging town that was home in the early 20th century to both African American and white loggers.
SOU will collaborate on the project with the Maxville Heritage and Interpretive Center of Wallowa County – a museum established and run by descendants of Maxville’s inhabitants, and dedicated to the history of African American, Indigenous and immigrant loggers in the Pacific Northwest.
The Maxville townsite was acquired by the museum in 2022 to be developed as an interpretive, educational and communal space. SOU anthropology professor Mark Axel Tveskov was the lead author on a nomination that led the National Park Service to place Maxville on the National Register of Historic Places.
Those efforts led the Maxville project to earn a 2024 Oregon Heritage Excellence Award from the State of Oregon.
The grant will allow students from the SOU Sociology and Anthropology program to gain professional experience in archaeological survey, excavation and analysis through field work that will take place this September, and through laboratory work that will occur over the coming academic school year.
“This project will allow our students to engage in practical work on one of the most significant heritage projects currently underway in the Pacific Northwest,” Tveskov said.
Oregon’s State Historic Preservation Office offers matching grants for rehabilitation work that supports the preservation of locations listed on the National Register of Historic Places, or for work that helps to identify, preserve or interpret archaeological sites.
SOU students will work with Maxville Heritage personnel on geophysical survey and traditional archaeological excavation that will identify significant features of the Maxville townsite and gather a representative sample of artifacts to better understand the lived experiences of Maxville’s inhabitants.
“Uncovering our hidden history has been a through-line within our mission and vision,” said Gwendolyn Trice, executive director of the Maxville Heritage and Interpretive Center. “Research, oral histories, journals and archives are some of the ways in which we uncover and discover our history.
“Archeology takes this uncovering to the next level, using scientific methods above and below ground to reveal our past in a way that established collection of information, textiles and artifacts cannot achieve,” Trice said.
Other partners in the Maxville project include the Anthropology/Sociology Program at Eastern Oregon University and the Anthropology, Art History and Environmental Studies programs at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington.
Maxville, about 13 miles north of the town of Wallowa, was once home to about 400 residents and was the county’s largest railroad logging town from the mid-1920s to mid-1930s. Loggers and their families came to Maxville in the 1920s from the South and the Midwest in search of work, and the Bowman-Hicks Lumber Company – which owned the town – hired Black loggers despite Oregon’s exclusion laws of that period.
Maxville’s African American families lived in segregated housing, attended segregated schools and played on a segregated baseball team, but Black loggers worked side-by-side with their white counterparts.
Maxville’s eventual decline was due to economic conditions, including the Great Depression and a consequent downturn in the lumber market.
-SOU-
