Mark Tveskov and students

Archaeologist, Anthropology Professor from Southern Oregon University

Maxville, OR

September 12, 2024

On a cold morning, the Westies walked from our Maxville campsite to an open, damp area where five people were digging and excavating six 1-meter square grids from the former housing sites of an old Black logging community. We watched as the archeologists carefully scraped away dirt to expose old tin cans, bottles, nails, a cast iron stove, and other remnants of human activity.

Maxville is a former segregated logging town with White and African American loggers whom the Bowman-Hicks Lumber Company brought to the Northwest. The town existed from 1924 until 1933 when the company abandoned the town due to the Great Depression. The people later abandoned Maxville in 1946 after a snowstorm, changing Maxville to a ghost town. Gwen Trice, a descendant of the original logging family and creator of the Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center, asked Mark Tveskov, an experienced archeologist from Southern Oregon University and a friend of Gwen’s, for documentation of materials in Maxville through archeological research as one of her plans in reviving the ghost town. 

As we were talking, Mark’s team found a small piece of a vinyl record in the African American House. Mark intends to extract the music from the remnant with help from a professor interested in Ethnomusicology. He also explained how a jingle found in the site is thought to be from horses that carried logs, based on pictures and oral stories complied by Gwen Trice and other Maxville descendants.

This archeological study is intended to help understand how the landscape and material culture of Maxville performed structured racism and segregation in the Pacific Northwest. Mark Tveskov and his team sampled archeological records from two locations, one of an White family’s house and another of a Black family’s house to compare. He gave us a tour of one of the White family house's remains, facing a magical morning view of nearby mountains, explaining findings of fragments of ceramic, plastic doll faces and crystal doorknobs, which the Black house remains did not have. There is currently no chapter in the logging history of the Pacific Northwest that includes the perspective of colored people, and Mark is helping to change that with this research.

by Ayano Yoshikawa