Southern Oregon contingent to excavate at Maxville, a historic logging site near Joseph in rural Oregon

By Holly Dillemuth, Ashland.news

Fall term hasn’t started yet at Southern Oregon University, but anthropology professor Mark Tveskov has already taken his “classroom” on the road — about 350 miles to the town of Joseph in eastern Oregon — with a handful of returning alumni and current students in tow for a unique project funded by a $20,000 state grant.

A contingent of SOU students with visiting alumni, led by Tveskov, spent Labor Day and Tuesday traveling to eastern Oregon, where they are gathering this week and next with other students and professionals from Eastern Oregon University and Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. The group will conduct excavations in search of artifacts that would better tell the stories of Black loggers who lived and worked in the town of Maxville, located in eastern Oregon, in the 1920s and 1930s. Much is still unknown about their lives, but with a $20,000 State Historic Preservation grant, Tveskov and his team hope to play a part in changing that and the broader narrative of Black lives in Oregon. 

“The story of Black people in Oregon hasn’t been told adequately, and many people in different fronts are working to tell that story,” Tveskov told Ashland.news in a recent interview in Ashland.

Maxville, located about 13 miles north of the town of Wallowa, was once filled with about 400 residents and was Wallowa County’s largest railroad logging town from the mid-1920s to mid-1930s, according to a news release issued by SOU in July. 

Loggers and their families came to Maxville in the 1920s from the South and the Midwest in search of work. The Bowman-Hicks Lumber Co. — which owned the town — hired Black loggers despite Oregon’s exclusion laws of that period. 

Tveskov, who has served as a professor of anthropology at SOU since 1998, served as the lead author on a nomination that led the National Park Service to place Maxville on the National Register of Historic Places, as reported in a previous Ashland.news story. Those efforts led the Maxville project to earn a 2024 Oregon Heritage Excellence Award from the State of Oregon. 

Gwen Trice, founder and executive director of the Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center, located in Joseph, expressed excitement about the cooperative project in a phone interview with Ashland.news in July.

The lumber company “recruited Black and white Southern loggers and some from the Midwest to Oregon, so they came with those Jim Crow mindsets in place,” Trice said.

Trice added that in the 1920s, Oregon’s exclusion laws for Black Americans were still in full force, and the Ku Klux Klan was at its strongest in the state, according to a previous Ashland.news story.

“So they were essentially moving to another deeply racist space, where they were burning crosses on the adjoining mountains outside of Maxville, (and) at least once came into the logging town,” she said. “At one point they had about a 200-person Klan march in the town of Wallowa, just below where Maxville was located.”

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, according to SOU.

SOU students and alumni will work with their colleagues and 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 before the town died out during the Great Depression and a downturn in the lumber market, as reported previously in an Ashland.news story.  

The Maxville townsite where students will conduct excavation work was acquired by the museum in 2022 to be developed as an interpretive, educational and communal space, SOU said in a news release.

Trice said that the artifacts excavated from the 96-acre town site (the interpretive center owns a total of 240 acres) will help tell a larger story of the lives the inhabitants of Maxville lived.

“We have an idea of where different parts of the community are,” Tveskov said in an interview in July. “We’re going to do some surface collection of artifacts around those areas and then do some limited excavation in areas to try to broaden our sample of artifacts.”

Students will dig a series of small holes, each measuring about a square yard.

“The specific thing we’re looking for is to help Maxville Interpretive Center understand the nature of the archaeological deposits at the site,” Tveskov said in July. “We know a lot about the layout of the community as it was, but we know that in sometimes general terms, and because the museum is going to be using the site for public interpretation.

“If we can identify, for example, a specific area where an African American family lived and excavate, we could maybe find some artifacts that speak to the particulars of their lived experience in that space,” he added.

The interpretive center has aerial photos of the site from the 1940s which will help direct the center’s use of lidar technology in the near future to give the center a better sense of what’s underneath the site.

Students and professionals’ work will culminate with a public presentation on Thursday, Sept. 12. at a nonprofit in Enterprise, about 20 minutes from Joseph.

“From the point of view of a professor, it’s the perfect thing to experience for my students because if they go on in archaeology, these are the kinds of projects that are state of the art … this is a unique opportunity for them,” Tveskov told Ashland.news last week.

During an interview with Tveskov near SOU recently, he shared how impactful on-the-ground excavation projects like this were for him as a student at University of Connecticut.

“I’d been taking anthropology classes and studying the history of colonialism, more from a cultural point of view,” he said, “but then when I got the practical aspect of archaeology, I was really hooked into archaeology.”

That’s what Tveskov, who had a strong interest in history at a young age, hopes for his students, too.

“It’s everything really,” Tveskov told Ashland.news, of the hands-on component of the project. “It’s practical engagement with the subject matter. It gets you beyond just the academic, abstract discussion of it; gives students a sense of the work and the possibilities, and it’s as fun as hell.

“A big part of archaeology is building communities between the communities we work with and the students,” he added, a key component to the excavation project.

He laments an often used comparison by some of his profession to a well-known fictional character — Indiana Jones — and dispelled the likeness for anyone placing him and his colleagues on the same plane (or invisible footbridge) as the popular movie series starring Harrison Ford.

“It’s almost like universal, right?” Tveskov said. “It’s the basic understanding that most people associate with archaeology and it’s tied to this kind of finders-keepers treasure hunting trope and the popularity of the movies.

“Archaeology is not about treasure hunting,” he added. “It shouldn’t be about aggrandizing a single person as a celebrity. It’s about engaging communities and empowering communities to tell stories that need to be told.”

And although treasure hunting it is not, nor breaking through cob-webbed walls, Tveskov confirmed that one comparison to the popular movie does holds up: He and others on this project will be searching for items that do belong in a museum and that can be used to tell untold stories, though their process will be much more respectful and by the book than that of Professor Jones.

“Archaeology should be a more humble service toward underserved communities … (with) a more subtle, careful approach,” he said. “When you excavate an archaeological site, you’re destroying it, and so it takes a lot of ethical responsibility to do it and we think about it really carefully, and we gain consent … of the local communities. These are all the antithesis of Indiana Jones.”

Students and professionals will be aiming to humbly work alongside other students as well as professional colleagues — all while staying together at a farm located between Joseph and Enterprise while they’re at it.

Tveskov said he doesn’t have alumni along for every excavation, but he noted the unique nature of this project.

“We’re grateful for funding that we got from the state,” Tveskov said, noting the project still relies on volunteers. “I was fortunate enough to have these alumni that have become friends … professional colleagues, and I was like, ‘You want to do this?’ and they came.”

Among them are SOU anthropology alumni Amy Cohen, who currently serves as a professor of anthropology in Okanagan, in British Columbia, Canada; Anne Wolke, a public defender in Grants Pass; and Zachariah Rodriguez, an abandoned mining lands archaeologist for the Bureau of Land Management.

Three current SOU students are also joining in on the project, Tveskov said.

Tveskov said colleague Rory Becker from Eastern Oregon University is in the process of writing a grant to fund the project moving forward.

The 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.

Email Ashland.news reporter Holly Dillemuth at [email protected].