Sisters is the perfect place to celebrate the role of women in history. We live in the shadow of mountains named after three women, and Native American women were known to camp along our creek, calling it “Whychus.”
It’s a challenge to find the stories of women who played a part in building our community. Most walk silently through the pages of history. If they are mentioned, it’s often under their husbands’ names, and although they worked together as a team, they were unrecognized. But some women stand out and we still speak their names long after they took their last breath.
The pioneers were the first European women to settle here, providing homes and comfort to their families and early travelers. Martha Cobb Hindman helped her husband open the Cobb Roadhouse in 1883, providing a welcome stop for people on the long journey from the Willamette Valley to Prineville. Married at the age of 13, she took care of a family of five while welcoming visitors to their station, built from the profits and trade of smoked deer meat and cured hides. Her light sourdough biscuits were famous. She was a tough survivor who outlived three husbands, becoming the mistress of the large ranch and dairy at historic Camp Polk. If you visit the Deschutes Land Trust Preserve there today you can see photos along the interpretive path and visit the spring-fed, stone-lined hole where she kept her milk and butter cool.
The Graham sisters, Leda and Lora, helped their pioneer parents tend another stop along the Santiam Wagon Road in the late 1800s, now called Graham Corral. Sheepherders from Shaniko came by with large bands of sheep on their way to high mountain pastures and traded for meals with mutton, huckleberries, and staples. In 1906, Leda married early Forest Service Ranger Perry South. In those days wives were considered convenient free labor and no doubt Leda supported her husband as he began to manage public lands, but we know nothing of her life except a few photos. Her first child Jesse was born and died along the Metolius and is poignantly buried with an elaborate tombstone at Camp Polk Cemetery. Lora married a Fire Guard and her life at Allingham Station from 1918-1924 is recorded in the classic history “That was Yesterday.” When her husband was away, she answered calls on the primitive phone, issued permits, and was required to feed any Forest Service staff that stopped by for 45 cents. She could barely keep up with the vegetable garden, baking bread and pies, butter churning, and other duties while raising three children. If you are lucky, you may see the narcissus bloom where her house stood at Allingham Meadow.
Librarians were a quiet but powerful force. Grace Cyrus Aitken began her career as a clever business woman around 1912. A young single woman she became postmistress and owned her own store, Sisters’ first gift shop with ladies’ clothing. She later married, helping her husband manage his drug store and ran a small library there. In 1923, she famously saved the mail, paychecks, and the store’s goods, when half of town burned in a terrible fire, by recruiting men to empty shelves into baskets and onto a lawn across the street. Her original store became the bottom floor of The Palace, which still stands in Sisters today. She later served as librarian for 16 years, quietly doing what needed to be done.
Maida Bailey was an expert on libraries, serving Stanford, Reed College, and the State of Oregon. A University Dean, she became a sheep rancher in Sisters while lending her brains and books across the state, helping expand our first tiny library for more access to books for everyone. Maida became an integral part of Sisters’ ranching, logging, and library culture and in later years cruised town in her green and white Chevy coupe, waving to her many friends.
Teachers worked hard to educate children of the early settlers and Native Americans. The first school was built in 1885, serving 30 children. Elva Smith homesteaded in a remote cabin on the lower Metolius River and was reported to cross the swift icy water on her horse to teach children on the Warm Springs Reservation. She disappeared in the pages of history, her cabin burned in a wildfire, and the site is now only marked by old apple trees.
The lady lookouts broke the glass ceiling of employment in the man’s world of the Forest Service in 1921 when Gertrude Merrill accepted a primitive posting on top of Black Butte. Men were scarce during World War I and II and women proved adept at fire detection. In 1923 Hazel McKinney, her two daughters, and their collie Snip, served from the new cupola with a living quarters inside the lookout. She delighted visitors with stories of mountain-top life. Hazel was an ace at reporting fire locations and had a mirror flash system to guide her firefighter husband on the ground far below. If you are feeling frisky you can climb to visit the restored cupola and imagine her lookout life.
To learn more about the history of Sisters visit the Three Sisters Historical Society in the historic Maida Bailey Library building.
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