May I apologize now before you begin to read this explanation about how all of the materials loaded onto this website came about. I have written quite a lot to read, but how else would you understand the immense effort that hundreds of middle school-aged students, many school staff and hundreds of community people past and present put into collecting and preserving our local history!

Historical photos have finally begun to be loaded on this website. Why has it taken so long waiting for the photos to be loaded?

Well, in the late 1990s and early 2000s Nestucca Valley Middle School staff and students embarked on a Heritage Project to try to teach students skills in various subjects by 1. learning about local history, 2. collecting and documenting history artifacts including local historical photos and stories collected from people who had lived life in the local area, and 3. by learning from and improving local historical sites and materials about local history.

The response was amazing! After teaching students the skils of scanning photos and documents we began scanning photos generous people brought in to the school. Sometimes a person might bring 1 photo, a small collection of photos or even photo albums that were loaned to the school for scanning. Many, Many students and some of the staff scanned hundreds and hundreds of photos. And many people sat down for interviews done by students and staff that were recorded. In addition, many people sent in stories they had written or collected.

It take long until the response was overwhelming. As many of the staff were also learning the best practices of how to scan documents and photos and how to safely store the scans and copies of informaiton we quickly gathered photos, documents, etc., but didn't quite get to the point of what to do with all we had collected. Note that I, Dean Bones, having grown up in the local area, was very concerned about somehow losing what we had gathered as I quickly realized that it might take years to learn how to properly share what we had gathered. I made multiple digital copies of the materials stored on various devices and also worked with students to set up a collection of many filing cabinets in order to store all of the physical copies of materials.

Know that I am sharing the information in this paragraph to help you understand that in addition to being extremely interested in preserving South Tillamook County history I also had a life and couldn't continue working on the history project for large periods of time. In 2003 I retired from teaching full time. I continued to do substitute teaching for another 14 years, plan and lead the Tillamook County Outdoor School program for a total of 36 years (The first number of years I was an assistant planner and leader.), work for Tillamook Estuaries Partnership planning and leading the all-county 4th grade natural resource activities including the Clean Water Festival and the 3rd grade natural resource activities including a number of days of the Down By the Riverside events.

All during these years I continued to collect and try to preserve scanned photos and documents about South Tillamook County history. Even though I had personnaly kept digital copies of the materials scanned and collected during the Heritage Project I was very concerned about the materials still stored in the Historical Project filing cabinets in the old Nestucca Valley Middle School (formerally Beaver Grade School) building. In about 2019 long after the middle school building was no longer being used I was contacted by Superintendent Misty Wharton and asked if I would mind going through the filing cabinets, the tubs of stored materials that staff had taken from their classrooms and stored near the filing cabinets and all of the piles of loose materials that had been gathered into the storage room when the building was being vacated in order to sort out historical materials that I thought the District might want to keep, sort out what could and should be donated to the Pioneer Museum, keep important historical information to share with others and dispose of what should not be kept. THIS FELT LAKE THE MOST AMAZING GIFT to me!

Some of the materials I found made me realize that I and others had no idea of many of the documents and information that had been shared with various staff members during our school project as in hindsight I realize that we had no detailed way of documenting what materials were shared with us, we had no way making sure that people were thanked for their contributions, and most importantly we had no organized way of knowing if we had made sure the materials that many people loaned to us and wanted back were actually returned. Each of the teaching staff members had agreed to work with materials of certain subjects such as sports, fishing, etc., and in addition each teacher was responsible for collecting and researching a certain number of school districts of the various 45ish school districts that had operated in South Tillamook County, for example, so only the teacher who received those materials new they existed.

Since that time of sorting through the past materials I have continued to scan found photos and documents including the treasure trove of information at the Pioneer Museum. Over time I have come to realize that much of what we scanned in our early years of the Heritage Project was done at what is now a very minimum quality level for scanning, so I have rescanned photos as they have become available to me.

But a major problem before being able to prepare the photos to upload was that because of all of the scanning over the years by so many different people we ended up with many multiple copies of many of the old historical photos. I also loaded the digital information on various hard drives in case any hard drive failed and there were a number of backup drives. So wehn I started working on the Cloverdale photos I actually found some that had 21 different scans of the same old photo. And most of the old photos had at least 4 - 9 or so various copies. So I had to go through each photo and find the one that seemed to be the best photo to load. It has taken months, and there other community's folders to sort through.

Thank yous must be given to so many people who have gone before us! These include but are not limited to the following:

• Clyde Hudson - Clyde was a local photographer who documented much of the life of the South Tillamook County area. Most of the old photographs that we see now were taken by Clyde. What a gift this man gave us of photos that took a huge amount of his time to travel to take, to develop and to preserve. I have a goal to research the historical photos I have and document, if possible, who took the photo. Clyde's photos will undoubtedly be a majority.
• Locals who went way beyond the normal call of duty in preserving, collecting and sharing the old photos that Clyde took and that probably others in their family took such as:
  • Lloyd McKillip - Lloyd loved local history. He treasured his photographs, organized them into albums with rich descriptions of what was pictured and loved talking about local history. He shared several albums with Nestucca Middle School for students to scan. And several of his great-grandchildren helped scan his photos.
  • Ruth REDBERG Crockett, her brother Carl, and her daughter Lois CROCKETT Holloway - Ruth was one of the first people in first year of the Heritage Project to invite me and several middle school students sit in her home and scan some of her photos. Ruth also kept photo albums with very detailed information about each photo. She made a photo album to be kept at Cloverdale Grade School that we were able to scan also. And her daughter, Lois, is a tremendously detailed keeper of South Tllamook County history.
  • Howard Owens - Jack Gilman offered the Howard Owens' photo album he had at the time for us to scan. And just like Lloyd and Ruth he had good descriptions of photos in his album.
  • Lorraine ROWLAND Eckhardt - Lorraine purchased Clyde Hudson's photos and photography equipment. She also set up a business to copy photos for people. If she would not have purchased Clyde's photos and equipment including his glass that were used in his photography we would not have many of the many photos Clyde took. She readily shared those photos and made many of the copies that were in Lloyd McKillip's, Ruth REDBERG Crockett's, Howard Owens' and the Tillamook County Pioneer Museum's albums and collections of photos. She was very generous in sharing a number of her albums for scanning by Nestucca Valley Middle School students and staff and shared albums with me as well. And this wonderful lady tried her best to identify each person in many of the photos she had and to also write other information about many of the photos.
  • Tillamook County Pioneer Museum - We are so fortunate to have a local museum that collects, protects and stores items in Tillamook County's history. Wayne Jensen, director of the museum, allowed me and about 5 students armed with scanners to sit in the museum scannin old photographs of South Tillamook County history. And later directors have been very kind in allowing access to not only historical photos but also to the many, many documents that pertain to South Tillamook County history including the long-time go-to person of the Research Room, Ruby Fry-Matson.
  • And, of course, the many people who a photo, a handful of photos, or albums to share of photos many of them or their ancestors had taken. Without these people there would be many gaps in our local history.
• Other old-time photographers - F. Briody, "Oro" Foto representing someone who I hope to research, and other old time locals who took and shared the photos they took. I have a hope of giving them recognition some day after researching them.

As you look through the photographs you will notice that many of them have special coding in the title of the photograph. (The truth is, however, that in the very early years of scanning the person scanning sometimes developed their own code such as CLO for Cloverdale, LK for Lloyd McKillip or some other mispellings, etc.)For now codes you will encounter include RRC which means it was from Ruth Redberg's photo album, TCHCS which means that it was one of Lloyd McKillip's photos from his albums that Bill and Elizabeth Minshall worked with Lloyd McKillip to copy. Bill took photos of each of Lloyd's historial slides. TCHCS stands for Tillamook County History Cloverdale Slide. HO represents a photo from Howard Owens' album. As I contine on working on this seemingly million year task I will provide a list of codes that represent people from all over South Tillamook County.

And about those wonderful descriptions that accompany most of the photos I post . . . most of the descriptions are from Lloyd McKillip's, Ruth REDBERG Crockett's and Howard Owen's albums along with Lorraine Eckhardt's additions. Gwen AYER Jones, Rollin Browning and others also contributed great information about photos and events as did others who cannot possibly be added here. I give a belated thank you to each of those people who had the foresight to give their knowledge to the future. Where there were any differences in their comments I combined comments from the albums, and, perhaps here and there I added my own words to try to further clarify what was being described. I am going through the many stories and transcripts on this site to produce a list of facts about anything having to do with South Tillamook County so that additiions to descriptions can be added later.

What Is Hopefully to Come?I will work through slides of Cloverdale before moving on to other communities such as Beaver, Hebo, Sandlake, Hemlock, Woods, Pacific City, Neskowin, Meda, etc. I have great hope and lots of information to produce photo pages of most of the about 45 school districts that once exsisted in South Tillamook County. Then there are the various subjects such as fishing, logging, transportation, obituaries, organizations, farming, cannaries, bridges, churches, cheese factories, doctors, disasters, military, and on and on and on.

Now that I am back in the saddle being able to post photos I hope to be able to much more quickly prepare photos, descriptions, etc., and get them loaded up little by little. But remember that I DO have a very enjoyable peaceful life literally enjoying just about every moment of every day doing what interests me and brings me joy. Thanks for reading this long explanation about my contribution to the documenting of South Tillamook County history! Dean Bones