Offbeat Oregon History podcast

Preacher Edmund Creffield's Bride of Christ Church broke up families, sanctioned adultery and inspired deadly violence in the early 20th Century. Ironically, its practitioners' goal was perfect holiness and godliness. (Corvallis, Benton County; 1900s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1105e-bride-of-christ-holy-rollers-in-corvallis-beginning.html)

Young Henry Miller, rejected by his illustrious father, turned to a life of crime, but he turned out not to be very good at it. For his part, the ever-classy Joaquin took to claiming Harry was not really his son. (Coquille, Coos County; 1890s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1507b.black-sheep-of-joaquin-miller-family.347.html)

WPA writer Sara B. Wrenn's oral history interview with Mrs. J.R. Bean, and some excerpts from the reminiscences of one of her in-laws, James Meikle Sharp, who crossed the country on an Oregon Trail wagon train and secured a teacher's certificate in his new Oregon home. (For the transcript, see https://www.loc.gov/item/wpalh001963/ )

Abraham Coryell Edmunds, throughout his several careers in Oregon and California, was almost like a cartoon — a larger-than-life loser in the vein of Wile E. Coyote, with a little Carrie Nation mixed in along with a whole lot of Don Quixote.

Nor were his “own-goals” minor affairs. A.C. Edmunds was almost singlehandedly responsible for the demise of the early Universalist Church in California, the temporary collapse of the Universalist congregation in Portland, and for the sudden death of the temperance and women’s suffrage movements in Oregon in 1874. Before he got involved, Oregon was on track to become the first state in which women could vote. His efforts to help make that happen set the process back almost 40 years. ... (Multnomah and Lane County; 1860s, 1870s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/20-01.ac-edmunds-temperance-own-goalie.html)

Oregon went 'dry' in 1914, so by the time the Volstead Act passed in 1919, Beaver State bootleggers were already seasoned professionals. So when the rest of the West Coast needed them, Oregon's 'midnight entrepreneurs' were ready to roll. (Statewide; 1910s, 1920s, 1930s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1308a-rumrunners-moonshiners-and-speakeasies.html)

A small construction engine was being used to build the South Jetty, to protect the mouth of the Columbia River for ships, when one off-course four-masted schooner crashed into it — so construction crews chugged to the rescue. (Hammond, Clatsop County; 1910s; Offbeat Oregon History column by Finn J.D. John, 15 May 2011) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1105c-railroad-train-rescues-shipwrecked-schooners-crew.html)

Not since before the Civil War had so many mariners drowned in a shipwreck on the Columbia River bar; as hurricane-driven breakers tore the big ship to pieces, all the would-be rescuers could do was watch in horror. (Columbia River Bar, Clatsop County; 1930s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1507a.shipwreck-iowa-worst-of-1900s-346.html)

This is the third and final part of WPA writer William Haight's oral history interview with Mrs. Neil Niven (Haight doesn't give us her first name or maiden name). Mrs. Niven came to the wild Oregon hard-rock mining boomtown of Granite as a schoolteacher, later served as its newspaper's editor, and throughout her time there she was a close and occasionally sarcastic observer of its wild, violent, rootin'-tootin' culture. (For the transcript, see https://www.loc.gov/item/wpalh001942/ )

The railroad, the local police agencies, and the U.S. War Department all desperately wanted to prosecute somebody, anybody, just not the young Marine who almost certainly was young Martha Brinson James' actual killer. (Albany, Linn County; 1940s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1607b.war-bride-murder-3.399.html)

Apparently desperate to avoid charging a uniformed U.S. Marine with the crime, prosecutors sought a scapegoat to pin the murder of Martha James on. They found one, and they had to work really hard to make it stick ... but they got it done. (Albany, Linn County; 1940s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1607a.war-bride-murder-2.398.html)