His first experience with Seneca was when he was in school and would ride through from Long Creek to Crane for sports events. He said, “The roads were gravel roads, and the store looked funny to me.” John Saunders probably never imagined he would move to Seneca in 1954. He remembers it as a good, nice, and friendly town for loggers and everyone else. He first lived in an apartment over the tavern and had to walk through the store to get home. Later he moved to the house where Connor and Ryne Smith live. He talked about the interesting life in Seneca.

John moved to Seneca to buy and run the store and the attached buildings. He bought the store from a man named James Moore, and then later on he bought the property the store was on. The store looked like a brick building with a brick veneer face and a metal awning. The inside was stucco as was the theater and the tavern. There was quite a bit of glass and the floors were wood. It all was one building with partitions between the businesses. The corks in the shoes worn by the loggers really tore up the wood floors. The health department had a regulation that the restaurant floor had to be sealed, so John put in hardboard floors and sealed them with varnish to make the place more sanitary. He had already replaced the store’s floor and the corks weren’t such a problem there anymore. The problem was that when the men first came from the hotel to the restaurant in the morning before daylight, it was a hassle to unlace their boots, take them off, put them back on and lace them again. To protect the new floor, he had the loggers wear a special moccasin type of device he’d made out of wood and rubber bands to cover the caulks. It was a one by four and a half to five inch piece of wood. He took a rubber band and nailed it on one side, took it over the top, and then nailed it to the other side. The logger would just have to slip their foot in under the rubber band. Many people thought the old rough and tumble loggers would probably strenuously object, but they didn’t. They were very cooperative.

When asked what his pay was, John said it depended on the year. If he had $125, 000 in yearly sales he might gross 16% and then have to pay the bills out of that. It was best if he could have a great amount of inventory. The hunters who came in the fall were a good boost to the business. He had some good years and in others he could have used a couple more hunters.

His favorite job in Seneca was working in the store. It held lots of merchandise and some of the products he liked selling were boats, motors, campers, and snowmobiles. When he worked in the store building, which also was the movie theater, service station, restaurant, and tavern, John always loved teasing the children. One of them was Linda Starbuck who is now the Seneca School Secretary. The funniest story John remembers happened when he was taking care of his niece, a preschooler. He took her to the babysitter in the morning and he picked her up in the evening. He asked, “Did you have fun today?”

She replied, “Good, sept we fought.”

He said, “You fought? What did you fight about?”

The little niece replied, “Well, she hit me back!” John felt the young people were the most fun part of work because he usually got an answer from them.

John said the Coconut Grove was in the upper story above the tavern. Originally it had a ring for prizefights and was later changed into apartments. It had sleeping quarters for two and a bathroom. It was used for Hines Safety Dinners, Hines upper management people and also for meetings. There were stairs to it from the front of the building. There was no reason for kids to be there. Grown people weren’t allowed in unless invited.

In Seneca, available jobs included surveyors (that laid out log sales and worked in the woods), people who built roads, tree cutters, people who loaded and unloaded logs, brush cutters, cat skinners and logging and railroad crews. The wages for a logging job when he first started as a young man in Bates was $1.32 an hour. When he moved to Seneca, it was still $1.32 per hour when running a cat and five cents more for road crew, $3.00 a day for driving your own rig to work, and $2.00 to $3.00 per thousand board feet to work as a faller. When John worked in the woods he mainly used one tool, and that was the bulldozer.

The Seneca mill was a planer mill built by Spec Hudspeth. Lumber came up from the mills in John Day, was kilned, planed, and then shipped out. It was cheaper to ship the lumber from Seneca by railroad than it was to ship it by truck. By John’s knowledge, the pay for workers at the mill was about $1.30 per hour.

Before the Hines Company purchased the timber resources, the US Forest Service did an inventory and decided the timber needed to be harvested and put it up for bid. To get the bid, a company had to build a logging camp or town in Grant County and then a railroad to ship lumber, sheep and cattle from this end. The Forest Service set the bid for $2.50 per thousand for the large tract of timber. In the end, a family named Herrick got the bid for $1.98 per thousand, which was cheap for timber. They had to build a mill in Harney County, a railroad from Crane to Burns and from Burns to Seneca. They were broke by the time they were building the tunnel through the mountain between Hines and Seneca, so Hines came in and purchased the bid. The cost of the whole project had not just been the bidding contract on the timber, but building all the attached items in the contract as well. It was a very expensive project

When asked if he had ever ridden the train, John said he’d learned a lot from the guys who worked on it. He also said he used to get on the old switch engine at the old Oregon Lumber Mill in Bates and ride quite a bit. They would let him run it and he said it was pretty fun. John didn’t ride the train in Seneca, but as he remembers it, the train was very large and held about thirty to forty cars. When he first came here, all the locomotives were run by steam. Some were oil fed. They used to have what they called a heavy fuel and they had to have the steam plant here to keep the fuel warm enough to be transported from the tanks into the locomotives. When John was going to school in Long Creek, there was an old fellow they called Fats Turner. He drove the school bus from Fox Valley to take kids to school in Long Creek. Meanwhile, when he didn’t have anything to do, he would sit out front of the general store and tell stories to people coming along. Some people came along one day and asked him what he’d done, and he said he was retired. They wanted to know what he’d done before he retired, and he said he was a railroad conductor. They asked what railroad was that? He told them the O & W Now and Then. John said Mr. Turner was talking about the O & W, R & N that came from Hines to Seneca. The train had once had passenger services, but he didn’t know when it was discontinued. In order to carry passengers the train had to have a conductor and Mr. Turner had that job.

The logs on the train were sometimes “monstrous,” John stated, “the largest I’ve seen.” They were occasionally five and a half to six feet stump wise. The average was about thirty three to thirty six inches in earlier times. Later the mills were rebuilt and they couldn’t handle the logs over thirty-nine inches. John said he had a little one-man saw behind the old hotel. Hines couldn’t cut some of the timbers they wanted for an addition to the mill in Burns. He cut the fifty six-inch logs for them so they could build their addition.

John was also fortunate because he got to go in the tunnel, though he was not on a train at the time. Inside, the tunnel was made by mostly pick and shovel and it didn’t have much reinforcement. When asked if it was big, he said if you imagine a locomotive probably fourteen feet high needing clearance for height and sides with logs on and equipment it was a good sized tunnel.

The main highways were paved when John moved to Seneca, although they were only graveled when he was in high school and rode the bus through on sporting events. He remembers them being paved around 1946 or 1947. He can remember as a youngster living on a ranch about fifteen miles north of Long Creek when the roads were just two ruts. His folks had a ranch called the Caverhill Place. They had the post office there. His mother would sit him on the porch (to get him out from under foot he supposed) to watch for Charlie. Charlie was the man who brought the mail from Pendleton to Long Creek and all the little post offices. He wore a hat and had a team of horses to pull his buggy. At that time, the road was just two ruts with no grading. John would sit there and watch over the hill. Pretty soon he would see ears come up, then the whole horse, and then Charlie Osborn in his hat. He had beautiful lights on the buggy. John was amazed at the color of the kerosene. One of the things embedded in his memory when he was probably around four years old was the buggy carrying the mail came into view and right over the top came an airplane. It was an Old World War I vintage aircraft. It was like two eras of time overlapping one another. John knows he was interested in airplanes from that time on. This story also reminded John of the times when aerial acrobatic shows would come through with the World War I airplanes and do stunts. He said he remembered a particular time when they had a rodeo cowboy in town. He got into the gin and had a little more than he should have that day. He kept pestering the pilot to let him strap his saddle onto the back of the airplane so he could “ride that airplane”. The pilot finally let him. The cowboy had to get an extra cinch so it could go around the fuselage of this old in-line two-seater airplane. They put the saddle on and he went up there being pretty boisterous, but when he came down he was looking for someplace because he was a bit sick. He was about as white as a sheep, but he did it. He rode that airplane.

John was not in Seneca when it was fifty-four below zero, but he was in Seneca when it was forty-nine, fifty, and forty-five below. People wore wooly underwear (called black woolies), heavy wool pants, and pure wool clothing. He would wear layers and layers of wool and anything warm he had. A person could keep warm when it was that cold, but if the wind was blowing or if a person got wet, it was almost impossible to keep warm.

John is one of the lucky men who got to meet Mr. Charles Hines and his friendly family. Mr. Hines’ son-in law’s name was Howard, and he later became the general manager.

The funniest story he remembers about living in Seneca occurred at the store. One time there was a hunter who pulled up across the road in front of the store, and he had a pretty fair buck. There was a Swedish man named Alec Bjorkman. He could always tell a pretty good story. He was trained in school for public speaking, and if they had him in a meeting where they were giving merits for public safety he could get up, gesture with his hands and be very impressive. Well, Alec came out there where the man had the buck and looked it all over. Everyone gathering around was commenting on it. “Well,” he says, “that’s not the biggest buck. You should of seen the von I got last year. You couldn’t carry the langs nor the laver.”

John would use his free time to go fishing, hunting, swimming, water skiing, and snowmobiling. From hunting, he has a pair of horns hanging down at Sels Brewery. They are from a nice bull elk. He said when he first came around there weren’t many elk. Deer were plentiful. There are probably more elk now than there were deer then. They didn’t hunt for shed antlers then. At that time the craft wasn’t developed for profit, but he can remember as a young fellow in Long Creek collecting all the hides they could find and traded them with the Indians. The Indians would come out of Pendleton and Umatilla in a mile long line with travois. Most of them would be walking. They would come through the country there in Fox Valley and Camas Prairie. They would trade the hides for gloves with gauntlets on them and the beading real fancy. They also traded for work gloves. He remembers a person could pick up gallons of arrowheads back then. One time he was with his cousins and they came upon an Indian grave. Not knowing any better, they took copper buckets and Indian beads home. His aunt got all over them and chased them back to the grave. They reburied the items

He also watched movies in the theater like old Disney movies, which were not in color. Some actors in the movies were Lassie, John Wayne, Marlene Detrick, Tex Ritter, Hop-Along Cassidy, and Gene Autrey. Even though they weren’t color, the kids seemed to like them. John had said, “Most cowboys in the movies wouldn’t make it in Grant County.” They used to laugh at John Wayne in his earlier movies. They thought he was a woos, because they really knew how to rope and ride horses. He said, “Too much acting in Hollywood.” He also said he’s known a lot of kids, and kids will be kids. He said that kids did sneak into the theater.

When Jim Moore owned the theater, he had a fellow running it for him. To John, it didn’t look like it was very profitable. He figured 20 people at forty cents a ticket. That would amount to $8.00. A person couldn’t buy much electricity or pay rent for that amount. We asked John how much he made on the theater. He said, he had a man named Warren Schroder who operated the theater for him. John furnished the utilities and power. Mr. Schroder tried for a year and pretty much went into a hole. Most people thought Edward Hines would take care of them because he furnished the cookhouse and did many things for them. They had no water or sewer bills. It was very hard to explain to the people that he needed another ten cents on the ticket. They couldn’t get the price of the ticket up to pay the costs, so the theater was closed.

There was also a swimming pool in Seneca heated by a steam plant. The pool was eight feet deep and was slanted. John said, “It must have been the greatest thing in Seneca, although I never swam in it.” The kids did swim in it and they had the most fun until Hines left Seneca. The pool had to meet rules and regulations on sanitation, lifeguards, etc. John told us that in the early days you pretty much took care of yourself with no lifeguard. Mr. Trafton and some others formed a committee and tried to get funding from a government grant. The town didn’t have any minority people in it so the government wouldn’t give them the grant money. There wasn’t enough money locally to keep it going because it would require a small steam unit to keep it running. The kids were very sad when the pool shut down. Today there are only bits and pieces left from the pool in Seneca.

John remembers the old hotel pretty much as it is today. He said it had twenty rooms upstairs and twenty rooms down. One end had a little apartment setup. The wood floors were all chewed up from the cork boots, and the rooms were pretty small. There were community bathrooms with one on each floor, and there were several shower stalls in each one. The basement also had living quarters as well as laundry facilities.

Both the store and the hotel were heated by steam from the steam plant across the river that also heated the shops, round house, and the company offices. It was sent over in pipes that were about eight feet above the ground. There was quite a trestle built across the river to carry the pipe at about the same place the golfing bridge is today.

He said that there were four bunkhouses behind the hotel with about six loggers staying in each. He couldn’t say the actual count of the number of loggers in Seneca. Between the hotel, the bunkhouses and the town there must have been close to 250.

There were many logging accidents as he remembers. Logging was a very dangerous job, and safety features weren’t practiced back then as they are today. One man who was in a logging accident was Mr. Hankins. He had a pole run through him. They cut the log off and took him to John Day. He lived, but some of them weren’t that fortunate. A young boy, Mrs. Clayborn’s son (she was a teacher at the Seneca School) had just gotten out of high school and went to work on probably his first job. He was following along behind the cat. One of the logs had bent down a little timber and when the log rolled over it, it came back up to hit and kill him. It took a while to get to the hospital back then. Corrine Williams was a registered nurse who worked for Hines. She had a pharmacy and would treat people when they were sick or got hurt.

John remembers it to be common for loggers to pour gas over their chain saw and light it to get it going during cold weather. He said most often a person would go out cutting logs and just dig under the snow to the dry needles, touch a little fire and set the saw beside it. He said he also saw another method used and he had seen it happen quite often. The loggers would go out to the woods and they’d have trouble starting their saws. They would crank and crank and sweat and cuss and pretty soon they’d pick it up. He said you’d be surprised at how far those guys could throw a saw, even the second time when they caught up with it.

The strength the loggers demonstrated while throwing their saw led us to the topic of baseball. A comment came out that it wasn’t a wonder that the baseball players could hit the ball over the Silvies River. John remembers Seneca had some good baseball players. A couple of them, Butter Shields and Julious Farmer, originally came from Long Creek. Before he came to Seneca, John lived in Bates and was on their baseball team. They played the Seneca team and happen to win the game. He said he was a young fellow, so he beat it down to the tavern to get himself a pop to have as he drove back. He was in a hurry to get someplace. There were two people in the tavern besides the bartender, Louie, and Ida Zera. Louie was kind of a tough old talking logger and he said, “What’re ya doing here?”

I said, “I come up to play a ball game.”

“Oh, you play ball out here?”

“Yah.”

“Who won?”

I said, “I think we got a couple rounds on em.”

“You did?” he thought a bit and said, “Well, you better get outa here then cause they ain’t gonna be very happy when they come down!”

John said when he went out he saw Chick Cyrus and Rod Barrott. They were just young fellows and one of them wasn’t old enough to go into the tavern. They were very close to the same age. This was the first time he’d ever seen them. This whole incident had an influence on his coming to Seneca.

When asked how the town had changed from the first days he came to now, John could see many changes. All the railroads and the shops are gone, and there is no population in the old hotel. The streets are paved and the houses have lawns. When he first came there were only one or two lawns and very few trees. There were a few “quakies” (quaking aspens) down where Brad Smith lives. The timberline is a lot further out into the valley and he attributed that to the jack rabbit population being down. The store is gone and all the other parts of it. John said he wasn’t in Seneca at the time it burned down. He had sold the store one-year before and the first payment was due the day after it burned. He said, “I had mortgage insurance that paid it off.” He also stated, “Pretty sad. I spent forty years there.”

John feels the town has changed so much basically because of the economy. Most people are now retired. They like to fish, hunt and they have the time. Outside of a few jobs, like Browning’s and Pettyjohn’s that have their own business, there isn’t much. There is no basic resource to have jobs, businesses or employ people. People have to go where the money is. All these are based on what the economy is. He felt the town was a place that came out of the time and history, kind of like an era. It was the time of the Great Depression and people hit the logging camps because of the work. Some would come walking into town because they didn’t have the money for any other means of travel. By today’s standards they might have been called a bum or a hobo, but they were dealing with circumstances beyond their control. It was a tough time with few jobs available. Many had left their family because they were just another mouth to feed. He reminisced, “You couldn’t find that greatness of people today. Real trying time for people. It was the years of the depression and people had a great heart to do what they did.”

John’s life has not just been exciting, but historical; being able to ride the Bates train, see the Seneca pool, or even having to set your chainsaw on fire to get it started. Of course there are downfalls, such as wearing scratchy, itchy wooly underwear. Even though, when a person lives in Seneca, they must wear wool underwear because of the cold weather, I believe John should be proud to have lived then. He is very privileged. I wish I could’ve lived back then.