Relationships were formed that lasted a lifetime.

Rural communities have languages all to their own. If I knew it as a child I forgot it, my world was the block I lived on, the alley that lead to grandma’s house, and the local grocer who exchanged our coupons from the Sunday paper into cold hard cash.

I chased the dream that was promised by jet streams that crossed the rural sky as a kid. I dreamed of discovery.  Four years ago, I came home. I journeyed like a salmon instinctively, to the original place my grandfather brought my father when they arrived to remote Eastern Oregon in 1924, there were laws against them being here in the early years. Exclusion laws.

The past has caught up to the present and is infusing itself in a shared experience in my community.

How does language serve cultural connection? I think of how many conventional languages there are (I don’t pretend to know), there is the language of the heart, the language of youth, of our elders and scholars.  There is also the language of place, a setting where activities are bonded by a common experience, where basic denominators such as work, isolation, hardship, food, even music serve as a bridge that transcends cultural norms and creates it’s own language, culture, roots itself and speaks to the common needs of those it serves. Maxville was such a place for a group of people brought to a landscape with different cultures, traditions, and skills.

Local logging heritage, social and economic practices, and recreational activities are  revealed through the collection, preservation, and interpretation of the multicultural logging community of Maxville, Oregon, championed through Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center, reveal the contributions of these isolated communities in the integration of African Americans and other nationalities over the past 100 years. Our community reflects shades of differences, beliefs, and values today that define culture at it’s best, excluding none.