How to Research Your Land's History · Section 1 of 7

1. Every piece of land has a history

Written by AI A draft for Dr. Bob Zybach's review, written by AI from his four published documents (one of them, Coquelle Trails, written with Don Ivy). Words inside quotation marks are quoted from those documents, with the page. He has not reviewed this draft.

Every piece of land has been somebody’s pasture, woodlot, hunting ground, shortcut or worry. The fences, stumps, roads and odd clearings on your place are clues to that history, and so are the papers, photographs and memories that go with them. This booklet shows you where those clues are kept, what each kind can and cannot tell you, and how to weigh them against each other.

The methods come from four studies by forest historian Dr. Bob Zybach, listed in section 7: his 1999 thesis on Soap Creek Valley, Oregon (the Soap Creek study); his 2003 dissertation on the Great Fires of the Oregon Coast Range; the 2011 Tiller study of the South Umpqua headwaters; and Coquelle Trails (2013), written with Don Ivy.

Why it’s worth knowing

Knowing how your land looked, and how people used it, helps explain what you see on it now: why one slope grew up in fir while the next stayed in grass, where an old road ran, why a fence line sits where it does.

It is also a matter of time. Great Fires 2003 turned up “a number of threatened or obscure sources of information, including fading memories, 90-year old hand-colored timber cruise maps, collections of 60 to 120 year-old photographs, agency reports, etc.” (Great Fires 2003, p. 302). Papers get thrown out, and memories leave with the people who hold them.

What the evidence can answer

More than most people expect. In the Soap Creek study, the original land surveys of the 1850s and 1880s “recorded specific locations, sizes, and species of trees and understory vegetation on a regular grid that subdivided the landscape into square-mile sections and pioneer land claims” (Thesis 1999, p. 21). The surveyors also noted crops, buildings and roads (paraphrase; Thesis 1999, p. 21). Great Fires 2003 found that the same kind of survey maps and notes can show Indian trails, homesites and campsites, berry patches and fields of root crops, mapping that “cannot be duplicated by any other source of information” (Great Fires 2003, p. 96).

With patience you can often learn what grew where, where trails and roads ran, where fires burned, when fields were cleared and who lived near the spring.

What the evidence cannot do is hold still. In the words of Great Fires 2003, “each landscape pattern that is shown represents only a point in time for a selected area” (Great Fires 2003, p. 11). An old map, a photograph or a neighbor’s story is one look at one moment.

Weighing many sources together

No single record gets the last word, not even the oldest one in the courthouse. Great Fires 2003 describes its approach this way:

“Two key features of this methodology are that research questions are answered based on the "weight of evidence" from multiple sources, and research findings include the formal identification of additional "tangible" questions as they present themselves.”

In plain terms: gather several kinds of evidence, see where they agree, and keep a list of the new questions that turn up. Answers are held loosely: “The preponderance of available tangible evidence is used to select likely answers, given the likelihood that such answers are intended to change or be modified as more information is made available” (Great Fires 2003, p. 53). The Tiller study works the same way, “making a reasoned answer to the question based on the weight of the gathered evidence” (Tiller 2011, p. 8). The rest of this booklet is about doing that on your own ground.