Whimsical Festival Turns 40

But the Oregon Country Fair rests on 11,500 years of human history

Reported by Aaron Scott

Every summer, the Oregon Country Fair draws more than 45,000 visitors with its unique blend of live music, circus and vaudeville performances, and handmade art from around the country. The three-day festival is the only private organization in the state with its own archeology team. The Fair is entering its 40th year, but the forest and meadows it calls home have been a human gathering spot for more than 11,000 years, making it the oldest known archaelogy site in western Oregon.
 The crowd of festival-goers parts like an ocean beneath a giant boat of white cloth. The boat seems to sail over their heads, but underneath are sailors, dressed in white lacy costumes and makeup. They walk through the crowd on stilts, carrying the boat as they go. Loyal festival-goers like to say the fair is unlike anything else on Earth.

Perhaps their predecessors would have agreed.

"People have gathered here for ages," says Virgil Courtwright, the co-coordinator of Oregon Country Fair's archaeology crew, which has been coming to fair since its start in 1969. "And we continue to gather here every year and try our best to take care of the land."

Archaeology Saved The Fair

The fair, which is organized as a nonprofit that also owns the property, first uncovered relics from previous inhabitants in the early 1980s during an act of self-preservation. The Oregon Department of Transportation attempted to expand a highway through the fair's land after discovering archaeological sites in the highway's original route. A fair volunteer named John Stamp argued that if there were ancient artifacts in the path of the highway, there must also be artifacts on the fair's property. He partnered with anthropologists at the University of Oregon, which has done all of the fair's carbon dating, to excavate and document objects.

"We proved that it would cost them millions of dollars more to come across our land," Courtwright said. "In the process of doing that, we discovered the oldest data site in western Oregon, which is 11,500 years."

Stamp put together a team of archaeologists and volunteers in 1987 to monitor the land and any building activity that might disrupt known or unknown archeological sites. Not even a posthold can be dug without archaeologists first examining the area.

"This is in the homeland of the Chela Mela band of Kalapuya Indians," says 56-year-old Ann Bennett Rogers, the crew's lead volunteer archeologist. She works professionally for the state government in Pendleton, Oregon, and co-authored the book "The World of the Kalapuya: A Native People of Western Oregon."

In honor of the tribe, one of the fair's meadows, now home to juggling lessons and a stage beneath a giant multi-colored tent, bears the name Chela Mela Meadow.

Most of the archaeology sites consist of camas ovens (also called earthen ovens), which are large pits as much as three meters across that were used to cook a wild grain called camas. The ovens were lined with heated rocks, filled with camas, nuts and other foods, and then buried for several days. The cooking process converted the mostly tough, starchy foods into a sweet, syrupy dish.

Along with the ovens, the archeology crew has discovered mortars and pestles, various stone tools and many types of arrowheads, including Clovis points, which are some of the earliest style projectile points in North America. They are often associated with big game remains, such as mammoths. "I used to tell kids, 'Imagine seeing an elephant walking down here, and this is what you've got. It's the elephant gun of 10,000 years ago," Rogers says.

Hands On History

During the festival, Rogers and Courtwright work in a section at the north end of the fair called Ark Park. The park is bordered on one side by the Long Tom River and on the other by open cedar houses, replicas of those of the Indians of the Pacific Northwest. Cases display artifacts and photos from archeological digs. On one end of the park, a group of children and their parents gather around three men in a circle, who chip away at pieces of stone with the butts of antlers to make arrow heads as the Kalapuya originally did.

"Fairgoers love Ark Park," Courtwright says. "They come in here and this is the Stone Age. All of our ancestors lived this way at some point or another. A lot of our stuff looks Native American, but every one of our people made a living with rocks."

Elsewhere, a man dressed in buckskin has drawn a crowd, which watches as he starts a small fire by spinning a stick on a flat piece of wood using a small bow tool. Other buckskin-clad volunteers demonstrate hide tanning, basket weaving, face painting and other primitive technologies using only the original tools. "The demonstrators here are all world-class," Courtwright says. "Some of them have Ph.D.s. Many of them have written books on primitive life skills."

Creating Our Own Archeology

Members of the archaeology crew discovered two new camas ovens eroding away from the riverbank when they returned to the fairgrounds this spring. On Sunday evening, as the rush of visitors slows to a trickle, Rogers leads a small tour to one of the ovens, which is in the riverbank on the side of a stretch of path called Strawberry Lane. Ducking under the fence, she lies down on the ground, hanging precariously over the edge of the cliff that drops 10 feet to the river below. Her gray hair tumbles over the lip as she points below her.

"Partway through the cut bank, you can see that red soil about three feet below the surface with charcoal on top," she says.

The oven is little more than a discoloration in the orange-brown soil — a jagged red line topped by a jagged black line.

We have really good context here," Rogers says, after returning to the path. "We think that this oven, if we were to date it, would probably date to somewhere around 4,000 years ago."

Rogers said she sees archeological discoveries like the new camas oven as an essential component of the fair.

"It's the history of this land," she said. "It's the history of the people who have been here before."

She said that in addition to relics from Native Americans, the land is also rich with objects from early fur trappers, including a crossing in the Long Tom River that was part of the Applegate Trail.

The Oregon Country Fair will continue to build on the history of the land as it begins to celebrate its 40th year of creating its own culture, not to mention an impact on the surrounding communities, where it runs arts programs and scholarships.

"We're creating our own archaeology here," Rogers says. "In 2,000 years, they'll be able to identify our postholes. And an archaeologist will probably be wondering what on Earth is going on out there because there's all this glitter and beads."