The Maxville Heritage Interpretive Timber Culture Traveling Exhibit is on display at the Deschutes Historical Museum in Bend.

BEND — Ever since Gwen Trice was a young girl growing up in La Grande, she wanted to move to nearby Wallowa County. Whenever she visited, often as a teenager, she felt something powerful was drawing her there, but she didn’t know what.

Later in life, she learned her father, Lafayette “Lucky” Trice, moved to the area from the Jim Crow South in 1923 to work in the logging industry. Trice’s father was one of the first Black people to live and work in Wallowa County, in a state that at the time of his arrival, excluded Black people in its Constitution.

Trice was fortunate to stumble upon her family history, learning of her father’s past as a logger. The revelation prompted her to make Wallowa County her home.

“It felt like I was a salmon going up to the original stream where I was spawned,” Trice said. “I was going up to that original stream, and nothing else mattered. I had to go home. And that became my overarching energy.”

That energy turned into a desire to explore and preserve the history of Oregon’s Black loggers who came to a logging town called Maxville, established in Wallowa County by the Bowman-Hicks Lumber Co. in the early 1920s.

The town was established in 1923 and lasted until 1933. After the town closed, some Black loggers stuck around while others moved to Portland or to logging towns in the region.

Today, Trice is the founder and executive director of the Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center, a nonprofit located in Joseph which is dedicated to telling the inclusive American narrative. Part of her work involves providing a traveling exhibit across the state showcasing the multicultural timber history of Oregon, and the Maxville Timber Culture exhibit is now open to the public at the Deschutes Historical Museum in Bend.

Trice’s journey back to her family’s roots in Oregon began when she was a student at Bellevue College in Washington state where she studied film, graphic design and videography.

In 2004, she traveled to Wallowa County for an annual cultural event in the town of Promise, where she was introduced to the crowd of around 300 mostly older individuals as the daughter of Lafayette “Lucky” Trice.

Trice said she recalled a change in the air after she was introduced.

“The whole crowd started murmuring,” she said.

She would spend the next three days listening to stories about her father from those who knew him.

At the age of 19, “Lucky” traveled to Oregon with his father in a box car from a logging camp in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and later sent for his family. Experienced loggers like “Lucky” were in demand and the Missouri-based Bowman Hicks Lumber Co. recruited loggers, both Black and white, in the South and the Midwest to work out West.

At the time, it was technically illegal for a Black person to come to Oregon, a law that wasn’t struck from the state Constitution until 1926.

“Essentially, they set up a southern town. They set up a segregated town in Eastern Oregon,” Trice said of Maxville. “They were from the South. There was no way white people were going to live side by side with Blacks.”

Despite the founding of Maxville in the image of the Jim Crow South, the town was relatively far removed from mainstream society, and so relationships between Blacks and whites did exist, Trice said.

In the end, while Jim Crow was alive and well across the country, Oregon was a good bet for the skilled Black loggers who chose to leave the south to make the state their new home.

“They hung from trees in the south,” Trice said. “They were hoping for a better life, and they got more pay. It wasn’t a ton more, but they were hoping for a better way of living for themselves and their families, and so they were willing to come out West.”

Trice said her father, who served in World War II, never spoke to his children about his time as a logger in Maxville. Throughout his life, he provided janitorial services, owned a coal yard, a coal furnace cleaning business, a youth center, a shoe shine parlor, and ran pool, snooker and pinball games. He met his second wife, Trice’s mother, in Jacksonville, Florida, after wooing her with his piano skills. Today, she is 95 and still lives in the same house where Trice grew up in La Grande, Trice added.

Kelly Cannon-Miller, the executive director of the Deschutes County Historical Society, said this is the first time the museum has hosted the Maxville exhibit. It was supposed to debut in 2020, but was postponed by the pandemic, Cannon-Miller said.

“The Maxville population is

absolutely tied to what historians refer to as the ‘Great Migration,’ between 1910 and 1970,” Cannon-Miller said.

The Great Migration, she said, refers to the time in American history when around 6 million Black people left the South seeking better lives in northern, Midwestern and Western states, such as Oregon.

“That is the lesson of the exhibit,” Cannon-Miller said. “On paper you can see the Maxville town, and it is segregated. But this is a really isolated place, and they are far removed from the systemic racism of the South.”