AUSTIN — Rosalie Averett has seen a lot of change since she moved to Bates in June of 1951 with her six-week-old son in tow.

Now 88, Averett was 16 when she moved to Bates, a company town in eastern Grant County built to house loggers and mill workers for the Oregon Lumber Co. The town ceased to exist after the mill shut down in the 1970s, but Averett didn’t wander far, moving with her family to the nearby community of Austin, where she has remained ever since.

She still has fond memories of her time in Bates.

“My husband was part of the woods crew. There was probably 300 people back then, and we had a good school,” Averett said.

“They had a principal, Mr. Cardwell, that was very stern and strict, and even the big boys were scared of Mr. Cardwell because he’d whip them. In those days nobody said, ‘You hurt my baby’ — you know, that’s what’s wrong with the world today. It was just a good place to raise kids.”

Averett’s husband, Tom Sr., set chokers on a logging crew to support Rosalie and their growing family. Tom’s wage for that work was 35 cents an hour.

One of the funniest things that happened in Bates, according to Averett, involved a half-blue tick hound, half-Labrador dog named Smokey that would wait behind the store for the meat truck.

“That driver said he knew that dog was going to wind up with something, and Smokey would just sit there,” Averett said.

One day Smokey got ahold of a great big bone-in ham and took off with it.

“Every bird and dog and even the store owner were chasing that dog to get that ham back. He ran over to where they had the logs stacked up across the river, and I don’t know what Smokey ever did with it,” Averett said. “Everybody and the birds and the dogs looked for that ham, and they never did find it. He ate on it for quite a while.”

Although it’s a well-known landmark now, the Austin House wasn’t there back then, according to Averett. There was a service station with a small lunch counter called “The Y,” named after the intersection of Highways 7 and 26.

“They called it The Y because the road cut off of Highway 7 on both sides of the service station and came down into Bates. There was no road through the mountains yet,” Averett said.

“Really, none of our kids got in any serious trouble at all,” Averett recalled of those early years in Bates. “Things changed, though, when the mill in Baker shut down.”

The community was “heartsick” following the mill closures, Averett recalled.

“We didn’t ask for anything from anybody. We had good jobs and we had everything we needed. When Edward Hines took over, that’s when it all changed. It was not for the good, either,” she said.

The mill in Bates shut down in 1975, a little over a decade after the Edward Hines Lumber Co. had bought the operation — and the town it supported — from Oregon Lumber. The houses in Bates were put up for sale for $1 apiece, with the requirement that the purchasers find somebody to move the houses to new locations.

The Averetts paid $1 for their home and had it moved to Austin following the mill closure.

“They moved some to Sumpter, some to Prairie City and ours out here, but it just wasn’t the same,” Averett said.

Despite all the change, the Averetts remained in Austin even when everyone else was leaving.

“We just like it here,” Averett said. “It’s quiet and peaceful. That’s all we want is quiet and peace. Once in a while somebody makes a mistake by not giving us peace and quiet.”

The changes happening in Averett’s town came with life changes that occurred throughout her time in Austin as well. Averett lost her husband, Tom, in 2002. She lost her eldest son almost two decades later, in December of 2021.

Today, Austin continues to shrink. The current residents are all older and no new residents are moving in, creating a situation where all of the town’s history is at risk of being lost — a dynamic that isn’t unknown to Averett.

When asked if she was worried if the town’s history will be lost when community members like herself are no longer around, Averett responded with, “Oh yeah. … We’ll lose the whole thing.”

NAME: Rosalie Averett

AGE: 88

RESIDENCE: Austin

OCCUPATION: Retired

HOBBIES: Watches neighborhood dogs because she “likes dogs”; cooking on her 1911 woodstove/oven

FAMILY: Husband Tom Sr. (passed in 2002), son Tom Jr. (passed in 2021), son Dan (owner of Grant County Building Supply)