After a couple days in the southeast corner of Oregon, it's time to move on down the road to our next destination. We drove 98 miles today, but it feels like we traveled to a whole different land. We started near Vale, Oregon, with it's quilt-like patchwork of flat irrigated agricultural land.
Our straight county roads turned into squiggly curves . . .
as we made our way into rocky canyons filled with volcanic rocks.
Then we started up in elevation, and began seeing tall pine trees and roads that switch-backed up mountain-sides.
A few miles later we were in the hills of the desert where everything was yellow and dry.
A couple thousand feet higher in elevation, we were driving through a thick tunnel of healthy evergreen forest.
As we dropped back down in elevation and out of the forest, we entered a valley. After all those transitions and changes in scenery, doesn't it feel like we've traveled to a different land? Actually, we've just traveled to Prairie City, Oregon. We checked into the city-owned campground, and then we headed 13 miles down the road to the town of John Day.
John Day, Oregon, is a tiny town. Its claim to fame is that it has the only stop light in the entire county. But it is home to a State Heritage Site that we wanted to visit. It's called the Kam Wah Chung, but that really doesn't tell us much, does it? This little building has a lot of history inside. Two Asian emigrants formed a partnership in 1887, and lived in this building in the third largest Chinatown in the United States at that time.
The other partner was a doctor, and his pharmacy included boxes and jars of over 500 different herbs and medicines that he prescribed to his patients. Some of those medications included bear claw and deer antler, which are still laid out on the table in this Asian pharmacy. Doesn't it feel like our drive today has taken us to a different land?
The two men lived here for over 60 years. The rest of the tiny building included their living quarters. In the kitchen we see the food and the dishes from their daily life in the 1940s.
That's an unopened box of Wheaties, with a peanut butter jar that doubled as a sugar bowl.
Everything is just as the house was left in 1948. By that time the merchant had died. When the doctor fell and broke his hip, he was taken to the hospital by ambulance and never returned. The house was locked up and everything sat just like it was for 50 years.
We were hearing this story from a very informative tour guide. He grew up in this town, and he remembers this old building that all the children were told was haunted. So now he is a retired school teacher, and has returned to his home town to give tours of the time capsule these two men left.
The two partners were well respected in the town of John Day, and their customers included both the Asian and white community members. Under the doctor's bed, they found a box with uncashed checks written by his patients. They totaled $23,000, because the doctor assumed he didn't need the money as much as the people that came to him for medical help. These two men lived a frugal life and didn't throw away anything. Calendars from the 1920s are still up on the walls.
As testament to the solid building, no mice had entered to eat the wheaties and make messes of the medicines. What was naturally preserved by those thick sandstone block walls, is now preserved by 21st century technology. The state of Oregon spent $2 million to install this state-of-the-art system to protect this time capsule.
It was an interesting tour, and we enjoyed our visit into John Day. As we returned to our campground in Prairie City, we see that the ranger station is closed. We love getting the expert advice from the local rangers, but many have closed to foot traffic ever since March 2020. Outside the locked doors, we see another of the Forest Service signs that show that fire danger here is in the worst category--EXTREME!
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