Discovering Main Street: Travel Adventures in Small Towns of the Northwest by Foster Church

Abstract

 Reviews Discovering Main Street: Travel Adventures in Small Towns of the Northwest by Foster Church Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2010. Maps, index. 192 pages. $18.95 paper. As a staff writer for the Portland Oregonian, Foster Church produced many an article on the sights and delights of small towns. This slim volume gathers four dozen of those pieces into a guide for off-the-freeway exploration in Oregon. Despite the title, Oregon is the focus: of the forty-seven entries, five deal with Washington towns, and all of those are but a stone’s throw from the Oregon boundary. The essays in Discovering Main Street are quite brief. Each locality is allocated three pages, sometimes a bit more. Each entry begins with a recent population figure and a note on highways and byways, and ends with a sentence about local lodgings and eateries. The paragraphs in between pay close attention to local history, providing a context for why the town came to be and which of its distinctive characteristics can be experienced today. Church directs visitors to proactively visit local chambers of commerce and talk with residents at the local bar or high school sports event,noting that we are usually “passive tourists” as we pass through small towns on our way to some other destination. “Visiting small towns as a tourist calls for a different mindset,” he notes (p. 8). Some investigation is required, and the effort is repaid. Church is an engaging writer and an adroit explorer. In erstwhile timber towns such as Oakridge and Powers, for example, he points out the recent evidence of entrepreneurial efforts to replace logging with such enterprises as brew pubs and bicycle tourism. (Somehow he overlooked the unusual and engaging annual cycle trek known as the Tour de Fronds, which wends through the rugged cutover forestlands between Powers and Glendale. But that only points up the fact that even in Powers, population 730, there is more of interest than meets even the discerning eye.) When they were first published in the Oregonian, Church’s photographs, or other contemporary images, were part of the package .Alas,neither those images nor any historical illustrations were admitted to the pages of the book, and that is unfortunate. A town like Spray,population 160,merits deservedly enticing words from Church. But if only the book had included the two stunning photographs that appear in his online version in the Oregonian ; then, you want to get in the car and head right on out there. Discovering Main Street is not a history book, but it displays a historical point of view. Local guidebooks often lack that perspective ; the “best places” genre looks for creature comforts, exquisite food and art, and shopping meccas. It would be unusual to find one noting, as Church does, the miniature beehive tabernacle of a splinter congregation of the Latter-Day Saints that graces Myrtle Point, a building that now houses a museum of logging history. The building is architecturally noteworthy, bespeaks an uncommon cultural and social history for the town, and connects the place to an industry that has now vanished from its townscape: logging. Church encourages us to consider other values when traveling — historical, social, scenic, and cultural — and alerts us to the fact that we can expect to find them on many an OregonbywayandMainStreet.Therearemany stories off the freeway,and Church’s handbook is an excellent enticement to find and learn from them. Richard H. Engeman Oregon Rediviva, LLC You can now receive your Oreogn Historical Quarterly subscription online. Call 503.306.5220 or send an e-mail to nic.mccarthy@ohs.org to find out more. ...