 I'm Peter Sage. I'm here on a century farm that's been in the family since 1883. Over my shoulder here is Table Rock. Ten minutes ago it was covered with clouds. It may happen again, but right now it has just come clear out of the clouds. I'm the current owner and at this point the heir and beneficiary of a century farm here at Table Rock, Oregon. We're at 10381 Table Rock Road. Actually there are two houses here, so one of them is 10381 and one is 10581 Table Rock Road. Well, I'm sitting here right underneath a photocopy of the deed. It was a handwritten deed and practically impossible to read by me, but it's what they did in 1883. Mr. Collins sold to my great-grandfather the property we're standing on here. Steven Nealon was the purchaser of it and he bought it in 1883. And over the course of time he had ten children who survived and he divided up this about 183 acres into ten strips. And so there are ten strips of about 18 acres each. This area has been farmed essentially as one big farm, but for legal reasons and tax reasons and historical reasons it's actually cut up into pieces. So we're standing on a property line right here. It doesn't look like a property line, but in fact strip for one of the ten kids is on my left foot and the strip for the other of the ten kids is on the other foot and so we are right here on a dividing line. But that's what happens when you have a big piece of land, you have ten kids and you divide it up evenly between the ten kids. And it's sort of a weird deal because it goes from Table Rock Road down to the Rogue River, almost due south. So each of these strips are about 4,800 feet long and 165 feet wide. I mean it's sort of a crazy sort of shape, but it was done in order to be fair to all of the ten kids. And some strips are a little wider than others depending on the quality of the farmland. So the little better land is only 165 feet wide. The not quite so good farmland is about 206 feet wide. And through a bunch of complicated inheritances and purchases and things, my family, I own two adjacent strips. So it's about not quite a mile long and 400 feet wide. The house you're looking at there was the house that was bought by David Dudley Sage. Sage Road was named after David Dudley Sage. That was my great grandfather. He had a teenage boy named Wellie. And the Nieland family had a teenage girl named Rose and happily enough they got together. Those were my grandparents. Peter and I are first cousins once removed. And the family grew up here. It's a property that has stayed in the family. And it was divided up, of course, with about ten different strips. And then, for example, my uncle John, who was actually a true farmer, bought some strips. And I think Uncle Amit, who also farmed the land, maybe bought a strip or two. My mother held on to hers. And so it's now owned by myself and my brother and my sister. And we've always just kind of... Table Rock is part of our life history. And I feel really attached to my property. And I know Peter feels the same way about his. And I don't know what else to say. I grew up always figuring that my great uncles and aunts were the sorts of people who had their name in the paper. My uncle Amit, whose real name was Robert Amit Nieland, was a county commissioner here. There was a time of real troubles here in Jackson County under the period known as the Good Government Congress. There was a period a little bit like the Tea Party or a little bit like the militia over in Harney County. It was a time when people were very, very angry with what was happening generally in the country. And during that period of uproar, ballots boxes were stolen. There were people shot in Jackson County. And there was a change in the county commission. My uncle Amit Nieland, the son of the founder of this farm, was appointed county commissioner to fill a vacancy. He lived in that house. And the story is that for a while it was... There were so many armed men running around that my uncle Amit had armed guards protecting the house. Men basically patrolling it to make sure the people driving on Table Rock Road didn't stop and make trouble. They didn't last for very long, but my father and his youth remembers the trouble that people were causing uncle Amit as a county commissioner here. Then the next farm over was my aunt May Richardson. May Richardson was a longtime central point teacher. The school in central point, May Richardson Elementary, was named after her. And May Richardson was one of the ten children, one of the daughters, and she and her husband hosted big family reunions on their front yard. May Richardson is best known by animal lovers for being one of the founders of the Jackson County Humane Society. But she was also a longtime, well-loved school teacher in central point. And the school district decided to name a school, not after a president, but after an elementary school teacher. And that was my aunt May Richardson. My aunt May Richardson had family reunion parties every August. So there would be big potluck dinners. There would be, I don't know, 50, 75 people. Now as a child, it was like, oh, all these grown-ups. But don't worry, there were lots of kids my age too. So all of the first cousins and second cousins got together, played, ate all the dessert we wanted, and played croquet. It was, these were lovely events. I'll tell you about my aunt May to give you a pretty good idea of what a pretty good old gal she was. I was a bit wild in my youth. And the river was quite private, of course, and you had to drive through family land to get down to the river. And it was an ideal place for someone like me who liked to raise a little hell to go out and drink a bit and that sort of thing. And I remember one time at aunt May's house, sitting around talking, and they were talking about somebody that had a problem. And aunt May turned to me and said, oh, Robert, we're so happy that you don't do that knowing good and well that I did. And looked at me and I said, of course, well, thank you, aunt May. And we both kind of smiled at each other. I mean, she was a sharp old gal, really was. So the house and the yard and the great big oak trees look today, frankly, the way they've looked my entire life. So for the 60 or so years that I can swear to it, it basically has been the same. And it's perfect place for family gathering and croquet in the front yard. One of the things that was sort of special about the family farm is that it has stayed in the family, both the 36 or so acres that I own, but also my cousins own it. And part of why there's a real attachment to this land is that the family sort of worked at keeping the family in touch with each other. It was a big family. Three of the brothers never married. The three bachelor brothers, one of whom was the head of my father as kind of a favorite nephew. And my father was able to buy his strip of land, his one tenth of the big family farm away from him. And Uncle Marion was kind of interesting and quirky to my father because he was a socialist, a communist. He was a sort of person who thought they would like to talk politics with people. Another of the uncles was a kind of prominent farmer here. John Neelan owned a consolidated other land in the neighborhood and became well-known as a farmer. Another one was the mother of Steve Wilson, the kind of a well-known logger. Old-timers here in Southern Oregon will know the name Steve Wilson. Steve Wilson's logging was one of the kind of bigger independent loggers here in the valley. So then there was my grandfather, who was important to me for goodness sakes, but dad said many things. My grandfather never owned a car, never drove. The little blue house on the edge of my property along Table Rock Road is the house that my grandparents lived in. It was a 468-square-foot kit house. They got from Sears. It had basically an itty-bitty kitchen, a little bitty bathroom, a bedroom. My grandparents, with their five kids, lived in it. They added on to it pretty promptly. There are two little stories about it that are kind of fun. One is that my grandmother was appalled that they planned on putting a toilet in the bathroom. She expected there to be a toilet, of course, and it came with the toilet, but she said toilets don't belong in houses. Toilets belong outside of a house, and so they put a flush toilet in as part of building and putting the house in place, but there was no toilet in the house. It was out and back in the woodshed. A flush toilet, but not in the house. My grandfather, Charles Weldon Sage, who went by Welley, had the house here on the property. It was a kit house. He was furious. It was, I think, a 460-square-foot house bought from Sears, and every single piece that came off of the truck had the name Gage, G-A-G-E, instead of S-A-G-E. He was furious, but on the other hand, the house came as promised, and they put it together. My grandparents got together because my father's father, on the Sage side, purchased the house right visible, just out the window here, and down the road, a couple hundred yards, was the Neelon family, my grandmother's family. She was one of the ten, and the two teenagers got together. They got together, then there was a breakup, and happily they got together, and so it all worked out. They had five children, one of whom was my father, and here I am. Now, an odd little quirky thing happened. A big oak tree, that was sort of scenic, I'm surprised, it was the twin oak. It was an oak tree that was forked in the middle. One fine day, with no breeze at all, it just up and broke in half and fell and crushed the front half of the house. Happily, no one was hurt. It was an expensive little disaster, but since no one was hurt, we'll call it a good piece of news. In looking through the debris, there was a piece of drywall, and the drywall had written on it on the inside, Wellie loves Rose, and a big heart. So, we decided what to do with that, and we decided, you know what, as we rebuilt the living room that had been crushed, we left it right where it was. No need, we saw it, a little love note sent to his wife, and it's been covered up for 65 or 70 years, or 80 years, and briefly uncovered, and we reburied it, a little piece of archeology, and who knows, in 50 years, someone may rediscover it. Now, my father says a story about Crater Lake that was interesting, and says something about what's happened with cars and tires. My father tells a story of how we had a wonderful family trip up to Crater Lake. I mean, what's the big deal? It's an hour and a half, two hour drive from Medford now, but at the time, I'd say when Dad was a young teenager in 1932 or so, it was a big deal. What was memorable about the trip, what was memorable was that they made it all the way to Crater Lake and only had three flat tires. That was what was memorable, only three. It's laughable now, since I think I've had perhaps three flat tires in my life and have driven hundreds of thousands of miles, but that was the story of where tires were at the time. Table Rock area sort of had, let's see, at one extreme or one end, the Table Rock store. It's at the junction of Modoc Road and Table Rock Road. It's now the Two-Vell Tavern, and of course, my great aunts and uncles would be appalled by this. The family that owned that store at one point gave in to pressure since they were far and away the closest store to Two-Vell Park, and they agreed to start selling beer about 1963, 65. And when they started to sell beer, my aunt May said, never again I will never shop at a store that sells beer. So I don't know where she went to buy groceries, that they don't sell beer, but it was a big deal. The Table Rock community had one other element, which was the Table Rock School. It's the Table Rock Church, but for a couple of generations it was the Table Rock School. My father attended that school along with other kids here in the 1920s and 30s, but it's been around as a school for probably 40 or 50 years, up until about 1955. The Table Rock School has been converted into a church, but in my childhood it was both a school during the week and then a church on the weekends. Now the Table Rock School District was its own little itty-bitty school district, and so my aunts and uncles served on the school board for it. They would hire exactly one teacher, so there was a one-room schoolhouse. It didn't close until about 1953-54, and so my older sister attended for three years a one-room schoolhouse. But they closed it finally to move it into Central Point, where May Richardson was a longtime first and second grade teacher. But anyway, the Table Rock School was the unifying institution for the area. The kids all went to school there. They would carry their lunches. Every year there would be a picture of the kids standing on the schoolhouse steps. I have a photograph of my father. It's about an 11-year-old surrounded by other kids. Some of them were making faces. I think how frustrated the parents must be to have gotten sent home a picture of their child on the steps of the schoolhouse with a child making a funny face, but that's what they did. In any case, the rambunctious Table Rock kids went to school there. My father and his memoirs talks about the baseball games they played. They played baseball games with neighborhood schools, the Agate area. If you're coming from between Medford and Table Rock, you go through an area that looks pretty bare. And if you know what to look for, you see a tree off to the side and an old kind of foundation that was the old Agate school. So the Agate neighborhood boys would play baseball. The Table Rock boys would play baseball and they would have pitched battles between the two neighborhoods. Table Rock has always been right here. The Table Rock community is literally in the shadow of Table Rock because twilight comes very, very early here. In the summer, if you're working late doing something, you're really quite pleased to have the sun go down in front of the tall bluff early. But there'd be stories of my aunt Kit taking the little kids out to pick lamb's tongues on the side of Table Rock. My father and his siblings told stories of the adventuresome things they did on Table Rock that the dad told mostly as caution. He told them the stories of the really, really stupid, dangerous things they did about how they would shimmy up a crevice. I have not looked for it because I get poisoned very, very badly. So my perception of this beautiful mountain that is just immediately in my foreground here is that it is a place where, if I'm not really, really, really careful, I get poison oak. Now truth is it's a lovely walk up to the top of Table Rock and if you stay on the path, you don't get poison oak. But if you do anything adventuresome, if you get off the path, it is a disaster for me. So anyway, the Table Rock stories that dad would tell would be of dangerous things that he and his siblings would do in their youth. Things that would be, I'm sure you'd get arrested now if you were a parent to allow your children to do what they did. But kids back in the 1920s, these farm kids were a lot wilder than kids are today. During the 30s, it was basically a subsistence farm. So there was pastureage, there were horses, there were vegetables for the family. They sold alfalfa hay, they sold vegetable crops. My grandfather had chickens and sold eggs. In the last 50 years, I would say it has mostly been in alfalfa and grain in rotation. It was one little exception that's been important to me. And that's because my father, about 1958, when I was about eight or nine years old, decided that the boys really ought to have a crop of their own. So he helped us put in a cantaloupe crop. And we began selling cantaloupes and through my high school and college years, it was a big part of my ability to put myself through college because I had other jobs, but on evenings and weekends I grew melons. An acre and the year I ran for county commissioner, I had five acres of melons. But mostly it's been about one acre of melons. The melons have been a sort of important thing in the farm for me. It's one of the reasons why I don't feel like an absentee owner. I'm not the city boy who lives in town who owns a farm. I'm the kind of a farm boy who owns a farm who lives in the city. And that's because in my early childhood, my father figured out that my brother and I would get bored with the farm if we didn't have something kind of real and tangible to do out here beyond pulling weeds and things. We had to have something fun. And the fun thing was to grow melons. So we began growing melons, which we then sold at local farm markets. And my brother and I would keep most of the money, and then until later we would keep all of the proceeds minus the hard expenses. And so through my junior high and high school years, I grew cantaloupes. There was more money in cantaloupes than there was in water melons, and we were in it to make money. So we would grow cantaloupes, and I would save the money in a college fund, which my mother aspirationally called the Harvard fund. And it turned out I was accepted and I went to Harvard. But we grew melons and saved the money throughout my youth. And then I will share an odd thing about the finances of melons. Melons in 1965 would sell at local farmers markets, and at the building that is now called Food for Less. It was called Bazaar at the time. And also Thunderbird Market, which has existed essentially in the same place and under the same ownership now for 50 years, I would sell melons there. And during the height of the local season, I would sell them for about 15 cents a pound. Well, the price of melons isn't all that much different now than it was, it's a little higher now, but not a lot higher. So the cost of everything has gone up. Gasoline has gone from 20 cents to currently $2 or so. The college tuition has gone from $2,000 to $50,000 at Ivy League schools, but melon prices have hardly gone up at all. But I still grow melons. Of course, there's no money in it for me to bring them to BBs, which is still in existence, or Blunts Ranch Market, which has long gone out of business, or Thunderbird, which is in business and so on. But I would grow them and then give them as gifts to my clients in my financial advisor practice. And that was fun for me. It gave me an excuse to drop by clients' homes with a gift basket. It was nowhere near as pretty and fancy as Harry and David does it, but it would come in a nice white paper bag and for flash, I would put a little bit of tissue paper in it. But it was a way of having an excuse to be out here at the farm working. People would ask me, how many employees you got helping with those? And I'd say I'm the only, I would do it all myself. That was part of the fun of it, is I would do the ground preparation, the planting, the weeding, the irrigating, the picking. This is the fallow time for the farm. This is the midwinter, and almost nothing is growing. The farm fields are out there waiting for things to dry out, warm up and get planted in the spring. Every year I move the melons around. If you're farming melons, you need to have different ground every year. You don't want to go back to the same ground for six years or so, but out there is where I grow the melons and have been doing so for 50 years. Friends and friends and people I know from Rotary and neighbors and to show them what a good melon tastes like. And this is kind of an odd thing. Everyone knows about wine snobs. In general, maybe even on food snobs, but especially wine. And people make a big fuss over, oh, the special taste of this wine or that wine. And people pay $50, $100, a lot more than $100 for some bottles of wine. And people make a big fuss over it. It's sort of amusing because anybody with $50 can buy a very good bottle of wine. I mean, buying a good bottle of wine isn't all that hard to do. But to get a really, really good melon, that's really hard to do. And if you haven't actually tasted one that was picked fully ripe, then eaten promptly, you have no idea what a melon is like. I'm appalled. You can buy melons today in Medford, right here in midwinter, and you can buy melons 365 days a year. At my Rotary Club, there's a fruit salad with melons in it every single Friday. They act like what melons are all about is some manufactured good. That is basically something you buy because it's orange and kind of half-sweet. People have totally lost their understanding of what a good melon tastes like. And so if I sound a little silly here, it's because I've become a kind of missionary for insisting on eating a really, really good melon. And I have no illusions that melon snobs will ever become as prominent as people who make a fuss over wine. I recognize there will always be a wine spectator magazine and I don't expect a melon spectator magazine. But truth is, getting a very, very good melon gives you a very complex suite of tastes that all come together and it's really, really hard to do. But people who get my melons in August and early September of every year are getting what a melon is supposed to taste like. I feel real proud of that. And it's part of what has linked me to the farm. It's given me a little project out here and a little piece of missionary salesmanship. What's special about the farm? Well, what's really special about it is it's been in the family for 130 years. But what's personal to me about the farm is that I've grown melons here that I take some real pride in. And I can teach people something that turns out to be hard to do. And I'll say if anybody's watching this, if you're eating a melon out of season, then you're eating something that may look like a melon but honestly has no relationship to melon at all. Because of a quirk of personal history, I have a secondary relationship to this piece of farmland and farmland like it. In my young adulthood, I was elected county commissioner here and the big issue facing the county at that time, I was elected in 1980. The big issue was land use planning. The county was under firm orders by the state of Oregon's land use laws to come up with a comprehensive plan that protected farmland. And so I was the county commissioner on the board when the land use plan was adopted. Indeed, I was the chairman of the board of commissioners. The year we adopted the first big ordinance that rezoned land. It was enormously controversial because in general, what the law required us to do was to downzone land in order to protect it. For people that aren't into it, downzoning means you take land that might have been divided into five acre parcels or two acre parcels and say either that you can't divide it at all or that you can only divide it into very, very large hunks of land. The purpose was to make it difficult, maybe impossible, frequently utterly impossible to put dwellings on it or to divide it up so that it would be sold off. We were fully aware and I, because of my relationship with this land, was very aware that telling people they can't divide things creates real problems. What do you do if you have a 40 acre parcel and you have two kids? Well, the easiest thing would be to cut it in half, give your son 20 acres and your daughter 20 acres. I mean, simple, only not simple because if you can't divide that land, you would either give the 40 acres all of it to one of the two children or you would give one child the 40 acres along with the debt to pay off the value of it to the other child and it could be that paying off that debt isn't easy in the least. It may not even be possible. So you would stick families with an impossible situation. Plus, truth is there was some money involved. In Southern Oregon and perhaps everywhere in the world, four or five acre parcels are worth more than one 20 acre parcel and 21 acre parcels are worth more than one 20 acre parcel. So telling a farmer that they can't divide their land up, can't do what the market is telling them to do, sell it to people in pieces, is frustrating their estate plans and costing them an enormous amount of money. Sometimes millions of dollars. If you have a large piece of land near a city, it would be very, very valuable cut up into pieces of land. And yet if that happens, what you have is a county, a community that is essentially ungovernable because you would have small parcels with wells and septic tanks and inevitably there would be septic and sewer problems and water quality problems. Plus you would have people forced to drive long distances and some of the charming things that take place right now in Southern Oregon that green space between Medford and Jacksonville. People who drive between Medford and Jacksonville see it, they experience it. Jacksonville is kept a separate place from Medford because there aren't a series of one acre parcels all along that strip. So from the city's point of view, the community's point of view, not having sprawl is a good thing, but from the individual homeowner's point of view, it can be an estate disaster or an economic disaster, or most likely both. And I was county commissioner at the time that was done. But I was very aware because of my own history here of how much pain we were putting people through sometimes by telling them they couldn't do what they wanted to do, which was to divide their land. On the other hand, the law was the law and I saw the bigger picture and the value of it, but I tried to be sensitive to it. But in general, the goal was to make it difficult, but not impossible, for there to be some safety hatches that would allow people infrequently, but if you met the right criteria to put houses out into farmland. The theory of the state of Oregon, which needed to be adopted by Jackson County, was that good farmland absolutely had to be preserved. And by preserved, it meant, on the one hand, that neighbors couldn't complain if you sprayed, neighbors couldn't complain if you made noise, neighbors couldn't complain if you had dust. In short, you had the right to farm. But on the other hand, you had to preserve it by not cutting it up and putting houses all over it. And so land that was class one, two, or three, and in some cases class four, which basically in shorthand means farmland that's either very, very good or pretty good, needed to be preserved. Land that was not at all good could sometimes be cut up into five and ten and twenty acre parcels. But there was always a lot of disagreement over whether the land was good enough to farm. And truth is, the state of Oregon's rules on this were pretty burdensome here in Jackson County. I say that as someone who supported land use planning and took a lot of heat politically for that point of view. But land that was farmable in a profitable way in the Willamette Valley could not be farmed profitably here. And honestly, this farm is a good case in point. This is not good enough farmland that anyone could make much of a living on it. That is to say farmland out here works because people have jobs in town. Farmland like this works because people inherited it without any debt and they were able to make money elsewhere and basically support the farm. Yes, sometimes the farm makes a little money, but this is not like Iowa or Illinois farmland where people can buy it for the fair market value, grow a crop on it and pay off the loan and basically own the farm. Here people own farmland because it's either has a sentimental value or a scenic value or it's a place where you want your kids to grow up. But there aren't very many farms that are actually good business. Every piece of land is different and every family is different. Sounds like the opening lines of a novel, doesn't it? But every piece of land is different. Every family is different. Every situation is different. What's unique about this one is this is a family farm that has been in the family for 130 years that is likely to be able to stay in the family perhaps one more generation and who knows. This is a barn that's right at 100 years old today. It was built by my grandmother's older brother. Uncle Harry. Uncle Harry was a craftsman, a carpenter and part of what made this farm work as a subsistence farm was that they raised their own fodder for the horses that worked the farm and that barn's been around. Yeah, anyway. Uncle Harry built that barn 100 years ago.