 My name's Connie Fowler and I came here with my husband in 1974 and we were both from the area sort of. He was raised in Ashland and I was raised in Grants Pass and I was always familiar with the Applegate and loved it and through him found Little Applegate and then found Buncombe and we live just three and three-tenths miles around the corner from Buncombe on Little Applegate and have been there since 1974. As we met neighbors we became more aware that these little buildings had some significance and I think we knew about the post office but the little clapboard building that was the post office and the lady that owned the property wouldn't let anybody do anything to preserve it and in fact it had sat there for all those years and never burned to the ground or anything and you know she had let people live in it you know kind of a stopover for a while you know and she was basically didn't want anybody on her property you know doing anything with it and we all were upset about that and wondered about it are they going to be saved or are they going to fall apart and there was just something about the fact that it was still there on a crossroads and and that it we knew that it had historical significance and also a certain amount of emotional significance. So what did you do? The property was sold to to Reeve and Lynn Hinyan and believe that was 1991 and they were very excited about preserving the buildings and so a group of us started the Buncombe Historical Society and began to do nothing but keep the buildings in as we like to say a state of arrested decay. In other words we don't want them to fall down but we don't want them to look like Disneyland either so well we could name our own position in the well the beginning was just a town council and you know with humor we were able to name ourselves so I'm the I was the town crier because I could write one person was the sheriff and one person was the master of building or whatever I can't remember exactly and then we decided to actually create a historical society and we don't we we ask people to join if they wanted to and we sold memberships for five dollars a family and to raise the money to help you know keep the buildings in repair but mainly just so that people could feel like a part of the whole thing and so we ended up with over 300 people from all over the world actually because some of the new people would have their friends either either the friends had been to Buncombe or they said you should you know belong to this it's it's really a cool thing to do and then subsequently through the Southern Oregon Historical Society we wrote the book about the history of Buncombe. I co-offered the book with JB Roberts and JB was a transplanted person but was very interested in history and he wrote the what was going on at the time in the country and in the world and then I wrote about the down home what's going on with the people and who they were and what they did and I had that need to do that or that urge to do it when we first moved there but I never got around to it and a lot of the old people died and I was fortunate to get some of them and to find some of the history through the Historical Society and through people that knew the people that were living not living at Buncombe but in the area. So what was that research process like? That was interesting I did some it took research takes a lot of time obviously and that fun part was going and and visiting with the people to me the hard part is sitting down and writing about it you know and and to write a book seemed monumental because I'd written lots of personal profiles and in some publications but not a book so that was you know kind of dragging your feet trying to say well how am I going to do this and so and in the book we his his writing about the history of or the current events more or less at that time is written separately from mine and but anyway it was it was hard to work the fun like I said the fun part was talking to the people and getting their stories and and I knew them a lot of them so that helped mm-hmm yeah the salt marshes the there was some people that would refer me and we still get people showing up at Buncombe day saying well my dad used to live here my mom cooked that building and even the other day a guy came and he says my grandfather worked on that building in 1930 or something and so that's always kind of fun and we try to get that documented but you know they get away from us and it's and and you wonder when I had a guy a man saw my number on the building but had no cell service out there so he his son called me and he said my dad wants to come and talk to you he lived in what we know as the cookhouse in 1930s because there was a resurgence of the gold rush in the 30s during the depression and people were desperate for some way to make a living and so they came from the Willamette Valley a lot of times because they'd gone up there originally to to mine and then they came would come back down here some of them and he came so he came out of the house he was 91 he had lived at Buncombe for I believe he said two years and he his parents just left the Willamette Valley they had no means of making a living and so they came down here and they just moved in and they tried to mine and he ran up a bill I think he said of forty five dollars at the Roosh store that they had in Roosh and this was a huge amount of money in those days and he couldn't pay it so he packed kids up and went back to the Willamette Valley and this man was very eager to see if he could find a relative to pay back what he had owed but of course it was hard to run anybody down we didn't pursue it and he since passed away but he had become a pilot and just a really nice person but that had bothered him for all those years there was a lady called me one time she got in my number from something and she lived in Klamath Falls and she said we had no clue where Buncombe was and she said my son is a historian and I am too and he works at the landfill in Klamath Falls and so he was digging around in the trash looking for whatever and he came up with this doll chest and it's approximately fourteen eighteen inches by maybe seven or eight and we could even have a picture of it if you wanted it and cardboard with a little wood around it and she said it was just full of postcards and letters postmarked Buncombe nineteen nine nineteen ten nineteen twelve and so she said we had no clue where it was and so she said that the Klamath Falls paper the AP had done an article and maybe that's where she got my number and here was Buncombe Oregon and she was really excited about it so she called and she said would you guys want that well no yeah so he said yes sure and she said well I want to show it at the Tule Lake Fair but then I'll send it to you and she did she followed through sent us the doll chest and I could I will have some of the postcards for you to see and so those are things I think that happened sometimes when you're doing research on a project you know I don't know about you but you know something will show up out of nowhere I mean how could anybody find that in the trash and what had happened the lady who was receiving these postcards or sending them was Grace Buck and she had married Mr. Heckham and he was from Klamath Falls and that's how it ended up in Klamath Falls and so she must have kept it you know as a kid and then when she got married she and then of course when he died they probably kids probably went we don't need that oh yeah she in fact the lady had him the woman that sent him to us had him cataloged actually and I've since then they're every which way but and there are some letters in there there was a address that she had made and I don't know what vintage it was because you know she could have made it later in life I don't know it was pretty small just and the buck there were two buck families in the area and we we figured out which one it was just conversations about I think one of them some of them are from her brother who was in World War one and we've read some of them and and then the postcards were just little you know chitty chats and interesting they would some of them were never postmarked so they either was either would put into a letter or were never sent but many of them there was we have postmarks from Rouge the little towns that aren't there anymore copper crump there was a school at little Applegate school and then and they were all approximately three or four miles apart because kids had to ride or walk to school anyway that's the doll chest story well I was thinking this morning I don't know who owned the property for before Mrs. Huckel but Buncombe was never it was a census area and at one time they believed there was probably 1500 miners living in that area in tents or you know just out on the ground and they would they would mine they mined along the creeks originally and Sterling Creek runs right by little or right by or through Buncombe so they they would go back and forth between the Sterling Creek area and Buncombe area and and then the as that along the river played out you know and was not as easy to find then they started working up the hills and that's when they came started using the power the nozzles the giants they called them to blast out the hillsides and and there's lots of evidence of that up and down the creeks what time that that was the middle 1800s were in when Buncombe was a six a census area and when it began to show up on the maps and then the post office was well actually after they a lot of the miners stayed around and then they became farmers and they farmed in the hillsides there and then they would mine when they weren't farming and they so they eventually they needed a post office so they established a post office in 1896 and the mail would come from Jacksonville over the hill by by stage probably by wagon two times a week and people would come down to Buncombe post office to get their mail and originally it was across the road in a house and the house burned and they built this little clapboard houses there now or building and eventually moved it across the road the other two buildings supposedly came from another mine down river called the federal mine and that was in the early 30s or even possibly a little before and so a lot of the miners stayed around and and just you know they became a community of sorts but there was never a town it was just a crossroads it was just a they had a little store in the post office they did maybe they'd have stick candy and flour and sugar and staples it was this it was the sterling creek over the mountain I guess yeah because Little Applegate Road didn't it existed but it was just to access people's homes and in fact there were eight fords across the river they didn't have bridges were there were there any particular bright spots in this project in the project well Buncombe day is probably what we consider the fun to fan fun thing and we started this well this year was the 25th anniversary of the Buncombe historical society but Buncombe but Buncombe day there were a few years that we took off but we've we've said all along the Buncombe is really a state of mind and and that it's a community and what's what's unique is that the people who have come in from other areas are the ones that want to be community because they didn't even know their neighbors in the city but they've retired and come here and they want that connection they don't it's not that they want a full-time hangout but they want that connection and we have phone trees for fire and different things that are important that we didn't have when we came and we had two-party phone and we didn't yeah and there was an old pumper truck at Roosh that was it took a half an hour to get to our house and the neighbors house cut you can probably wouldn't use this but the neighbors house caught on fire and the loggers had it out bucket brigade before the pumper truck ever cut there and now they can get there in 10 15 minutes but I think yeah in the whole process of doing of being there and doing the book was to see how Buncombe evolved from this just a pile of boards to something that means something to somebody it's usually well now it's the last Saturday of May this year it fell on Memorial Day weekend and we have two or three hundred people on the average come out we had a and for the centennial of the post office we had probably 2,500 people go through there and the the post office brought their postmaster out and he did a cancellation that we had designed and it was a blast but I think the main thing that that people are looking for I always say and in the book I said something about there's still gold in them their hills but that's not what the people are looking for they just want the hills they want the aesthetics they want to look at you know the mountains and and and they're concerned they want to keep the water clean and they want to keep you know things they know you can't go back but you can maybe bring along a little bit of of history with you you know or into your presence and hopefully that would make people you know more aware of what it might have been like in a simpler time it was hard yeah no doubt about that but but it was a simpler time I think you know it's just interesting and I've always been interested in in history so