Lettuce, a carousel, and firewood bound for Dallas

When lettuce looked like the next big thing

In 1923, Wallowa County growers set out to build a lettuce industry. Marilyn Hulse’s retrospective describes an organizing meeting in Enterprise and a lettuce information office in Joseph. Down in the lower valley, Pastor Falwell planted lettuce to raise money for his church. High-school students weeded and harvested the crop.

That is more than an odd crop in an old newspaper. Growers had to organize, find seasonal help, share what they learned, and reach buyers. The hoped-for industry worked its way into school routines and church fundraising as well as farm accounts.

Hulse dates the effort from 1923 to the final crops of 1939. Her verdict is that lettuce and the local climate did not agree. What remains is a sustained attempt, year after year, to make a new living here, not an economy that simply inherited its mix of work.

What the record shows: a historian’s 2023 retrospective. It gives the dates and a verdict on climate, not yields, prices, or shipping losses.

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The merry-go-round that moved to the lake

Walter Carper built a merry-go-round and powered it with horses. In Marilyn Hulse’s account he set it up in the meadow at Cougar Pond, near the head of Bishop Creek in the Promise country. People from Promise gathered there for Fourth of July picnics, horse races, and rides.

Then Carper saw he could make money at Wallowa Lake. He moved the ride, and the horses that turned it, to the amusement park at the lake.

So a lake attraction began as a homemade ride for a local holiday. Its maker had simply found a second audience for the same work. To follow that move, the atlas has to connect a meadow in the county’s north with the far more familiar lake.

What the record shows: Hulse’s 2023 retrospective gives no year for the move. She points readers to the original county history and Stories of Wallowa Lake.

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The long road to a customer

Wallowa County sits at the start of a long haul for what it produces, and at the far end of the line for what it buys in. That is how the county’s 2021 Economic Opportunity Analysis describes its place on the map. Read it beside the lettuce years, and the old experiment feels current.

Growing something and making a living from it are two different feats. A crop has to reach a buyer in good condition, at a price that pays for the work and the trip. A county can have land, skill, and nerve and still face a hard road to market.

That is why an experiment has to be followed all the way through. What goes in, who does the work, how it is processed, how it ships, and who buys it at the other end all belong in the story.

What the record shows: a 2021 planning document set beside a 1923–1939 crop story. The pairing is the atlas’s reading; nothing here proves that transport ended the lettuce effort.

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Firewood from Wallowa County, sold in Dallas

In October 2014, Nils Christoffersen of Wallowa Resources spoke at a small-diameter timber summit in Burns. He told the story of a mill. The meeting summary records the group’s investment, through Community Solutions Inc., in Joseph Timber. Then a majority owner liquidated the rest of the mill, and the plan took a hit.

By 2014 the biggest product line was bundled firewood. Bundles were going to Seattle, Salt Lake City, and as far as Dallas. Local contractors, meanwhile, had moved into streamside restoration, fuel reduction, weed control, and aspen restoration. Each job went on their record and helped them win the next one.

The pieces of the problem were all in view: products, equipment, buyers, financing, and crews able to win contracts. Restoration could put people to work and produce usable wood. Turning either into a lasting living took an organization that could hold those pieces together.

What the record shows: a meeting summary of the presenter’s own 2014 account, not audited finances. Markets and product mix are as of that date.

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The general store that added a brewery and a radio

M. Crow in Lostine opened in 1907, by Travel Oregon’s account, and the Crow family ran it until 2013. That year, as the family prepared to leave the business, designer and artist Tyler Hays bought it. Hays grew up in Joseph.

Today the profile describes a general store that is also a brewery, a meeting place, an outlet for M. Crow products, and the home of M. Crow Radio. The name on the building is the same. The way the business earns its money is not.

Keeping a familiar place open can take a new mix of things to sell and new people to sell them to. The profile and the film linked here show that turn.

What the record shows: a Travel Oregon profile and a six-minute film. They show a store that survived, not its profits, its staffing over time, or how every longtime customer felt about the change.

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Butter to trade, and a mother’s say in where to live

The Findley family carried butter out of the valley to trade for supplies. They moved again and again. And Sarah Findley had a say in where the family would live next. Those details come from Rich Wandschneider’s 2026 review of the Findley family history.

This puts the household on the economic map. Work did not start and stop at a business with a sign out front. Making something to trade, keeping the family supplied, and deciding whether one more move was possible were all part of making a living.

It also changes which stories get kept. A business that succeeds leaves a name and maybe a building. The work that kept a family going may survive only in letters, or in someone else’s memory, even when the business could not have run without it.

What the record shows: a reviewer’s reading of the Findley book, in a review published May 20, 2026. The book itself is a separate source still to be examined.

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Only the survivors leave a sign

In 1987, for the county’s hundredth birthday, local historians made The Wallowa Story, a narrated slide show that was later restored. It preserves a period account and the material that went into it. It also preserves its makers’ choices about what counted as the county’s story.

Set that centennial account beside the lettuce fields, the changed store, and the Findleys’ moves, and a restless economy comes into view. People tried things, adjusted them, moved, stopped, and began again. The businesses still standing are the surviving part of that process.

The lesson is not that every new venture works, or that the county has one obvious next industry. It is that attempts deserve to be kept as carefully as successes. A failed crop shows the limits; a changed store shows adaptation. A family record shows labor that no business directory or centennial slide show ever counted.

What we still want to know:

How much lettuce left the county between 1923 and 1939, and what did it sell for?

What year did Walter Carper move his merry-go-round to the lake?

Did the long haul to market help end the lettuce effort, or was it the climate alone?

What became of the bundled-firewood business after 2014?

Does M. Crow’s mix of store, brewery, and radio pay its way, and how do longtime customers feel about it?

What does the Findley book itself say about the butter trade and the family’s moves?

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