EDITOR'S NOTE: This story started in one of the participating news publications that run the weekly Offbeat Oregon History newspaper column. If you have found your way here in some other way, the article might not make much sense, as the first 600 or so words will be missing!
SO, WHY ALL the fireworks?
Williamson, who is probably the preeminent historian of the Mohawk Valley, suggests it was a land-use issue.
The Mohawk Valley is first-rate farmland, but also prime timber country. The valley floor is nice and flat and fertile, and the surrounding hills are gentle and well-watered and thick with trees.
So very early in the process of settlement, emigrants put down claims on that nice quiet peaceful bottomland, and then some of them watched in dismay as timber operators — most notably Booth-Kelly out of Springfield — started moving in to work in the adjacent woods.
Soon there was a logging railroad heading up the valley, and it got busier and busier as time went by, hauling logs down to the mill and timber workers and their families up to live. The older residents stewed as they watched their pastoral hideaway turned into an industrial community, complete with roaring machinery, howling steam whistles, and screeching buzz-saw blades.
One of these longtime residents was a curmudgeonly specimen named “Old Joe” Huddleston, the grumpy schoolhouse neighbor I mentioned earlier; and he is the fellow that most people suspected in the dynamite attacks on the school. Old Joe was already upset because the railroad had cut up the valley near his property, and when the school went in right next door as well, he was fit to be tied.
To make things more complicated, Old Joe was a hard-core racist. As the new century dawned in 1900, the old goat was on a veritable campaign against the Japanese colony upriver at Mabel and the Chinese and Japanese workers whom the railroad kept bringing in.
He also was very vocal about Ping Yang School. It was annoyingly close to his home, like the railroad.
Also, he was known to regularly practice “dynamite fishing” on the Mohawk River, chucking a lit stick into a promising hole and then scooping up all the fish stunned by the blast. Clearly he was a man who was comfortable handling explosives.
So when, late on the night of July 14, 1901, another dynamite blast shook the schoolhouse, everyone figured they knew who had set it off — although, of course, nobody could prove anything.
“This is the fourth attempt made to destroy this schoolhouse,” the Eugene Weekly Guard wrote the next morning. “First an attempt was made to burn it; about three years ago dynamite was used and the building was considerably damaged, the benches, etc., destroyed; and again about a year and a half ago dynamite was placed on the organ and exploded, but not much damage was the result.”
Evidently the organ — a pump organ (a.k.a. harmonium) of the type you operate by pumping bellows with your feet while you play — was tougher than the arsonist reckoned.
But he apparently learned from his mistake.
“The explosive was placed under the organ in the southwest corner of the building,” the Guard reported. “The organ, the desks, and all other furniture and apparatus were blown to atoms, the floor and sleepers of the building were completely splintered, the sides of the building were blown out and all that remains is the roof with part of the framework to support it.”
Old Joe was never charged. No one else was either, for that matter. But after Old Joe moved out of the valley a little later, the explosions stopped ... well, mostly. There was one more, and it was the last one.
