The Truly Mythical State of Jefferson
by Charles CarreonWhen I arrived in Southern Oregon years back, I learned of this concept of the “mythical State of Jefferson,” an area of Northern California and Southern Oregon that once played at seceding from the United States government. Nowadays, it’s an ad slogan that you hear on this local yuppie Clear Channel station that gets passed off as college radio. Last time I heard a college kid on the station was back in 1983, when they used to let the frat boys play Talking Heads and the Go-Go’s for four hours a week. Now it’s PC pap all day long and all night, too, though I do love my Nature Notes and the sincere voice of Colleen Pike turning sales pitches into public service. So I have to listen, and sometimes even contributed when gifted chatterboxes like the late Joanie McGowan held the station hostage for long enough. But I always wondered about this State of Jefferson business.
I occasionally go to the State Line Liquor store in the real state of California just south of the Siskiyou summit to get tax-free hooch. The State Line is one of the last structures left over from the destruction of the town called Hilt, that was dismantled in 1974 by the Fruitgrowers company, when corporate management decided that, since fruit was no longer boxed in wooden crates, they didn’t need fallers, log truck drivers, a mill, or housing for all those people, either, and told everyone to get out. Which they duly did. Bill Rooker and his wife Laurie are the last two remaining inhabitants of the town of Hilt. You can read the history of the town of Hilt in a photographic display at the back of the State Line Liquor store. It’s sad and poignant to imagine that a little town that had a school, church, baseball team, spelling bees, etcetera, just blew away because it was a company town where the company owned the dirt, the houses, the streets, just about everything. The Trinca Family stuck it out by running the State Line for about thirty years after the town folded, but a couple of years ago they sold out to Penny and her husband, who still serve the famous Pilot Rock burger, thick milk shakes and other classic food on red and white checked tablecloths.
At any rate, I was on my way to the State Line, having pulled off southbound I-5. I’d just made a right at the stop sign and was almost feeling that whiskey bottle in my hand, when suddenly a little monument caught my eye off to the right. I pulled over and read what it said: “Jefferson Davis – 1808 – 1889 – Highway No. 99 California – Erected by Daughters of the American Confederacy, May 1944.” Jefferson Davis? Not Thomas Jefferson? I scratched my head a moment and reached back into my knowledge of Civil War history to come up with this deeply-buried tidbit: Jefferson Davis was the President of the Confederacy, as in Abraham Lincoln’s opposite number. Hmmm, a monument erected about eighty years after the end of the Civil War by the original Dixie chicks. So I started researching and learned a few reasons why there are so few black people in this area, which seems so friendly.
It turns out that Oregon was the only US State to completely exclude “Free Negroes” from the State. It also turns out that former Oregon governor Walter Pierce, who ran the top office in the twenties, was a card-carrying member of the KKK, and at one time the Klan claimed 200,000 members in the State of Oregon. It further turns out that, until a date that history seems to have obscured from appearing in the Google database, the City of Medford had a “sundown law” that required black people to be out of town by sundown. Today, I bet a black person could eat at The Outback at any hour of the day or night. I wouldn’t necessarily suggest drinkin’ till closing time at The Satin Slipper or Dilligaffs, but that’s progress, a little at a time.
Then I read an online article by Vic Varis, an African American writer, entitled “Dixie in the North.” His work is well-footnoted and quotable, even in the short expanse of this article, and I’ve included his bibliographical notes, for those of the scholarly persuasion inclined to check Mr. Varis’ facts:
“Pioneers moving into the massive expanse of Oregon arrived each year from the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys. These included families from bordering Southern states of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Missouri, as well as Kentucky and Tennessee (Moreland, 1993). Many of the pioneers left the South where they could not compete with slave owners use of nearly free labor. Though there was no love for the Negro, they would not, for one reason or another, own slaves. They arrived hating both slavery and blacks (Moreland, 1993, McLagan, 1980; Robertson, 1901)…. In the 1840's the Provisional Government of Oregon began to incorporate the first of the infamous “Exclusion Laws.” These laws were designed to restrict entry, commerce, litigation and intermingling of races (McLagan, 1980).”
Oregonians voted eight-to-one to exclude blacks from the State. The exact vote was 8640 to 1081, and the precise language incorporated into the Oregon Constitution read:
No free negro or mulatto not residing in this state at the time of the adoption of this state constitution shall come reside, or be within this state, or hold real estate, or make any contracts or maintain any suit therein and the legislative assembly shall provide penal laws for the removal by public officers of all such negroes and mulattos, and for their effectual exclusion from the state, and for the punishment of persons who shall bring them into the state or employ or harbor them. (Platt, 1903).
But excluding black people from the State wasn’t enough for the die-hard slavers, as Mr. Varis explains, Southern Oregon was the hot-spot for turning Oregon into a slave State, that is – to join the Secessionist Movement of the Southern States: “In southern Oregon there was so much opposition that a “die-hard pro-slavery” group developed plans to create a separate pro-south government to be known as the Pacific Coast Republic. Even after this was squelched by the state legislature and the war was ended, advocates of the South “refused to admit defeat” and formed a clandestine movement to reestablish slavery somehow in Oregon (McLagan, 1980).”
Further research disclosed that the secessionist females, the Daughters of the American Confederacy, the would-be Scarlett O’Haras of Oregon, proliferated their racist agenda all over the country under the guise of this Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway ruse. A relatively-recent article on the subject states:
“In exploring along the old 99 route you might be surprised to find a handful of historical markers labeling this road The Jefferson Davis Highway. This is a curious though little known juxtaposition but California has four highway markers to prove it. And on each end of the highway in Washington, in Vancouver and in Blaine near the Peace Arch, stand stone monuments attesting to the fact. One wonders why the president of the Confederacy was so honored out west.” The Jefferson Davis Highway Out West, by Jill Livingston © 2003.
Well I know. Like my friend Iggy said, if it walks, quacks and craps like a duck, “It’s a goddamned duck.” Thank you, Daughters of the American Confederacy, for memorializing what the State of Oregon’s Political Correctness Team has sanitized into a “myth.” Some things, like slavery, bigotry, racism, and revisionist history, are just facts.
Published in the print edition of the AFP under Charles' pseudonym “Cyrus Magee”
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