ENHS Nature Trails May 2004 Article 3

Goat Hill
by Reida Kimmel

The Toll family homesteaded the upper part of our valley in the late 1880's. There were actually two families, the father with his second wife and their children, and his grown son and his family. They cleared the land, planted fruit trees and grain, and raised some cows and angora goats. These days one does not think of goats as a cash crop, but early in the twentieth century, the long lustrous wool from angora goats was a luxury fiber, used for upholstery and clothing. The fiber is more durable than sheep's wool and takes dyes brilliantly, so there was good reason for its popularity. Today, when acrylic, polyester, nylon and Gortex are the fibers of choice for home decorating and winter wear, it's hard to find angora goats unless you are lucky enough to live in Eugene where you can see, and even socialize with them, at the Black Sheep Gathering at the Fairgrounds in June or at the County Fair in August.

The Tolls were very hard working but their farms never really prospered. The soil was poor and the elevation of the valley, six hundred feet above Eugene, guaranteed that their fruit crops would ripen three weeks later than those in the Willamette Valley, when prices were rock bottom. In 1937, with the Depression and low prices for agricultural commodities everywhere, the goats smashed out of their confinement, breaking Bertha Toll's arm (which never did heal right), and ran to the old growth and scrub above the farm. No one bothered to try to retrieve them, so they lived, wild, until the early 1980s.

When we first moved to Eugene, they were there. The Tolls no longer farmed, and had sold off parts of their land, including our place, which is one of two surviving homes in the valley built by Bertha's brother Carl, the son of the original settlers. We would walk or ride the horses up to the top of "Goat Hill" in the evening just to enjoy the sight of the goats lying at the foot of an old snag, catching the last warm rays of the setting sun. One November in the early '70's I was riding through the woods near the top of the hill in a very thick fog. Suddenly the dense, gray air was filled with shapes. The goats ran and leaped across the path right in front of me and disappeared down the steep south side of the hill. Each year there were fewer goats. There was no longer a male, and though we occasionally considered buying a buck and replenishing the flock, we never did. We found a skull under an old growth fir not too many years ago, the last of the goats of Goat Hill.

When I walk up the hill these days, I can't help but imagine the past. There is the remnant old growth forest on the BLM side of the hill, 400 hundred year old trees growing amidst large basalt boulders covered with small licorice ferns. Farther down the north side of the steep hill is a grove of huge, big leaf maples. This is what the Tolls found when they moved to our valley. This is what they felled with their hand saws and axes to make their farms. Bertha, who is now one hundred one years old, tells that as a child she would walk over the hill and down into the Creswell valley to play with friends.

The pigs and cows as well as the goats pastured on the cleared land and prevented trees from growing. All the land from West Camas Swale Road to Fox Hollow Road was cleared then, worked by small farmers and ranchers trying to build a good life in the new West. Some time in the decades after the Depression, the land fell out of cultivation and returned to forest. That is what we knew when we moved here, tall dense, healthy fir trees, forty or so years old. We thought they would last forever.

Then, starting in the summer of 1989, all the land to the south and south east of Goat Hill was logged and partly fenced. Once again cattle replaced the forest. In 1992 Bertha sold her land, she thought to a developer, but it was clearcut immediately. No more deep dark woods. The hidden mossy spring house, always dripping and cool, was bulldozed and replaced by a cement box. Gone too was the winter rattlesnake den, and the rattlesnakes. The tall big leaf maples on the hill groaned and creaked in the wind. I was sure they would die. The land was as desolate as it had been when the farmers first cleared it, and it was horrible. As the law requires, it was replanted in tiny Douglas firs. Then it was sold. In a few years the lower slopes of the hill were covered with blackberries, but the trees outpaced the weeds. The new owner, perhaps foreseeing the changes global warming might bring, or perhaps just for fun, is planting all sorts of species on the hill, and they are prospering. Many of the trees now exceed twelve feet in height. Sequoias, white pine, lodgepole pine, western red cedar, and ponderosa pine are scattered amongst the naturally reappearing incense cedar, madrone and maples. It's going to be a pretty forest, rich in species, but unlike a native forest. Most wonderfully, because the owner refrained from using herbicides, the native shrubs and flowers have returned.

When I walked up Goat hill yesterday, the lower slopes were carpeted in creamy Iris chrysophylla. Iris tenax, in all shades, were in clumps everywhere. Shade loving Merten's saxifrage and sun loving blue pod lupine were blooming abundantly almost side by side. Sidalcea lined the path to the top. The old big leaf maples on the north slope of the hill were a rich green. They had stopped groaning years ago. It was a blustery day. Black sheets of rain showers gliding over Fern Ridge Lake obscured the view of Mary's Peak. The resident pair of red tailed hawks and a solitary vulture soared above, and invisible warblers sang mightily in the trees below me. The young firs' new needles were as soft as feathers. A huge black and yellow bumblebee visited the last flowers on a black raspberry bush beside me. It was so quiet. The dogs and I sat by the old stump and warmed ourselves in the sun like the old goats did in the past. Soon the trees will be so tall that there won't be a view. I can't wait.

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