History Secrets

History secrets are created by the ravages of time as people die, memories fade, and documents get thrown away.

The two people who have done the most to find, organize and archive information about the Elliott Forest are Jerry Phillips and Bob Zybach.

Jerry Phillips is in his 90s, but his mind remains active. His book, Caulked Boots and Cheese Sandwiches, is easily the best historical reference on the Elliott State Forest, and the entire book is available for free by clicking on the link in this sentence.

The single most useful source of historical information about the Elliott State Forest is the Oregon Websites and Watersheds Project (ORWW), an educational, nonprofit 501 c(3) corporation founded in 1996. Bob Zybach has spent the last 24 years working with school kids to teach them how to do historical research about "long-term use and scientific management of Oregon's natural and cultural resources." Along the way, he has collected more and better information about the Elliott State Forest than exists anywhere else. But at least to my eye, the information in the ORWW website needs significant editing: its pages look like they were constructed in the mid-1990s, and the website is organized by student projects rather than more content-friendly ways.

Despite Bob Zybach's good work, information about the Elliott State Forest remains scattered across many state government computer systems, cabinet files and archival storage boxes. Relevant information can be found in various Department of State Lands offices, Oregon Department of Forestry offices, and Oregon State University offices. Jerry and Bob have done a fairly good job with early Elliot Forest history; oddly the situation has gotten much worse lately.

Bob Zybach

I have a handful of folk heroes; that is, people with such original ideas, they changed how I think about the world. I'm primarily trained in information systems, so my folk heroes mostly come from that field: Linus Torvalds who created the Linux kernel in 1991, Tim Berners-Lee who invented the World Wide Web in in 1989, and Craig Newmark who started Craigslist in 1995.

Bob Zybach is less well known than these global celebrities, but he easily falls at the top of my list. Why? Because of all the original source documents he found that show how human and natural forces have shaped and reshaped Oregon's forests for thousands of years.

In the 1990s, government scientists, environmental groups and others were claiming Oregon had once been covered with vast forests and lots of old-growth trees. These claims sounded plausible, so I simply assumed they were factual.

Bob Zybach found a host of original sources to assemble an entirely different and more accurate view of what the first pioneers encountered: western Oregon was actually a savanna, and the forests were more like islands of green surrounded by tall grass.

I first met Bob in the 1990s by attending various presentations and historical tours that he gave for free. He had a better understanding of early Oregon pioneer life and forest history -- BY FAR -- than anyone I'd ever met, so I listened carefully and came away from each encounter with new insights.

Bob earned his doctorate from Oregon State University in 2003. His dissertation was "The Great Fires: Indian burning and catastrophic forest fire patterns of the Oregon Coast Range, 1491-1951."

After Bob graduated from OSU, he moved to Cottage Grove where he continued to do historical research. I'm certain he's the world's foremost scholarly expert on the Elliott State Forest and its history.

Because Bob had moved away, I lost track of him until a few months ago because of our shared interest in fire lookout towers. He told me about the Cougar Pass Lookout in the heart of the Elliott State Forest, and we jointly prepared a proposal to renovate the Cougar Pass Lookout at www.CougarPass.Org. That's what sparked my interest in how the Elliott State Forest is managed.

Bob has paid a price for uncovering and publicizing all the historical sources about Oregon's forest history. Few people can argue with his conclusions because he has found so many interlocking historical maps, early Department of Interior reports, log books from ships, Osborne photographs, passages from pioneer diaries, interviews with Indians whose ancestors walked here from Asia 11,000 years ago, notations in journals written by early scientists, ... the list goes on and on. But that doesn't mean people like to be to proven wrong, to find out we now have more trees in Oregon than at any earlier time.

I suspect that explains why the Department of State Lands and the OSU College of Forestry have frozen Bob Zybach out of any meaningful role in thinking through how the Elliott forest should be managed.

Dave Sullivan, PhD
Emeritus Professor of Business, Oregon State University