Jones Grocery & Service Station

ODOT, Historic Columbia River Highway Oral History: Final Report

Darlene Stiles & Valda Jones Dryden

Cousins Darlene Stiles and Valda Jones Dryden are the grandchildren of Joseph Oliver Jones and Teresa Wirth. They were interviewed on separate days in May by Kristen Stallman and Sara Morrissey. They were born in Viento and spent much of their childhood in the area.

Darlene and Valda’s grandparents, Joseph Oliver Jones and Teresa Wirth, came west by train in September of 1901 from Missouri and Arkansas respectively. They arrived in The Dalles and took a boat across the Columbia River to White Salmon, Washington. The family then traveled by wagon to Troutlake, Washington, where they lived for eight years. In September 1910, the Jones family moved to Portland, but never quite settled down. A decade later, the family finally found their home in Viento, a small settlement west of Hood River along the Columbia River.

When the Jones family arrived in the Viento area, Grandpa Jones (also known as J.O. Jones) and his boys built a service station (Figure 3.14) and acquired several homes on the property. J.O. Jones’ service station provided gasoline for travelers and truck drivers as well as treats for the children. When travelers with children stopped at the station for gas J.O. would ask the parents if the kids could have a bit of candy and would then distribute little black licorice candy pipes. His own grandchildren, Darlene and Valda, knew he had a soft spot for children and would stop by the station to help J.O. in order to get some treats. The grocery store provided food and basic staples for the Jones family as well as the railroad workers that lived with their families at Viento.

Underneath the service station J.O. Jones had a large generator to provide the station and the family’s homes with electricity. While the lights could be dull, they were a vast improvement over candles. The service station functioned as J.O. and Teresa’s home. Their kitchen and living quarters were located in the back of the station’s grocery store. It was “just one huge big building, but there were partitions” remembers Darlene. Behind the service station were the “little house” and the “big house” where many of J.O. and Teresa’s eight children would come to live. Other buildings, including a one-room school house and a barn, lay scattered around the property, hidden in the trees and surrounded by wildflowers.

Both Darlene and Valda were born in Viento in the spring of 1933 as Teresa Jones, J.O.’s wife, wanted to have her children come back to Viento to have their children.

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In addition to his service station, J.O. Jones was also the caretaker for Viento State Park. Starting in 1925, the State of Oregon acquired parts of the Viento property to open a state park. The park was beautiful, full of wildflowers, large trees, and a creek that ran through the woods to a small waterfall.

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When construction began on the interstate, the State of Oregon approached J.O. Jones with a proposition in regards to his land at Viento (Figure 3.18). He would have to sell the land at market value or it would be condemned and taken from him. Darlene recalls, “My grandfather would have liked to have kept some of the land. He had quite a bit of acreage. But they would not allow it. The state […] let him know that they could condemn it.” The only land that was not affected was near the river.

J.O. and Teresa Jones sold their land to the state and moved to northeast Portland near Freemont Street. In 1964 a large flood occurred in Viento and much of the park was destroyed from the trees, to the fountain, to the sand dunes. With the flood, the Jones family lost some of their remaining sections of land near the river, and the railroad took the rest. As Valda remembers it, “They just demolished Viento and then the floods came.”

“I'm sorry that my children could not get to be able to have this joy that we had with the park and my grandparents…”

-Darlene

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