Written from my perspective Che’usa Wend . . . July 28, 2011
It makes me smile every time someone speaks of a place by a name rather than an address. Just like we give our phone numbers with just the last 4 digits!
We used to do that back in Ohio where I grew up. Before they changed it to 7 numbers, our phone number was Trinity 6-7834. So anyone within 5 miles of where we lived, we just said it was 7834!
Betty Jenner and I talked about the old party lines and how interesting those were! I got a copy of the Western Siskiyou County Telephone Directory from August 1957 and it shows:
‘Elbert Whipple Green view 21-F-12′. Now that’s an interesting number!
And speaking of Eb, last night he presented me with the December 11, 1971 Redding Record-Searchlight paper with an article entitled: ‘Old buildings tell Etna’s history’. . .
The Article is just too precious not to share!
Old buildings tell Etna’s history
by Garth Sanders, Regional Editor
Dec. 11, 1971
ETNA ~ There’s no big hurry in this town of 729 people.
Take the way Etna is handling its flag pole problem.
The old 131 foot high flagpole, up in 1929, developed a rotten spot and fell down one night in early 1970.
The broken stub has pointed reproachfully skyward for almost two years arousing the curiosity of visitors.
But the townspeople aren’t disturbed. Somewhere in town there’s a replacement pole.
Once a week somebody goes down and turns the new pole one-quarter of a revolution. The process is supposed to make the pole season straight.
It wouldn’t do to have the new flagpole looking like a corkscrew when it’s erected.
“We hope to get the new flagpole up yet this year ~ maybe before Christmas,” says Mayor Lee M. Durette, who moved here from Chico in 1941 because he loved the quiet, cool life in this secluded Siskiyou County valley.
The town’s approach to its flagpole crisis is typical of the relaxed attitude in Etna.
It wasn’t always so. The town started in the 1850’s as a gold mining camp called ‘Rough and Ready’.
Civic leaders soon changed that to ‘Etna Mills’ because somebody had built a flour mill. Etna became a main point on the old California-Oregon Stage Road.
Butter, flour and meat produced by the pioneer farmers around Etna fed the miners in the surrounding mountains.
There’s a good deal of that history to be read in Etna’s buildings.
The offices of the Siskiyou Telephone Co. occupy what was once an old flour mill.
When you drive around town, you’re amazed at the size of some of the old homes.
The old AH. Denny house looks big enough to have been a boarding house for whole mining crews. Denny was a pioneer merchant prince with general stores in a number of mining camps.
But it was just a home. ‘Denny had a big family,’ one old-timer recalls.
The old Golden House was built back before the turn of the century. It looks like a New Orleans townhouse of the 1800’s. It’s been a hotel, a rooming house and is now owned by Mr. and Mrs. LH. Adams. They are renovating it and plan to furnish all the rooms with antiques as a hobby.
Across the street from the Golden House is the Odd Fellows Hall ~ built in 1880 and still used for lodge meetings.
The lodge hall, the Golden House and several other old buildings strung along Main Street were built with bricks made right in Etna.
Police Chief Ariel Facey is also the town ambulance driver and operates his own butcher shop.
“He’s on duty 24 hours a day,” says Mayor Durette. “The chief is paid $600 a month by the city. If the town is dead, he goes home about midnight ~ otherwise he sticks around to 2 or 3 a.m.,” the mayor says.
“The town has no real problems,” Durette insists.
“It exists on the income generated by the rich farmlands around it and is happy to serve as home to a few loggers who extract timber from the rugged Salmon River country to the west”.
Why are there so many substantial old homes in such a small town with a rather dull economy?
“There was quite a bit of mining ~ there was a lot of money around here” is Mayor Durette’s explanation.
Etna was incorporated as a city in 1878. It has no newspaper now, but around the turn of the century the town supported two weekly newspapers. A long and vicious feud between the two editors reached its high point in 1900 when one of them called the other ‘a pin-headed cur ‘.
“There are still rugged individualists in Etna today”, the mayor says.
“Most of our people are real nice. But we have a few . . .
