Thursday, March 28, 2024

Vi Lemons remembers the family businesses, orchards and trucking

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The evidence indicates Bill Peckham was kind of a rolling stone in his youth - a Florida boy, he moved on to the Midwest before ending up in the Okanogan country of north central Washington, back when the Okanogan was just being settled and people were still staking out homestead claims. Bill Peckham and his wife Annie found their niche in the new town down by the river, the one that had been called Ives Landing.

Bill Peckham may have earned himself a footnote in Pateros history. Bill's apple orchard may have been the first one in town; at least that's the family legend, according to Bill's granddaughter Vi Lemons. Bill's first apple trees went into the ground in the spring of 1909.

"He was raised in Florida," Lemons said. "His sisters were teachers in colleges down there." That was back in the 1880s and 1890s, when Florida was still just a sparsely settled peninsula that was hard to reach, before it was discovered, before half the East Coast retired there. Bill Peckham left isolated Florida and headed north. He got as far north in the United States as was possible at the time, and met up with a young woman named Annie Rosendal.

"Grandma was a seamstress in Minnesota," Vi said, and she already had a child from a previous marriage. (Her first husband's fate is lost in the mists of time.) "Her son was my dad," Vi said. When he was young Annie's son Henry went to live with Annie's brother Ollie on his homestead near Cameron, Alberta, Canada. Henry "took the name Rosendal," Vi said.

In the meantime Annie and Bill took off for greener pastures than they could find in Minnesota; in the early 1900s they ended up in the Okanogan country. "They were up on Paradise Hill first," Lemons said. "They had a little house there." It's still standing, Vi said. "Dad would come and visit with them. He loved riding horses up there."

Bill broke ground and planted crops but Paradise Hill wasn't really for him; he and Annie moved to Ives Landing, recently renamed Pateros, in 1908. He bought property down by the Columbia River, near the ferry crossing. The house and barn were built into the hillside sloping up from the river.

Making a living at the edge of settled country necessarily involved a lot of work - Bill Peckham planted an orchard and grew whatever else his family could eat or he could sell. "They raised chickens," Vi said. "I can remember gathering eggs." Bill raised so many chickens he needed a two-story chicken coop, "four rooms downstairs and four rooms upstairs." There was a stockyard just down the road, and after the railroad came to Pateros in 1912 ("it went right by their place"). So Bill became a cattle inspector too.

The Peckham house was partially built into the hill, with the kitchen and dining room downstairs and the living room upstairs. Bill Peckham dug his own well, and when the steamboats went out of business and were being broken up, Bill bought the pilothouse off one for his pumphouse. There were three other houses along that road, Vi Lemons remembered, and "Downings had a (fruit) warehouse down around that road, too."

While Bill and Annie were building their farm, Annie's son Henry had left his uncle's farm in search of greener pastures of his own. Henry Rosendal wasn't a farmer; he was attracted by the brand-new field of automobiles and trucks, and became a truck driver. He too went west, to Vancouver, Canada, "and that's where he met Mom," Vi said, his wife Tecla. Henry and Tecla and their two daughters moved south to Washington State in 1923, to Pateros where he set up a trucking business and helped his mom and stepfather with their farm.

They stayed in Pateros 10 years, moving to North Dakota in 1932 to be near Tecla's family. But North Dakota had its drawbacks. "Forty degrees below zero in the wintertime. We had enough of that," Lemons said. And North Dakota in the mid-1930s, the Dust Bowl years, wasn't the best place to try to make a living. Henry brought his family back west in 1936.

Henry had his own trucking business and helped his parents in the orchard and built houses on the side. He had two daughters, Vi and her sister Velma; Vi was more the tomboy. "That's why I learned to drive truck." Her parents bought a house in Carlton, but when their girls got old enough to go to high school the family moved to Pateros. Henry built a new house on Warren Avenue, which still stands. "They bought that in 1938 and lived in it until they died." (In Tecla's case that was until 1991, when she died at the age of 91.)

Henry had a little orchard around his house and built two other houses across the alley. Dr. Harold Stout and his wife Berniece rented one of Henry's houses when they moved to the Brewster-Pateros area in 1940, and Dr. Stout's office was in the back.

Vi Lemons drove truck along with her dad, even after she got married; her husband was a Brewster boy, Vernon Waddell. "They all called him Bub," Vi said. "I never did hear anybody call him Vernon." There were four Waddell boys, Vernon and "Lester and Hank and Leonard. They're all gone now." Bub Waddell also drove truck and "Dad and Bub, they built a lot of houses." Henry Rosendal had two or three trucks, and they were all on the road during harvest. "We'd haul peaches and stuff like that over to the coast. It was fun." Vi and Bub would take their daughter and two sons along for the ride.

Bub Waddell died in the 1950s. "I found him shot in the orchard." They never figured out what happened, although Vi had her suspicions about a man who tried to rob the electrical repair shop in downtown Pateros a couple of days earlier. "Jim Meadows, he ran that," and the thief tried to grab some stuff and run. Bub was over picking up the mail, like he always did, and ran the thief down. He threatened Bub and maybe, just maybe he made good on the threat. But no one was ever charged.

Henry Rosendal died in the early 1960s; his mom outlived him. The pioneer orchard that was one of the first, if not the first, didn't survive the great flood of 1948 but was replanted afterward.

That was in the spring of 1948; there was a lot of snow that winter and it hadn't melted when it warmed up and started raining. The Columbia River rose to the point where they only thing to do was open the gates at the dams along the river and let the water run. Annie Peckham's house and orchard were right in the way of the floodwaters. The lower floor of her house got it bad; "36 inches of water in her kitchen," Lemons said. Her family had to use a high-pressure sprayer to get out the mud and debris and dirt.

Vi Lemons was the cook at Pateros School for 12 years while her children were growing up; "Opal Dicus, she was my helper." It was a good job for a woman with kids, she said. She met a guy that was working on construction at Wells Dam, Harold Lemons, and they were married in 1967. Harold died earlier this year.

Annie Peckham's house and land were right in the way of the rising waters behind Wells Dam. The orchard had to come out, and the house was moved. "That (construction of the dam) sure changed Pateros," Vi said. The house ended up on the other side of the highway; "it's still there. Right behind the folks's." Harold and Vi Lemons moved to Brewster and bought a house on Second Street, where Vi lives today.

She kind of wishes she'd listened a little more closely to the stories her parents and grandparents told, when she was younger. "I wish I'd done more asking questions."
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