Hop Barns, some things I learned in 2017
I got a reference question today about hop barns and remembered that I’d given a wonderful talk for Benton County’s Preservation Pub series. In fact, not to brag, but I was the first to kick off the series and people quite enjoyed all the things they learned.Â
Since I always put my talks on Tumblr, I was quite surprised to find that I hadn’t actually done that in this case. So here it is, 30 months later. I’ve cut out the introductory slides, but included the introduction. Cheers!Â
INTRODUCTION
There are many amazing things about the history of hops in America that I could talk about, and I will tell you that this talk is coming on the heels of a talk I gave last week at the Hop Growers of American convention in Bend (remember, this was Jan 2017). I was part of a history session, sandwiched in between Dr. Al Haunold, who released the Cascade hop and talked about his work in the USDA/OSU public breeding program, and 4 hop growers, some with roots reaching back 6 generations. So there’s some pressure to be correct when you are talking to farmers about their history!
This is a similar situation. I am not an architectural historian, so if you have questions about construction I will happily punt to others in this room who certainly can talk more about a roofline or a door. I’ve also not trained as a historian, but I have read a lot and talked to enough people that I feel pretty comfortable stepping into that role for hops.
I’m not a farmer, though I do grow 5 hop plants in my backyard and I generally understand how plants grow. I’m not a brewer, though I do enjoy the products. And I’m not a scientist. Once I was being interviewed by a reporter who asked me about hops genetics; wanting to be helpful I answered, then she quoted me and the AP ran a shortened version of the story with the quote. I have no business talking about genetics.
Tonight’s talk will be somewhat awkwardly divided into a few sections. In the first part I want to tell you a bit about me and the archives that I created in summer 2013. Then I’ll talk a bit about hops and what they’ve been used for – hint not always beer – and then we’ll take a short pit stop on hops growing history, then field architecture and barn structures, landing back in Oregon and Benton County.
Here’s what I won’t talk about but is interesting: who was picking – especially as it pertains to race and gender – and OSU’s vital role in hops research. I also won’t have tons of time to tell you farm stories, but I will hit on a few good ones at the end. Finally, I won’t have time to talk about other well-known W coast growers like Meeker, Horst, or Flint.
HL was a 3rd generation Oregonian, so my family has been here since the 1850s and my daughter is the first in my direct line to be born outside the state.
HL grew hops and you can see on his land on this Metsker Atlas. You’ll see these maps later; they are quite helpful. I point out a name mistake here because I’ve found that when you are doing historical farming research you need names, and you need to think creatively about how they might have been changed or misspelled.Â
The land was sold off by the 1940s, and the Edmunsons initially moved closer to Eugene and then up to Junction City. I share this not because I think my own genealogy gives me some special insight into farming, but to say that this was a pretty common thing. Small farms, lots of people growing a lot of different things, families moving from agriculture to other jobs. I do like to think I have a bit of hop DNA, since I did start the first hops/brewing archive in the nation. Â
WHAT DOES AN ARCHIVIST DO SLIDE:Â Lots of words here, but the main takeaway is that archivists, librarians, and historians are all different.
WHAT IS THE OREGON HOPS & BREWING ARCHIVES? OHBA is an archives that is housed at the Oregon State University library. It's an ongoing project to save this history of the work the people at the university are doing, but also one that works with communities and industries to preserve the history of the work they do. Currently I'm focused on the Pacific Northwest, documenting hops, barley, commercial and home brewing, beer, cider, and mead.
HOPS: WHAT HAVE THEY BEEN USED FOR?
Hops have a long history, and I am indebted to Michael Tomlan for his 1995 book Tinged With Gold and Peter Kopp for his 2016 book Hoptopia: A World of Agriculture and Beer in Oregon's Willamette Valley.
Pliny the Elder writes about common hops in his 77AD Naturalis Historia, creating the first record of hops. The first reference to hops cultivation in continental Europe is in the 8th century – though not for their beer – it’s most commonly accepted that you had to wait until 1079 for their addition and then you’d have to be in Hallertau.
In 1574 Reginald Scot writes “A Perfect Platform of a Hop-garden, and necessary instructions for the making and maintenance thereof, with Notes and Rules for Reformation of all Abuses,” the first practical treatise on hop culture in England. As a side note, Scot also wrote a book about witchcraft in 1584.
Though we most often link hops with beer, hops served many functions in pioneer kitchens, and were grown at home in small kitchen gardens. Hops were used in cooking (breads, salads) and home decor (stuffed in pillows, basket weaving with bines), but they were also known for medicinal uses to help with afflictions like flatulence, skin irritations, and mental illness.
HOPS: WHERE HAVE THEY GROWN?
This page that you can’t read is from Ezra Meeker’s 1883 book Hop Culture: A Practical Treatise on Hop Growing in Washington, from the Cutting to the Bale – and it shows how widespread growing was. New Mexico and Montana don’t have numbers, and of course Hawaii isn’t listed.
Though early (non Native, likely European) settlers to North America could pick native wild hops in the woods around their settlements, roots were on the list of articles brought through the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1628/29. We know Massachusetts was shipping hops to New York as early as 1718, and that they had some success since a 1732 English law banned export from the US through Ireland. It’s also clear that by the early 1800s hops were a commercially and agriculturally significant crop – and the main hop-producing region was shifting west.
It’s been said that no agricultural reorientation within the United States has been more sweeping than the shift of the American hop-growing industry from east to west between 1860 and 1920. By 1893, the Pacific Coast hop crop surpassed New York, and the decline in Eastern production was rapid in the following years. With the arrival of hops came kilns – the first arrived on the west coast in the early 1860s. Though there is little initial innovation in construction you do start to see larger barn complexes.
Early western farmers were helped by the construction of the transcontinental railroad, allowing them to transport their hops to the breweries in the mid-west and east. And to prompt the question – yes hops were still grown during Prohibition, but they were primarily grown for export. When the Prohibition was lifted in 1933 hop acreage rapidly increased in Oregon, Washington and California. And then in the years following World War II, the US was the largest hop producing country in the world.
I know you might be anxious to get to Oregon, but first let’s linger a bit to talk about field architecture.
HOPS: FIELD ARCHITECTURE I
For the sake of credit, neither of these are photos from OSU collections. The first is from England, and the other from Wisconsin. I love these photos for many reasons, and while we have lots of Oregon field photos, I show these because I want you to see the same crop growing in different states or on a different continent. The reach of this industry was wide, and is wide.
I also want to point out a few of things – the first is that this “field architecture” is incredibly important when we think about the history of the hops industries, but it is impermanent. So these pictures and the publications written by Ag agencies or by growers for industry periodicals are vital for the preservation of our knowledge of these structures.
Secondly, notice the pole system in both fields. We don’t have time for a deep analysis of fields, but know that growers experimented and wrote extensively on the best layout for a field. The density of planting, field infrastructure, and intensity of cultivation of the field meant more money but also more work.
A variety of poles were used, and wood choice varied by durability, availability, and cost. The standard was 12-16 feet, though some publications recommended as high as 25 feet. And of course poles were reused or replaced, but their longevity varied –3-25 years depending on the wood – and they got shorter each season with sharpening to remove the damaged portions. Demand for wood and was high, which limited yard growth in places like California where it wasn’t as plentiful.
The last thing I want to point out are the boxes the Wisconsin pickers are using. There is a lot of discussion in reports about boxes and their standardization. Since pickers were paid by the box, consistency mattered. Plants were cut at the ground and the whole pole was removed. Some boxes also had slots for holding the poles the hops grew up, so people would pick and they’d drop right into the box. Around here we are MUCH more likely to see hop baskets and scales in the fields for weighing.
HOPS: FIELD ARCHITECTURE II
These two pictures ARE from OSU, or rather they are pictures that we scanned for the Mount Angel Abbey Library. They show a more modern operation, with the hops being trained on a higher wire trellis system using a horse cart, and field being picked after the bines were cut for harvest. I’ve also included an older drawing from a farming publication showing a design where pickers walked under the wires, picking the cones from below. Â
As fields were shifting from pole to trellis, you see a lot of experimentation with setup, and the high wire trellis system won out with west coast growers as early adopters.
In the early 1900s to 1910s this system’s popularity was well established, and with the introduction of hop picking machines wire work of 16-18’ became the norm. BUT, the machinery was designed to fit the established trellis systems, not the other way around.
HOPS AND OAST HOUSES IN ENGLAND
Because early 17th and 18th century growers grew on the scale of household, not commercial production, air drying the crop worked. But, as acreage and yield increased in the New England area you start to see oast houses, as the English called the center drying room, or hops kilns, as we've called them.
And of course many New England families borrowed their design from the English oast house – which is what you see here. Converting oast houses to homes was pretty popular in the UK, and here’s a residential property on Frogs Lane in Kent. You'll notice that the sun always shines in England.
And another nice sketch of the interior of an oast house, where you can see the hearth, drying floor, and baling process.
HOPS HOUSES ON A HILL
But what about America? Early recommendations were to build into the side of a hill, with an opening at the bottom for adding fuel. It was also easier to have the drying floor level with the top of the hill. This picture is from Michael Tomlan's Tinged with Gold and shows a hop kiln in New York, and then on the right you see a sketch of a kiln with a steeper slope.
HOPS HOUSES ON LEVEL GROUND
There are some nice examples of hop houses in New York, and this one is from the Library of Congress and is a drying barn from Otsego County. This picture was taken in 1937, but construction certainly predates that.
Because the drying stage is critical for the value of hops, there's much talk, debate, and experimentation surrounding the hop kiln, much of it centered on the composition of the flooring, the heat source used and its positioning in the building, the height of the drying floor and the ceiling, the depth of the hops, and how the moisture should best escape the building. Early on the goal was to keep in the heat, not let it out through vents.
Early facilities were rectangular, one to two story, and used for collecting, drying, cooling, and storing. Most commonly wood or charcoal was used in a brick furnace; and bricks were set in a honeycomb pattern so heat could rise through them. Drying floors were thin and either perforated or constructed with wooden lath strips so heat could pass through – later on you see cotton, linen, hair used on this drying floor.
It was also common for the building to be wider at the bottom than at the top since moisture rose from and escaped through the roof or gable openings.
HOPS HOUSES
This nice example of layout is in Andrew Samuel Fuller’s book 1865 Hop culture; practical details, from the selection and preparation of the soil, and setting and cultivation of the plants, to picking, drying, pressing and marketing the crop.
Soon we see thinner walled structures with vent holes, or cowls, in the top, and a preference for "draft drying," which meant constructing the kiln so you could work with natural air flow. Another shift in the 19th century when radiant heat was possible thanks to blacksmith production of stoves for home heating.
Speaking of fire, it’s a hazard. If hops are improperly dried, the moisture in the bales can cause a spontaneous combustion. Eventually concerns about fire lead to a separation of the kilns from the cooling rooms, as well as an increased experimentation with construction materials.
HOPS KILN EVOLUTION I
Back to our look at the evolution of drying technology. Worried about losing heat from the kiln when moving hops from drying to cooling or storage, some started to investigate dumping floors. Because of the increased possibilities of early mechanization, you’ll also see movable drying floors.
Another change comes with the shift from a focus on drying with drafts of forced air to a focus on convection. And thanks to an increase in electricity for rural areas, vacuum fans – often using airplane propellers – electric pumps for irrigation and recording instruments become more common. And of course with these new advances in technologies, you see an increase in complexity in design and using specialists for design and construction.
HOPS KILN EVOLUTION II
This is jumping way ahead in time, but I think it's a good leap to show these Oregon State drawings from 1950 to illustrate this complexity – please excuse the horrible picture, I was scanning a crumbling bound pamphlet!
HOPS: WHERE HAVE THEY GROWN IN OREGON?
Choosing a photo here was hard, so you get two. This map is from the 1930 An Economic Study of the Hop Industry in Oregon published by the Ag Experiment Station at Oregon State Agricultural College.Â
Looking at the cluster of dots you’ll likely see some familiar growing regions. On the left you have Hop Field Day 1941, a nod to OSU’s role in research and development, but also to women wearing a black dress and heels in a field.
The earliest record of the hop crop in the Northwest is one in a transport record from Fort Vancouver to Sitka Alaska. There is also a reference to hops growing in the Fort Vancouver Farm in 1836.
There is conflicting information about who the “first commercial hop grower” was in Oregon and the exact date hops arrived is unknown. Frederick Geer might have planted hop seeds near Silverton in 1846. There’s also a reference to Adam Weisner bringing the crop to Polk County in 1867. But the commonly recognized “first” grower was Geroge Wells of Buena Vista (William is credited with planting the hops, but he was 8 at the time). George planted the first commercial hop yard in 1867; though hardly a major contributor to the global marketplace, he inspired others. George Leisure follows Wells as another early grower, setting up in Lane County in 1869.
In the early 20th century hops were plentiful in Oregon– and from 1905 to 1915 Oregon was the nation’s largest hop producer. Despite Prohibition and the Great Depression, Oregon hop production grew after World War I due to the impact of war on European agriculture. From 1922 to 1943, Oregon regained the honor as the nation's largest producer, with post-Prohibition production centered in the area around Independence – known as the “Hop Center of the World.”
The entire Willamette Valley felt an increased demand for a seasonal labor for the short harvest season, and growers needed to sell their fields to them. They advertised in newspapers to recruit urban and rural families, and because the work was “unskilled,” pickers were recruited from all over the region. Women and children were hired for their perceived picking dexterity (and lower wage demands), and a diversity of workers were found in the fields (racial, economic, geographic).
Many of the operations provided cabins or tents, water, and other necessities, but also entertainment. Organized hop festivals, like the Hop Fiesta in Independence, grew out of the end of harvest celebrations in the camps. Pickers still have fond memories of these celebratory evenings, but less fond ones of the hard picking during the day.
By the early 1950s Oregon’s hop crop began to decline and mechanical picking machines replaced the need for seasonal laborers. This change meant a shift in growing practices, with many either abandoning their crops or increasing their acreage to pay for their investment in mechanical pickers.
Concurrent with this boom/bust in production, hop farmers in Oregon faced a problem plaguing many other hop-growing states: mildew. In response, in 1930 the USDA and Oregon State formalized a university hop research program that dated to the 1890s. In 1894, you see reports that Professor George Coote was experimenting with hops, and five years later in 1899 GW Shaw is giving hops fertilizer advice in the Corvallis newspaper. In 1901 and 1902, OAC Profs Knisely and Phillips are conducting drying studies, with special attention to Lupulin, the active ingredient in hops, and how much is lost at different temperatures or lengths of drying time.
But it was Dr. Alfred Haunold who made a lasting mark on the industry with the 1972 release of the Cascade and other modern American hop varieties.
HOPS: WHERE HAVE THEY GROWN IN BENTON Co?
Lane, Linn, Benton counties dominated the industry until the mid 1880s – you can see the black bar shrinking.
HOPS: WHERE HAVE THEY GROWN IN BENTON Co?
Here are some lovely colorized Metsker atlas maps to show you distribution, with hops growing near Philomath, up through Albany, on both sides of the Willamette River, down to Kiger Island, and heading toward Monroe.
For my talk at the Hop Growers of America conference, I relied a lot on federal and state Ag bulletins and reports, but this week I turned to the state historic preservation database, the Oregon Century Farm and Ranch records, and newspapers. The Oregon historic newspaper project is amazing – it’s full text searchable and no microfilm is involved.
I limited my “hops” search to the Corvallis papers and came up with over 1800 articles, covering everything from state/national/international crop news to which local families were leaving town to pick at a regional yard. I found grower’s names and locations, info about acreage and yield, amazing advertisements for picker and field equipment and supplies, and news about field crime or contract lawsuits – there weren't many of these last two, but still worth mentioning for variety.
As I was rounding the bend through my 500th article this phrase popped into my head: the story of life emerges from the minutiae. Some of these details are just part of what went into newspapers, but as I worked toward a talk on historic preservation I found myself caught up in stories. Partially it's because I love telling and hearing stories, but in order to track down barns and the location of fields, I needed names and a historical narrative.
And in these stories I found many that pulled me towards them. How can a researcher resist not knowing about the governor who ushered in state prohibition, but grew hops only a few years earlier? Who could resist learning about the successful Chinese hops growers who made a great income despite sharing 1/4 of their profits with the men who owned the land, and who saw their world change as Corvallis' Chinese community shrunk?
For those attending to their quizzes...
Oswald West was the state land agent turned grower turned governor turned progressive Prohibitionist - as far as I know he was never a brewer. And as far as I could find, those Chinese farmers are named Sorbin Sing, Sam Sun, Chin Yuck, Hop Lou, Sing Fat, Sing On, though because “nicknames” were used it’s possible that Sorbin Sing is actually Sing Fat or Sing On. And they farmed on land owned by George Heckle, Millard Beach, SN Lilly, Henry Gerhard, and William Wells.
By 1892, one newspaper article from Corvallis notes surprise that there aren’t any hops farms, but notes there are several large farms in Benton County – most towards Philomath or north in Linn County. This changes.
In 1893, George Avery is planning to plant 10 acres in the spring 1894, D.A. Osburn bought the Millard Beach farm across the Willamette River and planned to plant all 120 acres as hops, and JD Howell and WA Cumming leased 50 acres for hops from John Whitaker. In 1895, Norm Lilly comes online, a farm that flourishes in the next decade, with 3847 boxes and @230 bales dried that first year; by 1902 the Lilly yard reports 5 hop houses, 160 pickers, and samples of their hops are “showing” downtown. In 1900, John Whitaker has a yard with 35-40 acres, a small percentage of his 530 acres 10 miles north of Corvallis.
By 1897, Lincoln Allen and Willis Bump are prominent kings of Kings Valley growers, and in 1898 it’s noted that there were a good number of Native American from Siletz are picking on that farm. Five years later, the main growers are listed as Lincoln Allen, Hugh Smith, CL Bump, Townsend Bros, Dunn, Ritner, and Johnson Porter.
Despite Corvallis voting in a local option for alcohol prohibition in 1904, in 1906 reports that hops acreage was increasing across the county. With these increases are new barns and fires, but rarely anything about people sharing drying or processing facilities.
It’s also clear from the newspapers that families from Corvallis travelled up and down the valley for picking, with regular updates in the paper on who was going where when. As an example, in 1900, 100 people from Corvallis picked in Buena Vista, bringing home about $1500-2000 in total. And beyond money or field experiences, there’s an impact on the public school system: in 1895 there are 50 fewer kids in attendance the first day as there were the previous year – by 1899 they just delay the start.
THE NANCY DREW BARN HUNT I
As I end my talk, I reach the beginning, which started as: “Tiah, can you talk about Benton County barns?" So I'll end with my own stories about my quest to discover those still standing. Nancy Drew, girl detective, style.
First I will say holidays and weather sidelined a couple of trips, but when I was office bound I spent a lot of time with the addresses from the State historic preservation site – and Google street view.
This top one is the Luther barn on Christmas Tree Lane in Albany, next is on Kirk Ave in Brownsville, next is The Harry Nelson Hop Farm on Springhill in Albany, and the bottom is the Southern Pacific Railroad and Ziegler Hop Warehouse on 1st St in Aurora. I was able to locate some others, but the pictures weren’t great.
THE NANCY DREW BARN HUNT II
I did actually hit the road. My father-in-law was visiting for the holidays and I didn’t have to twist his arm much to accompany me on a “barn hunt.” Armed with an ambitious list and travel itinerary, we set out north with 3-4 hours before we needed to be in Portland. We didn’t find many barns and it took us closer to 4 ½ hours, but we did have a great find on our second stop.
This hop dryer was built on CA McLaughlin’s farm in 1946. There is a fan at the top for ventilation, and you can see the stove from the outside and with its duct work from the inside. And yes, piles of hops baskets. According to a farmer we talked with, this drying house was never used, which perplexed me. I mentioned it to some growers last week at the convention, and they were perplexed too and started their own research. Word is the owners are investigating using it this year to dry hops.
Why couldn’t we find more barns? Had they been torn down? Yes, for some. Do we not know how to read a map? Yes, though some we didn’t even try to find because their addresses were recorded as rural routes. Another idea I have is that they were converted for other uses and are unrecognizable. A 1919 article points to experiments in California where hop driers were used to quickly dry all kinds of fruits and berries – even various salt water fish. The article notes that during WWI one grower turned a number of hop kilns into vegetable driers and secured big contracts for dehydrated vegetables for use by American army abroad – and the author suggests dried fruit could be a new industry.
THE SEAVEY COMPLEX I
So the story of my barn hunt actually has another part – and a great punch line. Armed with an EXTENSIVE packet of information prepared for the property survey – during my holiday vacation we set out to find and take pictures of the Seavey hop processing complex, built between 1911-1912, and.6 miles from the junction of Hwy. 99 West and Alexander Avenue.
I was avoiding going into work to look at the Metzker Atlases, because I was on vacation, and figured “how hard could it be?” We drove ALL over south town looking, finally giving up after an hour to go to the grocery store. Why couldn’t we find a large hop complex? The answer was on the last page – which we hadn’t checked before our trip. It was torn down in 1990.
Fortunately, Lynda Sekora's 1991 report provides a lot of wonderful details about the site, and because it was prepared as part of the national Historic American Engineering Record, there are photos on the Library of Congress site. To orient you, the top pictures are from the Historic American Building Survey on the Library of Congress site – they show the general view of hop barns from gravel road and the view of north facade of the complex, looking south. The bottom one is from my libraries Gerald Williams Collection.
This complex is representative of the extensive hop operations in the region, though these driers were only used until around 1952, when an infestation of red mite hit, the facilities remained although the farm cultivated beans.
James Seavey was an important figure in Oregon's early-20th century hop industry. He owned and operated four large hop yards in the Valley, his field operations adopted the most current innovations, and he was considered an authority among Oregon hop growers on hop production. From 1905 to 1955, he also sold hops domestically and worldwide in Portland.
He was descended from seven generations of Maine fishermen, and when his father, Alexander, arrived in Oregon in 1850 he established a 160-acre farm in 1855 on the McKenzie River near Springfield. James was born in 1873, and got his start in the hop business working for his father. When Seavey Sr. died in 1908, James and his brothers, John and Jesse, took over their father's land holdings. James kept the McKenzie River ranch, where his father's original 25 acres of hops had grown to 150 acres. John grew on acreage near Goshen and Jesse in Corvallis. Jesse invented many labor-saving devices used in the family hop operations, and he built the balers for the drier complexes. For those of you still attending to your quiz cards, James purchased the hop yard where these hop driers were in 1912 from D. B. Taylor. James' son, Alex, joined his father in the hop business, and is credited with introducing the use of forced-draft fans and mechanical hop pickers in the 1930s.
It's hard to tell, but there are eight two story hop driers, arranged in two banks each containing four driers, and each roughly 30'x30' inside. They have hipped roofs, wooden shingles, and central cupolas. Originally the cupola roofs raised for a natural draft during the drying process, but later surplus airplane propellers were installed to help the upward movement of the heated air. A central "fuel bay" connects these two banks of hop driers. At the time of Sekora's report there was one surviving cast iron furnace, 28" wide and 34" high, stamped with “Holt Equipment: Independence, Oregon.”
Although we're not sure who designed these, the buildings are similar to the 1880s driers from Washington. In 1883 Ezra Meeker, a Puyallup hop grower, published a detailed "treatise" on the cultivation and processing of hops, and there is enough similarity here to assume that Meeker's publication was a major influence.
THE SEAVEY COMPLEX II
Here are some from inside the driers. You have a view of heating pipes extending through outside wall to exterior stack, the remains of hop bailing chute on ground floor – this chute extends to the second floor – and a view of scoops on second floor that was used for loading and unloading hops.
Thanks to all of you for your curiosity and thanks in advance for your questions. I have been a librarian and an archivist for a long time, and I truly believe that it is vitally important that we return to primary materials of the past and continue to engage with our history – be that through the built environment or through archival documents. We can commit ourselves to preserving, sharing, and at times trudging, through the messiness of people and the lives they lived. The connections we draw, the lessons we learn as we read through the details of a life lived 100 years ago, and the ways we connect it to our own lives can show us history isn’t necessarily a linear or progressing path.
And thank you to all those who have donated photos or ledger books or reports to us or to historical societies and archives. Thank you to all those who have shared their stories with me – oral histories can be awkward and uncomfortable, but the details of lives make up a history of a people.
