This 1912 photo was taken at the Klaber hop yard, established in the field just north of the Boistfort School and across the road from the Klaber store and post office in the early 1900s. On a sales trip to Europe, the town's namesake, Herman Klaber, the owner of what was said to be the world's largest hop field at the time, died on the Titanic a century ago. Pictured in this photo are Gust Anderson in overalls and Bert (Albert) Roundtree in the jacket. Anderson managed the hop field and Roundtree was the foreman. Walking behind the men is George Dillon. This photo is from volume 1 of "Our Hometowns: A historical photo album of Greater Lewis County," and can be purchased at The Chronicle, Book 'n' Brush and the Lewis County Historical Museum.
A worn cabin nestled in evergreens beside the Chehalis River tells a story of one branch of a pioneer family that settled the Boistfort Valley in the 1850s.
During a visit with Ernie Rose, 96, who lives on the Pe Ell McDonald Road, we walked outside to see the old home place where Agnes (Roundtree) Keller told him she was born in 1897. The three-room cabin, smokehouse, and outhouse once belonging to George and Nora (Allbritton) Roundtree stand as a tribute to the Roundtrees’ past but also that of the Roses who bought the land more than a century ago.
The property was homesteaded by Agnes’s grandfather, Martin, the youngest of Turner Richardson Roundtree’s seven children. As a teenager, Martin crossed the Oregon Trail from Illinois with his parents in about 1854. They were following his older brothers and sisters who had come west in 1852 and settled in the Lewis County in 1853 after a brief stay in Polk County, Oregon.
Perhaps the most well-known of those 1852 immigrants was Turner’s granddaughter Mary Adeline Roundtree, who was 16 when she married Centralia pioneer Joseph Borst in 1854 and settled on the flatlands near the confluence of the Skookumchuck and Chehalis rivers. Her father was James Roundtree.
The patriarch of the family, Turner, was born in Kentucky in 1795. He fought in the War of 1812 under William Henry Harrison, who later became president, and at the battles of the Thames and Fort Malden, according to “The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, Volume XXXI, History of Washington, Idaho, and Montana, 1845-1889.” Turner’s Scottish wife, Mary Adeline “Polly” Ferguson, was a cousin of Patrick Henry, according to Bancroft. Two years after moving to Illinois in 1830, Turner fought as a lieutenant in the Black Hawk War, a brief conflict with Native Americans.
On the Boistfort prairie, Bancroft wrote, Turner “amassed a comfortable fortune, besides expending his means freely upon public works and in hospitalities.” The 1860 census listed him as a farmer with real estate valued at $3,000 and personal property at $3,500 (equivalent to $85,000 and $99,000 in 2018 dollars). One way he earned money was butchering hogs—60 at a time — and driving the bacon five days north to Olympia, where he sold it for 28 cents a pound, the Chehalis Bee-Nugget reported Dec. 24, 1926.
One of Turner’s grandsons, Patrick Henry Roundtree, wrote his memoirs in a notebook, including details of his journey west in 1859 with his father, John. The Chehalis Bee-Nugget shared his story in a 1926 article about the 61st anniversary of his wedding to Minerva Jane Cooper.
Patrick’s uncle, Andrew J. Roundtree, had returned from the Boistfort Valley to persuade his older brother John to come west. Andrew accompanied Patrick’s family when they left Illinois April 4, 1859, and was elected a lieutenant under Captain Dan Sheets when they joined an immigrant train of 105 wagons at Omaha. On the Platte River, they met “disgruntled miners who had suffered ill luck in the Pike’s Peak boom.” The miners were waiting for a man named Curtis, whom they intended to hang. When he arrived, Curtis spoke persuasively for 90 minutes and talked them out of it.
“The immigrant train had been held up three hours expecting to see a lynching but, disappointed, moved westward,” the newspaper reporter wrote.
At Walla Walla, the immigrants scattered throughout the Northwest. The Roundtrees shipped their belongings on a scow from The Dalles and drove their stock beside the river. Later they chartered a scow to journey up the Cowlitz River from the Columbia River. It took four days to travel from Cowlitz Landing near present-day Toledo to Boistfort, where they arrived Sept. 25, 1859. More of Patrick’s memoirs can be read online at https://jtenlen.drizzlehosting.com/walewis/roundtree1.html.
Turner Roundtree had 35 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren when he died March 21, 1868, while traveling home from Claquato on board the steamer Carrie Davis, which began navigating the Chehalis River in 1867. His wife died in 1880.
Martin and his wife, Mary, raised their family on the property where Rose lives. But when Martin died at 34, he left Mary a widow with five children. She had also just buried her sixth child, an infant named Allen, the month before her husband died. She later married Rev. Edward Harris and lived near the old Boistfort post office, while her son, George, raised his family on the old home place.
George and Nora Roundtree built a new farmhouse in the early 1900s, but when he died in 1915, Nora sold the property to Ernie Rose’s grandfather, Anton Rose, an Austrian immigrant with seven children. Next week I’ll write more about Ernie Rose, a Boistfort native and World War II veteran of the Battle of the Bulge.
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
