Taber Homestead: a Pioneer Story

By Fran Taber

June 03, 2010

This is the story of the Taber Homestead up Brender Canyon as filtered through long-time memories of Warren as told to his wife, Frances. There are, no doubt, the inevitable inaccuracies of memory, but the outline is true and, to me, amazing.

One hundred nine years ago, a small family arrived ‘out west’ by Union Pacific train and began their trek from the frontier town of Ellensburg, setting off by foot across the Colockum Pass with a herd of Angora goats and meager belongings. Twelve-year-old Bill Taber, his mother, Dalla Fleming and Grandmother Beebe had made their way from Atkinson, Nebraska through Spokane in order to homestead in a wooded canyon near the town of Old Mission. Making their way past the well-established Brender farm, they built a small house on a large flat along Brender Creek.

Grandmother laboriously began clearing the land with grub hoe and axe and slowly increased the open land, where they planted cherry and apricot trees. A dug well provided water that was carried to house and garden as well as to the trees. The goats had been brought as a way to bring in some cash as well as to provide milk, meat and fiber but they were unable to bear live young. It was later learned that the soil on the homestead lacked iodine and that lack caused the goats to abort. So they initially subsisted by gardening, hunting, and raising chickens. They had plenty of firewood, so kept warm in the long, cold winters.

Gradually there were neighbors, mostly men who were developing timber homesteads rather than family farms. Friction and friendship both developed, resulting in the dramatic shooting of a neighbor whose cows repeatedly trampled Grandma’s gardens, the family’s basic food supply. The women had warned them and after a confrontation at the broken down fence, they followed through with their threat in a burst of frustration and fury. It was the talk of the county for weeks until the trial, when Grandma was sentenced to Eastern State Hospital, where she eventually died. The ill-feelings generated by this event lasted for generations.

Meanwhile, another family had arrived in Everett, the Oliversons, straight from Stavanger, Norway by way of Fergus Falls, Minnesota. Hard-working Norwegians, they were building a life there, becoming farmers, whalers, and fishers. The middle daughter Alma had a pleasant childhood and in her late teens was engaged to be married. But during an epidemic early in the century, Alma contracted polio and was thereafter mostly confined to crutches and a wheelchair. Her fiancé broke off the engagement. The Oliverson family often journeyed to Cashmere during the summer to pick fruit and visit family who had settled in Brisky Canyon. It was during one of those summers that Alma met and married Bill Taber and settled on the homestead in a tiny two-room cabin. They still drew water from the well in the creek bottom, cooked on an Old Majestic wood stove. Their three children grew up in the canyon, Howard, Warren and Frances.

Bill Taber never finished school but held many jobs. He was the first rural route mail carrier out of Cashmere, a fruit inspector, and his great adventure was a trip back east to learn Morse code so he could be a telegrapher. He helped build houses, especially the one that still exists, on the homestead, which the family moved into in about 1936. He loved playing checkers at the Cashmere fire hall; he was a champion wood splitter. During harvest time, he and the children would pick their fruit and Alma would sit out in the yard in her chair and sort and pack it. Some years they would then load the Model A Ford and, with a goat on each running board, travel to Everett to sell the fruit and visit family. In the winter, he would park the car (‘so the plow didn’t have to come all the way up to the end of the road’) He would walk to Wenatchee to fill a gunny sack with books and walk back in a day—about 20 miles. And they would read and study by the light of Aladdin lamps. They had no electricity until 1937 when 16 year-old Warren dug the holes and set the poles so that his mother could have water in the house, electric lights and a radio and Victrola.

Alma mostly stayed home, keeping a spotless house, chasing kids and threatening them with her crutches, cooking, canning and baking-- her only relief being to sing in the church choir and an occasional visit to and from friends in the next canyon.

In 1933, Bill bought a 40 acre parcel a half-mile down the canyon from the homestead where he built the ‘little house’ where the family moved during the winters so as to be closer to town and the plowed road. On that property they also had a dug well and few amenities, but built a small warehouse in the cool creek bottom to store fruit.

After Warren returned to Cashmere after WW II, he bought the homestead from his parents and they bought a small house in Cashmere across from what is now the Pioneer Grocery and which Howard occupied after their deaths. It has since burned down. The old homestead is now owned jointly by 4 of Warren’s children, the 40-acre parcel by his wife, Fran.

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