This post was created by Allia Service, class of 2022.

The history of home cooking, and women’s household labor is often obscured by a lack of obvious sources. ODNP offers a window into this world through women’s pages and food sections, which were both common in 20th Century newspapers.  The Sunday Oregonian included a cooking advice column written by Lillian Tingle, that provides an intimate view into the home kitchens of Oregon women.  

Sunday Oregonian, December 24th, 1922, Page 48. https://oregonnews.uoregon.edu/lccn/sn83045782/1922-12-24/ed-1/seq-48/

In the winter and spring of 2022, I researched home cooking in Oregon through Tingle’s home cooking correspondence column (1908-1929). I first wrote my undergraduate history capstone, and then created a digital humanities (DH) project. The project centers on women from across the Pacific Northwest who wrote to Tingle with questions that ranged from broad to specific. What united all of Tingle’s correspondents was that they were navigating big changes to U.S. food ways as more women had to cook for themselves instead of relying on servants and home economics blossomed. My project includes a map representing the geographic distribution of Tingle’s correspondents over time and a historical food blog, which investigates Tingle’s recipes, the relationship between Tingle and her correspondents, and connections between Tingle’s column-community and modern online food content.  

The first recipe I recreated was her most popular fruit cake recipe.

For this project, I read hundreds of Tingle’s columns between 1910 and 1925.  The Sunday Oregonian was long, usually 50-100 pages. ODNP’s search tools helped me quickly find the columns so I could use my time for research instead of slogging through hundreds of pages I didn’t need. I enjoyed getting a sense of questions and anxieties that plagued housewives in the kitchen. For the food blog, I recreated some of Tingle’s most popular recipes and highlighted some of the best stories from the column.   

One of my posts focuses on a strange fad that swept through Portland in 1912 called “rose beads.” The first few times I read about rose beads I had no idea what they were. Since Tingle’s column focused almost exclusively on food, I assumed they were edible, maybe a dessert? In fact, they are decorative beads made from rose petals. The fad is somewhat incomprehensible from a modern standpoint. The beads usually turn out black or grayish, sometimes dyed red or pink, shriveled and decidedly homemade.  

My attempt at rose beads produced these unattractive purplish-gray beads that only became grayer and dustier as they dried.

And yet, Tingle’s column was overrun with requests. On July 21st, 1912, alone 6 out of 8 correspondents wrote in with questions about rose beads. Tingle became increasingly exasperated as her column, previously full of recipes for bread, canned food and cake, was hijacked with pleas for help with an inedible decoration. She wrote in 1912, “When the rose bead fever seizes a victim nothing can be done but provide the necessary recipes and materials and wait in patience for the attack to pass.” Even a “puzzled bachelor” wrote in July of 1912 to express his curiosity:  

Tingle, Lilian. “Answers to Correspondents.” Sunday Oregonian, July 21, 1912, Page 56. https://oregonnews.uoregon.edu/lccn/sn83045782/1912-07-21/ed-1/seq-56/

Both Tingle and the puzzled bachelor are dismissive of women and their hobbies. Men also participate in seemingly frivolous fads and trends, but society generally does not judge them as harshly. Although after making the beads for myself, I have to agree with the puzzled bachelor, the roses were far more beautiful before being mangled and mummified. 

Women’s Pages and ODNP 

Tingle’s column provided an invaluable resource to hundreds of people in the early 20th Century and represents a transition toward reliance on ‘experts’ to learn household skills like cooking. It gives us a window into a period of transition, especially for middle-class housewives both in cities and rural areas. The Sunday Oregonian was a regional paper and many people outside of the Portland area only got the Sunday edition, which is reflected in the makeup of Tingle’s correspondents. Over the columns I studied, about 50% of correspondents were from Portland. The rest were scattered among 214 localities across the west. Which indicates that Tingle’s appeal, and the appeal of domestic science wasn’t just for city women. To investigate this geographic diversity, I created an interactive map that displays the distribution of Tingle’s correspondents over time.   

This shows all of the correspondents I recorded, to interact with the map, it’s available here.

Tingle’s column was part of a robust women’s section in The Sunday Oregonian. Unlike smaller Oregon papers from the time, it is full of illustrations, graphic advertisements, and content beyond standard news. The Sunday Oregonian is far from the only paper in ODNP to include a women’s section or food journalism. According to historian Kimberly Wilmot Voss, women’s pages in newspapers started appearing in the late 19th Century, and often covered society, fashion, ‘women’s news,’ and food. Food pages didn’t become prominent until the 1950s, but food columns and sections certainly existed before the mid-century boom. They were sometimes included in the women’s page or sometimes a separate entity, but they were often written by women. The women’s pages and food sections were both places were women journalists innovated and participated in important, often overlooked journalism, and they were cages that newspaper editors used to prevent women from accessing the prestigious ‘hard news’ sections. Here is a list of just a few ODNP papers that include women’s pages and/or food sections during some, or all, of their run, there are undoubtedly many more:  

• Klamath news 1926-1931 
• Oregon city enterprise 1891-1922 
• La Grande evening observer 1904-1959  
• Roseburg news review 1920-1945 
• Capital journal 1919-1980  
• The Oregon daily journal 1902-1972 
• The Oregon statesman 1918-1994 
• East Oregonian 1888-2019 (From 1916-1918 this paper includes a common supplement promoted by the federal government called “daily chats with the housewife” about war rationing) 

In “The Significance of Trivia,” celebrated historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich talks about why the history of household labor is important and how she found historical meaning in the diary of a midwife in which previous historians saw no value. She quotes a history of childbirth which concluded that the diary “is filled with trivia about domestic chores and pastimes.” By taking both a qualitative and quantitative approach to the diary, Ulrich found enormous meaning, and encouraged historians to pay “attention to the mundanities (and profundities) of housework.”   

One of the goals of this project was to encourage more investigation into the history of home cooking as seen in newspapers, since ODNP is open access, it is an incredible resource where anyone can do this kind of research. What we eat, how we think about food, and the people who prepare it can give us a window into an understudied aspect of American social and political history.   

Bert Dunn— Historic Oregon Newspapers advocate and history buff— describes his new book and his important fundraising work for digitization of Coquille newspapers.

Can you tell us a little about your project and yourself?
Working with my coauthors we have completed a photographic history book on Coquille, Oregon.  The book titled Coquille was published by Arcadia Publishing within their Images of America series. I am retired and living in Springfield but Coquille is my hometown.  My coauthors were Andie Jensen of Coos Bay and Yvonne-Cher Skye of Coquille.

What led you to Historic Oregon Newspapers?
I was always curious about Coquille history but become more interested after using the ODNP website to access historic newspapers for prior projects. These projects included completing an exhibit for the Springfield Museum and assisting another author on his book.

The ODNP website proved so useful that I began raising money to digitize historic Coquille newspapers. The results have been amazing; 35 years of newspapers have been completed and another 17 years are being funded. Vast amounts of new historical information are now easily accessible and searchable by the public.

How did you use Historic Oregon Newspapers online and which titles were useful to you?
The ODNP online historic newspapers were an extraordinary source of valuable information for our book.  I was able to search many papers simultaneously.  I found relevant information in many papers including the Coquille, Bandon, Roseburg, Coos Bay and Portland papers.

Where can we purchase/access your book?
The book is available through national retailers as well as numerous outlets in southwest Oregon including the Coquille Valley Museum.

What’s your next project?
I will continue to work on raising money to put Coquille newspapers online as they effectively support future research of many people including authors, teachers, students, genealogists and general history buffs.  I will also be an ongoing advocate and coach for new users of the ODNP website.

Blog post compiled and edited by Jes Sokolowski

Dr. Tracy J. Prince shares how she takes advantage of the sources available on Historic Oregon Newspapers to uncover forgotten histories of Portland.

Can you tell us a little about your publication(s) and yourself?

I’m a Professor at Portland State University’s American Indian Teacher Program (in the College of Education) and the author of Portland’s Goose Hollow and Culture Wars in British Literature: Multiculturalism and National Identity and co-author of Notable Women of Portland and Portland’s Slabtown. Fellowships and teaching opportunities have taken me to Malta (as a Fulbright Senior Specialist), France, England, Canada, South Africa, Australia, and Turkey, but Oregon has been my home since 2001.

What interested you in this topic?

All of my research has focused on what has been overlooked in previous histories and trying to uncover and tell those stories in my books. Growing up in the South, in poverty, in a family that had hidden most of its racial history—I’ve always had a lot of questions about race, gender, and social equity issues in history. In my three Oregon history books, I dove deep, trying to understand the lives of women, blue-collar immigrants, and people of color—stories that weren’t considered significant in earlier histories of Portland.

What resources did you use for your research?

The Historic Oregon Newspapers online was my most important source. I also researched at many archives, including: Oregon Historical Society, City of Portland Archives, Portland State University Archives, OSU and U of O Archives, State of Oregon Archives, Oregon Jewish Museum archives, Portland Art Museum, and many others.

What did you use in Historic Oregon Newspapers online? How did you use the site and which titles were useful to you?

I focused my search on Portland resources including: The West Shore, Oregon Daily Journal, Oregonian, Morning Oregonian, and Sunday Oregonian.

Historic Oregon Newspapers online was life-changing for my research! Back in the olden days, in 1997, when I received my Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska, research had to be conducted in the library, holding a book, journal, or newspaper in my hand or scrolling through microfiche or microfilm. The miracle of Historic Oregon Newspapers online was being able to do key-word searches in historic newspapers to try to understand what was happening in Portland in the 1840s to 1910s. While writing most of my books, my children were small, so I did a lot of my research online, after I put my kids to bed. Using Historic Oregon Newspapers online, I read most mentions of the word “Indian” from the 1840s-1870s in Portland. I looked for mentions of Chinese vegetable gardens and black pioneers and women pioneers.

My three Portland history books could not have happened without the fantastic Oregon Digital Newspapers resource! Here are some of the discoveries I made in my digital newspapers research:

My Portland’s Goose Hollow book (2011, Arcadia), explores the history of Native American, Chinese, Irish, German, and Jewish residents of one of Portland’s oldest neighborhoods and the now-buried Tanner Creek that carved out the gulch giving Goose Hollow its name.

Thanks to Historic Oregon Newspapers online, I was able to uncover lots of forgotten information about Tanner Creek and the Tanner Creek Gulch before the creek was buried; how the gulch was infilled and turned into sports fields for the Multnomah Athletic Club (now Providence Park-where Elvis once performed) and Lincoln High School; and the hundreds of Chinese gardeners living and working in Goose Hollow.

My two most surprising discoveries were finding digital newspaper articles about Native Americans living near the Chinese gardeners in the gulch and finding the original 1870s Oregonian article “A War About Geese” describing the incident where Goose Hollow first got its name after women fought over geese and assaulted a police officer who responded to the ruckus. This article has never been seen in any other Portland history book and took hundreds of hours of research to find. These Native American and Goose Hollow origin stories would’ve been impossible to find without the fantastic resource of Oregon’s digitized newspapers.

My Portland’s Slabtown book (2013, Arcadia, co-authored) covers northwest Portland (from the Willamette River to the Tualatin Mountains), much of which was once called Slabtown. Thanks to searching Historic Oregon Newspapers online, I was able to uncover a forgotten Native-American village in northwest Portland in the long-forgotten and infilled Johnson Creek Gulch. This was a stunning find, as I read an Oregonian interview with a pioneer who was reminiscing about a Native American village and sweat lodge near NW 19^th and Overton. I just about fell over as I read the newspaper article online. Other digitized articles helped me uncover much more extensive Chinese vegetable gardens than previously known; stories of Chinese and Native people speaking Chinook Jargon (also called Chinook Wawa) to each other; stories of Native Americans returning annually to northwest Portland’s Wallace Park for seasonal trading encampments (until at least the 1930s); and many stories about the buried creeks, lakes, and gulches of northwest Portland. Most of this incredible history would remain unknown today if Oregon’s Digitized Newspaper project did not exist.

In my Notable Women of Portland book (2017, Arcadia, co-authored with Zadie Schaffer), my research uncovers the almost completely forgotten presence of Native Americans in Portland history and other complex ethnic and blue-collar stories that are often overlooked, with chapters on Native and pioneer women, Progressive Era women, women of WWI, WWII, and post-war, women in the arts and women in politics. Oregon’s Digitized Newspapers allowed me to:

-Uncover a more complex history of Native American women in early Portland than any other historian has covered (including the pervasive use of Chinook Jargon).

-Correct the record and find more information on Black pioneer Sydna Francis’s family. She wrote for Frederick Douglass’s newspaper and was prominent in New York abolitionist activism before moving to Portland in 1851. I found advertisements for the store on Front Street that she and her husband ran. Oregon histories refer to her brother-in-law (a Portland merchant) by the incorrect name of O.B. Francis. Digitized newspapers allowed me to find an 1852 Oregonian ad from his store to prove that his name was I.B. Francis.

-Find photos of Oregon women in WWI and WWII, including newspaper articles about women heading off to join the Yeomanettes or to be a Red Cross nurse at the Presidio.

-Learn more about women working in Portland’s shipbuilding industry

-Find a previously unknown illustration of the Oregon Camera Club where Lily White and Sarah Ladd were prominent members.

-Find an image and biography of Capt. Minnie Hill, the only woman riverboat captain west of the Mississippi.

-Find an article where Tolstoi praised the metaphysical writings of Lucy Mallory.

Where can we purchase/access your work?

The books are available at Powells, most Portland bookstores, many libraries, Amazon, etc.

What’s your next project?

I’m constantly researching for these future books. For all but the last one, I’m again relying heavily on Historic Oregon Newspapers online:

-Native American Art of Oregon

-The Forgotten Native American History of Portland

-Chinese Vegetable Gardens of the West Coast

-Might Oughta Keep Singin’ (about race and music in the American South told through four generations in Arkansas).

Meeting a kindred soul:

At every talk I give around the state, I mention how grateful I am to have the Historic Oregon Newspapers online resource, how it has allowed me to uncover a much more multicultural history than is ever taught in histories of Portland, and how researching online allowed me to research at home when I had two small children and couldn’t’ve spent hours at the library. I also tell people what a wonderful resource this is for ancestry research. After one of my talks, a woman came toward me with a big smile and told me that she couldn’t believe she was in the audience as I told this story, since she and her late husband David Arlington were some of the early donors to the effort to digitize Oregon’s newspapers. I was so excited to shake Andrea Arlington’s hand and thank her, to tell her how much their contributions meant to my research, to tell her how my research on Oregon’s multicultural history is now being used in many public schools, to tell her how life-changing this resource has been to my work! What a wonderful gift to give generations of researchers, to help tell the complex histories of Oregon that earlier historians didn’t think to focus on. I encourage folks to dig in and see what you can uncover.