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.  

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.  

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.  

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:  

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.   

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.   

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.

King Con: The Bizarre Adventures of the Jazz Age’s Greatest Impostor will be released on August 7th! Read more about the Oregon connections author Paul Willetts discovered while researching below:

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

I’m a U.K.-based writer of nonfiction, most of which has focused on true stories set against a twentieth-century London backdrop. Probably the best-known of these in my home country was a book called Members Only, which has adapted into The Look of Love, a lavish and quite stylish movie starring Steve Coogan.

My books are often described as “novelistic.” Without embellishing the verifiable facts of a story, I try to shape my research into a dramatic narrative that conveys a strong sense of place, character, and period. I suppose I’m instinctively drawn to tragi-comic stories, to stories that give us an insight into the wider society in which they took place. That’s certainly true of my latest book, King Con: The Bizarre Adventures of the Jazz Age’s Greatest Impostor—which is the first of my books to be published in the U.S.A. Spanning the period between 1917 and 1929, it’s about Edgar Laplante, a handsome and extraordinarily charismatic Rhode Island-born vaudeville singer and con-man, who was a bit like a cross between Jay Gatsby and Tom Ripley (with a dash of David Bowie’s blurred sexuality and shapeshifting theatricality).

In search of attention and acclaim, Laplante reinvents himself as Chief White Elk, leader of the Cherokee nation. He ends up traveling to Europe to meet the British king. While he’s there, he captivates a pair of fabulously rich Austrian countesses who bankroll his “royal tour” of fascist Italy, where he becomes a darling of Mussolini’s regime, routinely greeted by thousands of adoring fans.

But this isn’t a straightforward con-trick story. Over just a few months, Laplante gives away his ill-gotten-gains—equivalent to as much as $58 million in 2018 currency!

What interested you in this topic?

Absolutely everything—the period; the intriguing and very strange personality of the man at the center of it; the various settings, which range from First World War-era America to 1920s Paris and the French Riviera. Immediately I came across the Edgar Laplante saga, I knew I had the ingredients of a book that’d generate a good advance from a U.S. publisher and that would, more to the point, be fun to research and write. Edgar Laplante’s often absurd antics certainly kept me entertained.

At that time I was keen to find a specifically American story and use that as a means to switch to a U.S. publisher, partly because your country has a stronger tradition of novelistic nonfiction, and partly because I love American books. Not just the contents, but the way they’re designed and produced. To me, they always feel far superior to their British counterparts.

One of the lovely things about writing nonfiction is that you learn so much when you’re working on it. As with my previous books, I’ve gone to great lengths to comprehend the world within which my protagonist pulled his various cons. Understanding the nature of communications between cities at that time was key to understanding how an impostor like him could keep conning people and then just moving on to another city.

What resources did you use for your research?

I drew on a vast amount of material that generated about half-a-million words of notes. The central thread of the story relied upon old files from Scotland Yard and the Bureau of Investigation (the precursor of the F.B.I.); letters held at Washington State University; a smattering of obscure memoirs; along with a staggering number of newspaper and magazine stories published in America, Canada, Belgium, France, Italy, Switzerland, and the U.K. I was pleasantly surprised at how these enabled me to put together such a detailed portrait of the life of someone so transient.

For my depiction of the countless places through which Laplante moved, I used vintage travel guides, newspapers, photo archives, architectural floorplans, and the work of recent historians. I have, of course, done my best to synthesize this into a book that aspires to be as readable and entertaining as possible. Whether I’ve succeeded, though, isn’t for me to say…

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

I mainly used your digital newspaper collection, which features eight stories about Laplante, a.k.a. Chief White Elk. These appeared in publications such as The Morning Oregonian between 1918 and 1920 when he made two forays into Oregon with his first wife—a genuine Native American, who is herself a fascinating character. Born Burtha Thompson, she was a bright and beautiful proto-feminist who styled herself Princess Ah-Tra-Au-Saun. That’s a name familiar to people who are interested in the pioneers of American photography, because she repeatedly modelled for the great portraitist, Emma Belle Freeman. But I digress…

Getting back to your original questions, your digital archive renders the research process much, much easier than it used to be. Paradoxically, this sort of digital technology makes it possible for writers like me to evoke the pre-digital world. For instance, I routinely use word-searches in order to obtain information about such things as weather, specific streets, and sartorial fashions. The only trouble is, such textural detail tend to lead misguided readers to assume I’m fictionalising the past.

Where can we purchase/access your book?

It’ll be available through Barnes & Noble and independent bookshops, as well as websites such as Amazon and Indiebound.

What’s your next project? I’ve just put together a proposal for a new book, though I haven’t yet shown it to either my U.S. or British agents. It’s for what could be described as a nonfiction thriller—a label that is, I know, frequently applied to books that are less than thrilling. Well, I hope this’ll buck the trend. Like King Con, it focuses on a bizarre and dramatic story that hasn’t, astonishingly, generated masses of previous books.

For more information about Paul and his work, visit www.paulwilletts.com.

John Riha, Ashland-based author, discusses the historically-rooted inspiration for his latest novel!

Can you tell us about your book?

The Bounty Huntress is an historical novel set in southern Oregon in the early part of the 20th century. It tells the fictionalized story of Iris Greenlee, Oregon’s first female bounty hunter. Iris is a young farm girl from the Applegate Valley whose father—a game warden in Jackson County—is murdered when she is very young. She grows up tough and rough-hewn, and learns many practical survival skills, including hunting deer in the nearby mountains. When she and her small family—her widowed mother and autistic brother—are nearly overwhelmed with setbacks, indignities, and the threat of the loss of the family farm, Iris is determined to make money by using her backwoods knowledge: She’ll hunt wanted criminals for money.

Tell us about yourself.

I’m a longtime media executive from the Midwest with a professional history that includes writing and editing for many national publications. I was the Executive Editor of Better Homes and Gardens and the Editorial Director for Meredith Corporation’s Special Interest Media, a group of more than 120 magazines and seven websites. After raising our two boys in Iowa, my wife and I decided to move back to the West, to Ashland, where we had met in 1984. I now freelance write and edit for national magazines and websites, and I’m slowly turning my career toward writing books, especially historical fiction and humor.

What interested you in this topic?

The part of the story about the murdered game warden is true. I ran across one of those “100 Years Ago Today” articles in the Medford Mail Tribune about the crime, and I became intrigued. I was especially interested in the fact that the murderer was acquitted in a raucous trial, even though there was a reliable eyewitness to the crime. Also of interest was the fact that the warden had two small children at the time of his death—a four-year-old girl and two-year-old boy. Add to that the fact that the accused murderer himself was murdered 16 years later in an unsolved crime. I began to wonder, “What if those kids grew up and took their revenge?” That classic revenge theme was the genesis for the novel. The part about Iris Greenlee becoming a bounty huntress is fiction.

What resources did you use for your research?

The archives available through Historic Oregon Newspapers online were invaluable. In researching the murder, I was able to follow the crime from the shooting all the way through the trial in great detail. Many small observations and nuances noted in the historical articles were a great help in adding color and authenticity to the novel. I was able to corroborate facts in other local newspaper accounts and the Oregonian. Other period articles and even advertisements were extremely valuable in setting the tone and creating language appropriate to the period. I also spent many hours at the Southern Oregon Historical Society Library in Medford, researching details such as the construction and floor plans of the county jail and courthouse in Jacksonville, and viewing historic photos depicting the towns and rural locations of Jackson County.

Where can we purchase/access your book?

The Bounty Huntress is available through Amazon and any book store can order copies. Locally, it’s at Bloomsbury Books in Ashland, rebel heart books in Jacksonville, and Reader’s Guide Books in Salem.

What’s your next project?

Travelling along the coast last year we stopped at the Coast Guard Lifeboat Station in Port Orford. Although it’s decommissioned now, they had an extremely treacherous and dramatic launch point for rescue operations in the 1930s. That definitely got me thinking, so we’ll see if that manifests into another book.