Tragedy and the strawberry
festival
by By Bill Miller
for the Mail Tribune
Monday, September 23rd 2019
Three children stood
at the rail of the ship and watched as their mother’s lifeless body fell into
the Pacific Ocean.
Three-hundred miles
south of San Francisco and on their way to join their father in Portland,
12-year-old Mary McGhee took charge of her brother Melville, 8, and sister
Joanna, 7.
“We three children
had to see her dropped over the side of the boat and buried at sea,” Mary said.
It was March 29,
1854, nearing the end of a journey that began near Jefferson City, Missouri.
Cordelia, the
children’s mother, had not seen her husband for nearly three years.
John Wesley McGhee
had left for the California gold fields in 1850, but finding little success, he
moved north to the diggings near Yreka. Rather than struggle to find a fortune
in gold, as an ordained Methodist minister he had decided it was better to
preach to the mining population.
“The removal of most
of his congregation from Northern California to Southern Oregon,” Mary said,
“caused him to come to Southern Oregon.”
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| Mary McGhee Day |
He settled briefly
in Sams Valley, but Mary said in 1853 Chief Sam of the Taklema band warned him
of trouble.
“You are a Bible
man. I don’t want you killed,” the chief said, “Go away for a while. My young
men are going on the warpath.”
McGhee went to Salem
and took up a land claim southeast of the city. There he wrote to his wife and
sent her money to bring the family West.
Cordelia gathered
the children and caught the stage to St. Louis, where they rode a riverboat to
New Orleans. From there they sailed to Aspinwall, Panama, where they traveled
west across the Isthmus, by then the fastest route to California and Oregon.
Their fare included
railroad tickets on the still incomplete Panama Canal Railway and a relatively
comfortable 12-mile mule ride to the Pacific.
As they headed north
on a steamship, 32-year-old Cordelia broke out with Panama Fever, a variant of
malaria common to the Chagres River Valley of Panama. She died within days.
After arriving in
Portland, Mary had to find her father.
“At Oregon City we
met a man who knew my father,” she said. “He took us to Salem and out to my
father’s place. Father asked me, ‘Where is your mother, Mary?’ and I said she
was buried at sea three days before we got to San Francisco.”
Without a wife and having
no way to take care of his children, McGhee placed them in Tabitha Brown’s
orphanage and school in Forest Grove. When he remarried and decided to move to
Washington, Mary and Melville stayed at school, and little Joanna went with
their father.
Mary was one of the
first graduates of the Tualatin Academy that would soon become Pacific University. “I took up teaching as my life’s work,” she said.
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| Add caption |
At a Salem
strawberry festival in 1870, Mary’s life work took a detour when the president
of the university approached her.
“He said, ‘Mary, I
want you to meet a friend of mine from Southern Oregon.’ He introduced me to
Mr. Day,” Mary said.
A little later, a
fellow university student approached, and he too introduced her to Mr. Day.
That evening, a third friend approached, but this time Mary was ready.
“He said, ‘Mary, I
want you to meet,’ I said, I know him already. His name is Silas Day. He is a
miner and lives in Jacksonville.”
Silas called on Mary
the next day and they began their “courting by letter.” They married May 22,
1871. They had four children and would remain in Jacksonville for the rest of
their lives.
Writer Bill Miller
is the author of “History Snoopin’,” a collection of his previous history
columns and stories. Reach him at newsmiller@live.com or WilliamMMiller.com.
