WPA Interviews

Marsh, Charles

INTERVIEW

Mr. Charles Marsh, Ninth and Geary Streets, Albany, Oregon

Charles Marsh was born in Platte county, Missouri, June 1, 1854, to Granville Marsh, of Tennessee, and Margaret Jane Simpson Marsh, of Kentucky, the parents of his one sister and two brothers. They crossed the plains to Oregon when he was two years old. Their route was not straight to Oregon, though, and first they settled in Sacramento, California, where the father worked a year for a Judge Collins. The family came by sea from San Francisco to Portland early in the year 1858. First Mr. Marsh farmed in Jefferson and in 1860 moved to Linn county, where he bought, wisely, a farm on Knox Butte. A golf club is now built on his land.

When Charles was a boy he went to the Grasshopper school, at Knox Butte, and then because he got so he could read fairly well in the Fifth Reader, and because it seemed to be the rule in those parts for a fellow to quit school when he could do that, he quit, and went to work on a farm, "so's to earn my own keep."

Farm work was what he chose for a career and he has worked all his life as a farmhand. He said he used to get twenty-five dollars to thirty dollars a month, and in harvest a dollar and a half a day for sixteen hours work. In 1918 he earned the highest wages he ever got, four hundred dollars, for one hundred days of farm work at four dollars a day. "I guess you'll think I'm stretching that a mite, "he said, "but I'm not. I really did get four dollars a day!"

He has lived in Linn County since 1860 and never married - not even once. He took care of his parents after they got old, and washed and cooked for them, and anyway was as shy as a deer of "womenfolks, except Ma," and after "Ma and the old man passed away I sort of got out of the notion of marriage."

He thinks conditions are, of course, different now from what they were, but he says they changed so gradually that he, for one, could hardly notice any change at all.

He doesn't think prices are very different from what they were when he was a boy and he cites as examples a recently purchased pair of pants, "might sturdy," that cost him one dollar and sixty cents, and some brand-new thick-soled shoes "that'll have me steppin' some to wear 'em out before the good Lord calls me home," for which he paid one dollar and ninety-eight cents.

Copyright © 2000 Patricia Dunn. All rights reserved. This transcription may not be reproduced in any media without the express written permission by the author. Permission has been given by the Transcriber to publish on the LGS web site.