Each year, the library friends group ALFA produces a heritage calendar with historic photos, trivia, and other materials. In 2006, notecards with drawings by Annie Mae Jensen of architecturally significant historic buildings have been an added fundraiser. For purchase details for the calendars and the cards, see the ALFA website.
The Athena Public Library collection includes many primary documents from yesteryear for genealogical and historical research into family and community heritage: scrapbooks, newspapers, cemetery records, voter registrations, water bills, school registration books, organization minutes, photos, issues of Pioneer Trails, local history books, and more. The Athena Library Friends Association [ALFA] is working on organizing, indexing, and archiving these materials. The library also cooperates with other libraries and museums, and with sources on the Internet, to obtain additional materials for researchers. Your contributions of copies of your family trees, photos, and documents would help expand the collection; please confer with the librarian about what you might provide. ALFA also produces annual calendars: "A Glimpse Into Athena's Heritage."
If you happen to take the WALKING TOUR of Athena, do add a stop at the library during its open hours.
For another angle on Athena history, take a visit to the Athena Cemetery, where family names reverberate, some gravestone sculptures of yore are unusual or artistic, the views out over the fields to the Blue Mountains are lovely, and the shade is welcome on a hot day.
To get to the cemetery, go north on one of numbered streets from Main to Sherman Street, turn west and drive (or walk) up the hill.
In 1839 Thomas Farnham, a member of the Peoria Party Expedition, carried his journal strapped to his back and wrote each night about the day's events coming over the Oregon Trail. At one juncture he wrote of crossing ".... over a series of mountains swelling one above the other in long and gentle ascents covered with noble forests of yellow pine, fir and hemlock." In the evening, according to his account, "the mountains hid the lower sky, and walled out the lower world. We looked upon the beautiful heights of the Blue Mountains, and ate among its spring blossoms, its singing pines, and holy battlements."
In 1866, a 37-year-old bachelor from New York state, Darwin R. Richards traveled over much the same route but came further on, to claim a homestead of 160 to 200 acres near Wild Horse Creek. He intended to farm, but soon realized the need for a stagecoach stop, and founded one complete with postal service. The station -- which became known as Richards' Station -- was described as a "low rambling structure on the brow of the hill" where the long-used Indian trail crossed with the road leading down to Wild Horse Creek. The Athena library recently received the gift from Ronald and Fay Haverland of Richards' family Bible, with his signature in fine penmanship, and a record of his marriage on Dec. 21, 1878, to Maria Louise Meador. As part of a grant from the Oregon Council for the Humanities in 2004 to the Athena Library Friends Association, specialist/genealogist Connie Lenzen was able to produce a great many more facts about Richards, his travels, his wife, and his properties by using land records, old newspapers, and other primary documents. The library now has the information of file with details on a display board.
Not short of ambition, Richards undertook to lay out a townsite of four blocks (along what is now Darwin Street), naming the settlement Bellview. The name did not take hold -- being variously called Mudflats, Middletown, Squawtown, and Yellow Dog -- although the settlement began to.
 | Thomas J. Kirk (born in 1839 in Missouri) arrived in Umatilla County in 1871 after the majority of the wrangling was past about where to place the county seat, and just one year before the county's official founding -- with the county seat at Pendleton -- in 1872. He soon purchased 1,560 acres of land adjoining Richards' section. |
As the town lay midway between Pendleton and Walla Walla, the name Centerville was adopted. In the summer of 1878, Allie Stafford -- then 18 years old -- wrote a letter to her grandmother: "Our little town is coming right along ... fourteen houses, two blacksmith shops, one beef shop, one grocery store, one agriculture house, one livery stable, one hotel, and the big harness shop." She forgot to mention the Christian Church which had been founded in 1873.
Eventually, not only had Richards' Addition been added, but also Kirk's 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th additions, as well as Rose's Addition, Knowlton's Addition, and Stafford's Addition.
It was no easy task to get the town established. This was the time of the Bannock Indian Wars. A diptheria epidemic swept the area, costing many lives, particularly amongst the children. If young Allie Stafford hadn't been among the fatalities, she might have written another letter about the coming of a railroad depot on the northside and about the building in 1880 of the hotel St. Nichols at Third and Main, a structure advertised in an 1887 Centervillian newspaper as "first class."
Centerville's continued growth (reaching 120 by 1882) necessitated a 2-storey brick schoolhouse built in the mid-1870s in the town's center. When D. W. Jarvis was hired in 1877 as superintendent, his background as a classical scholar led him to compare the town's surrounding landscapes with the terrain of Greece; thus he suggested the name of Athena when confusion arose with other Centervilles in Oregon and Washington. The state legislature officially confirmed the name Athena on May 16, 1889.
In 1890, C.A. Barrett, then Mayor, joined with other businessmen to incorporate the First National Bank. Barrett was also instrumental in bringing electricity, phones, and a water system to Athena. At the time, saloons lined a whole block on Main Street and three doctors resided in the town. The main crop continued to be wheat for several decades; peas were later added as a second major crop.
Photo courtesy of Wheatland Graphics collection.
A traveler's guide in 1940 encompassed the following entry: The old town of ATHENA, 17.7 m. (1,713 alt., 504 pop.), on State 11 by Wild Horse Creek, was a stage station on the road from Walla Walla to Pendleton. It was long the scene of an annual camp meeting with horse racing as an added diversion. A cannery, absorbing the pea yields of former wheat lands, gives the town an increasing economic importance.
Athena's first high school graduation was in 1897, with ten graduates. In 1915 a new school building was ready for use, and housed all 12 grades until McEwen High School was built in 1948 on land donated by the family of former Mayor Andrew B. McEwen. The 1915 building was destroyed by fire in 1975, and a new $1.3 million elementary school opened in 1977. (See also a walking tour of the town's early buildings).
SELECTED SOURCES:
Athena Press, issues archived at the Athena library.
Gaston, Joseph, Centennial History of Oregon, Chicago: SJ Clarke Publishing, 1912.
Geissel, Genevieve and Mildred Miley, Athena, Once Centerville, Has Interesting History, Umatilla County Historical Society Pioneer Trails, V2, no.3, April 1978.
Gilbert, Frank T., Historic Sketches, Portland, Oregon: AG Walling Printing, 1882.
Tillman, Barrett, Athena History website, as viewed on 28 July 2001. [Information now incorporated into Caledonian Games website.]
All materials copyright J_H_M Associates, 2004-2005.
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