"IF THERE IS such a monument to Bickleton's staying power and rural eccentricity, it's the Whoop-n-Holler Museum a few miles south of town. There, on Lawrence and Ada Ruth Whitmore's family farm, sits a cache of community history and odd memorabilia.
A collection of ancient farm equipment is spread across the rolling bunchgrass fields, and inside a large shed you'll find a couple dozen of Lawrence's classics: Model T's, Studebakers, a horse-drawn hearse on sled runners. He acquired them in trade, by buying real cheap or by rescuing them from the wrecking yard before restoring and polishing them to museum quality.
One of his grandfathers settled the land they live on and another, Frank Churchill, was known around Bickleton as "the snake charmer" because he had a way with rattlers. There's a grainy old photograph in the Whitmore house showing him holding onto and wrapped up by 13 rattlesnakes. He never got bit and was known to bust up poker games by taking off his hat and letting the snakes inside slither out. Churchill was also a moonshiner, which may explain his courage.
Another building on the Whitmore property is called the "treasure house" and contains a smorgasbord of curiosities. Leg irons worn by prisoners from a Walla Walla chain gang. Rattlesnake skins and petrified tarantulas. A 1959 electric lunch pail (with instructions). Art made from plant and tree roots. Pack saddles. The first bathtub Lawrence and Ada ever owned. A pump organ on which Ada Ruth, without prompting, will sit down at and play "What a Friend We Have in Jesus."
The most curious item of all is contained in a glass display case, next to an old ring with a pill compartment. It's the false teeth that once rested inside the mouth of Lawrence's great-grandmother.
Not far from the treasure house is an 1896 one-room schoolhouse. It has a chain of tiny desks with dusty textbooks, a pot-bellied stove and confiscated sling shots hanging behind the teacher's station. To enhance the visitors' experience, Ada Ruth had Lawrence rip off wood sheathing someone had nailed over the walls to keep out drafts.
"My wife likes to use French words like, 'we,'" said Lawrence, who is 73, tall, burly and gravel-voiced. He motioned toward the walls inside the schoolhouse. "Guess who did all the 'we' on this."
Not that Ada Ruth is a slacker. The closest thing Bickleton has to a historical society is the shelving in her house. In various rooms she has stored dozens of binders and boxes filled with clippings, photographs, letters, government records. They tell stories of fires, schools, poor farms, sheep herding, eccentric hermits, ranches, the post office, the Bickleton gas station (it has none now) and the pioneer picnic.
She has the scoop on the daring robbery of the Bickleton Bank in 1917, in which the banker got locked in the safe, and the town's last murder - in 1879. Actually, the murder was in Cleveland, a tinier town to the west.
Ada Ruth co-authored a picture book of the area's history, which looks at the various settlements around the hub of Bickleton, like Glade, Bluelight and her hometown of Dot. She's also in proud possession of a book that lists the first 50 years of Klickitat County marriage licenses.
Her most exhaustive work, though, concerns the dead.
For 31 years, she has dug through records, sent letters and made phone calls in an effort to determine just who is in each grave within the area's nine pioneer cemeteries. Once she's found the identity, she works to get at least a concrete marker in place. Sometimes she pesters the families, sometimes the community chips in, sometimes she and Lawrence just buy them. Over the past two decades, more than 200 markers have been laid thanks to her.
"I just think people shouldn't be forgotten," she said.
Lawrence is renovating the large storage bay of an ice-cream truck parked on their property, turning it into an office where Ada Ruth can keep her mounds of historic papers. All those records will be more secure in there, they reason, if or when fire sweeps across the bunchgrass."
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BLUEBIRDS AND BLOODLINES: FLOCKS AND FOLKS TRAVEL TO A STEADY BICKLETON BEAT by Richard Seven
