Blowing up the school was once a Mohawk community tradition

As of the time of this writing, it’s election season, and some of us are being asked to approve bond measures for local schools. So, most likely I don’t have to tell you that such debates can get pretty heated.

We should count our blessings, though. Some Oregonians used to argue over this sort of thing with dynamite.

More specifically, a few of the residents of the unincorporated hamlet of Mohawk did.

Mohawk is situated in the heart of the Mohawk River Valley a dozen or so miles northeast of the Eugene-Springfield metro area. It hasn’t always been called Mohawk. Over the years it’s been named Donna and Ping Yang — Ping Yang having been, in the mid-1890s, the popular English pronunciation of Pyongyang, then the capital of Korea (and today the capital of North Korea).

In the early fall of 1894, Pyongyang had just made headlines worldwide as the scene of a historic battle between the colonial forces of China, which had dominated the Korean peninsula for years, and the “liberating” armies of Japan. The Chinese had outnumbered the Japanese armies by a good margin, so the outcome had been very unexpected. As a result, the “plucky” Japanese warriors had captured the imaginations of newspaper readers worldwide. Within a year the battle was a regular subject in the pulps and serials of the day.

Also within a year, a little one-room schoolhouse was built in the Mohawk Valley. The community named it Ping Yang School.

There are other theories on the origin of the name. But if the Ping Yang school was in fact named after a battlefield, it was an appropriate choice, because it quickly became one — in more than just a metaphorical sense.

You see, a sizeable percentage of the population did not want the school to be built where it ended up. Basically, everyone wanted it built close to where they lived, so that their kids wouldn’t have to walk as far and because they figured the neighborhood around the school would become the most important part of the growing town.

Everyone wanted it close, that is, except Old Joe Huddleston, the man who actually lived next door to the chosen site. Old Joe hated the noise of children at play — and more about him in a red-hot minute.

Speaking of red-hot stuff — almost immediately after the school was built, someone snuck in at night and tried to torch the place, by dumping coal oil on the floor and lighting it off. This did not work. Most likely that’s down to the fact that the almost-brand-new school was built with green lumber fresh from the local sawmill. Anyone who’s tried to get unseasoned firewood to burn knows there’s not enough kerosene in the world to get that job done. Especially not in an unheated building on a foggy, drizzly February night in the Mohawk Valley.

In any case, the coal oil flared off and flickered out, and the frustrated would-be firebug had to slink back to the drawing board to come up with another plan.

Which he did, three months later, when he skulked back under cover of night with a few sticks of dynamite.

“Several sticks of dynamite were placed under the house and exploded,” the Eugene Weekly Guard reported, “with the result that the building was completely demolished. Schoolhouse, books and furniture quit the hitherto quiet regions of Ping Yang by the upward route. The explosion was heard for miles about.”

That was in early May of 1895. The new schoolhouse had lasted less than six months.

The reports of the building’s demise turned out to be a bit exaggerated, though. Although heavily damaged, the school was repairable, and it was reassembled in jig time by community volunteers, in time to finish the school year out without incident.

There is an amusing report that local historian Steve Williamson found from a former student who recounted that the schoolteacher, for a time, had to step carefully around a big blast crater in the floorboards while teaching her lessons. But, apparently education was pretty important to Mohawk Valley residents, and everyone made do.

The attempted demolition does seem to have established a tradition at Ping Yang School. Over the subsequent 15 years, three more attempts would be made to blow up the school with increasing success, until after the last effort in 1909 the building succumbed completely and had to be replaced with a bigger structure. This new schoolhouse served the community uneventfully until 1963, when it was quietly replaced with Mohawk Elementary School, just a few hundred yards away on the other side of Marcola Road.

So, why all the fireworks?

Williamson, who is probably the preeminent historian of the Mohawk Valley, suggests it was a land-use issue.

The Mohawk Valley is first-rate farmland, but also prime timber country. The valley floor is nice and flat and fertile, and the surrounding hills are gentle and well-watered and thick with trees.

So very early in the process of settlement, emigrants put down claims on that nice quiet peaceful bottomland, and then some of them watched in dismay as timber operators — most notably Booth-Kelly out of Springfield — started moving in to work in the adjacent woods.

Soon there was a logging railroad heading up the valley, and it got busier and busier as time went by, hauling logs down to the mill and timber workers and their families up to live. The older residents stewed as they watched their pastoral hideaway turned into an industrial community, complete with roaring machinery, howling steam whistles, and screeching buzz-saw blades.

One of these longtime residents was a curmudgeonly specimen named “Old Joe” Huddleston, the grumpy schoolhouse neighbor I mentioned earlier; and he is the fellow that most people suspected in the dynamite attacks on the school. Old Joe was already upset because the railroad had cut up the valley near his property, and when the school went in right next door as well, he was fit to be tied.

To make things more complicated, Old Joe was a hard-core racist. As the new century dawned in 1900, the old goat was on a veritable campaign against the Japanese colony upriver at Mabel and the Chinese and Japanese workers whom the railroad kept bringing in.

He also was very vocal about Ping Yang School. It was annoyingly close to his home, like the railroad.

Also, he was known to regularly practice “dynamite fishing” on the Mohawk River, chucking a lit stick into a promising hole and then scooping up all the fish stunned by the blast. Clearly he was a man who was comfortable handling explosives.

So when, late on the night of July 14, 1901, another dynamite blast shook the schoolhouse, everyone figured they knew who had set it off — although, of course, nobody could prove anything.

“This is the fourth attempt made to destroy this schoolhouse,” the Eugene Weekly Guard wrote the next morning. “First an attempt was made to burn it; about three years ago dynamite was used and the building was considerably damaged, the benches, etc., destroyed; and again about a year and a half ago dynamite was placed on the organ and exploded, but not much damage was the result.”

Evidently the organ — a pump organ (a.k.a. harmonium) of the type you operate by pumping bellows with your feet while you play — was tougher than the arsonist reckoned.

But he apparently learned from his mistake.

“The explosive was placed under the organ in the southwest corner of the building,” the Guard reported. “The organ, the desks, and all other furniture and apparatus were blown to atoms, the floor and sleepers of the building were completely splintered, the sides of the building were blown out and all that remains is the roof with part of the framework to support it.”

Old Joe was never charged. No one else was either, for that matter. But after Old Joe moved out of the valley a little later, the explosions stopped ... well, mostly. There was one more, and it was the last one.

It happened in 1909. According to a student attending the school at the time, the students and teachers had been complaining about the small size of the school for several years. The Mohawk Valley was growing, and the building just wasn’t big enough.

But, as usual, not enough of the local taxpayers were willing to ante up to do something about it.

So at the end of the school year, a group of enterprising pupils decided to force the issue in the way that had become a Mohawk Valley tradition.

That’s right, these lucky young punks got to literally do what every maladjusted elementary-school kid fantasizes about: Blow their school to smithereens. (Didn’t we all sing a song about that, back in the day, during recess?)

The kids turned out to be a lot better at blowing up schools than Old Joe Huddleston, or whoever the Mohawk Bomber had been. Their efforts resulted in total destruction — and, in short order, the new, larger schoolhouse that they wanted.

The new building lasted until 1963, when it was taken out of service in a far less dramatic fashion — with a school board vote.

(Sources: “The Ping Yang School Bombings,” an article by Stephen Williamson published in 2005 at storiesbysteve.com; archives of the Eugene Weekly Guard and Albany State Rights Democrat, May 1895 and July 1901)

Finn J.D. John teaches at Oregon State University and writes about odd tidbits of Oregon history. His most recent book, Bad Ideas and Horrible People of Old Oregon, published by Ouragan House early this year. To contact him or suggest a topic: [email protected] or 541-357-2222.