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Janelle,
I placed the photos on my FTP site where your family can fetch them. They are all around 300K in size so I didn’t want to send such a heavily laden email with my dial-up connection.
Once you go to each of these links, just right click the photo and save it to your computer. I’ll leave them on my site for a month or until I hear from you that they have been retrieved.
The photos are:
Gerking Tree.jpg:
http://home.teleport.com/~mberry/images/Gerking/Greking%20Tree.JPG
Gerking Tree Detail1.jpg (which I rotated for easier viewing):
http://home.teleport.com/~mberry/images/Gerking/Gerking%20Tree%20Detail1.JPG
Gerking Tree Detail2.jpg:
http://home.teleport.com/~mberry/images/Gerking/Gerking%20Tree%20Detail2.JPG
R Tree Typical.jpg - the “R” in the blaze is sideways. These R trees were supposed to be scribed at every angle point in the road survey. They are usually a blaze with a single “R” in it:
http://home.teleport.com/~mberry/images/Gerking/R%20tree%20typical.JPG
R tree with R G initials.JPG – Ray was having fun with this one. Instead of scribing a single “R” he scribed 3 Rs and his initials: R R R R. G.
http://home.teleport.com/~mberry/images/Gerking/R%20tree%20with%20R%20G%20initials.JPG
And in another directory I have a small snippet of the Surveyor’s report which appoints Ray as the marker for the survey:
http://home.teleport.com/~mberry/images/survey/1908%20surveyors%20report.jpg
If you have any information about Ray Gerking I’d enjoy hearing about him. Of all of the old roads I’ve retraced in Central Oregon, Ray did the finest job of marking I’ve ever seen. I fancy he was a young, hard working and energetic man when he assisted with this survey. Maybe a bit of a fun loving cut up.
Usually the helpers on these road surveys were locals who had an interest in the road being established…local farmers, ranchers, businessmen and the like. The only professional surveyor on the crew was the County Surveyor who directed the crew, ran the instruments, took notes and reported to the county commissioners. Ray probably volunteered to help survey this one road…I haven’t seen his name on other surveys. I know that the Gerking Market Road is in the Tumalo (AKA Laidlaw) area so the Gerking Family probably had a vested interest in a wagon road being created and improved from Laidlaw to Prineville, which was the County seat and center of commerce at the time.
These markings are very unique. I imagine Ray got a good chewing out by the County Surveyor for his high jinks, but 96 years later it’s an interesting novelty and it’s fun to think about the reaction the county surveyor had when he came down the road (which was at the time on the main wagon road between Prinville and Laidlaw) and first saw the freshly blazed “Gerking” tree and the 4 R tree. If those trees could talk…
I was out along the old Horner Road a couple of weekends ago looking for more trees and other survey evidence. It’s quite remote and desolate in a juniper desert sort of way. When you’re trying to retrace the footsteps of surveyors in an area that is basically unchanged since the time it was originally surveyed, it’s as if those long gone and forgotten men are alive again for a brief moment. You find a place that you think is a good starting spot, take a look at their 96 year old handwriting on your copy of their original notes, dial the bearing in on your compass, look down the line they supposedly went along, measure the distance and start snooping around. Then lo & behold! a half grown over blaze in a juniper with just enough of an “R” visible to confirm that Ray Gerking himself was here chopping that tree and dutifully carving markings into the fresh cut wood. And you think “Great job, Ray. I’d a liked to shook your hand”. I’m glad I found some Gerkings to share these trees with. Hopefully some of them will be Rays direct descendants.
Mike
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