The fourth of 11 children in the Rayton family married the fourth of 11 children in the Black family, and together they had four children (not 11).
Leonard Rayton, who was born Sept. 19, 1882, at Claquato and grew up in Curtis, was the fourth child of John and Angeline Rayton’s 11 children. In October 1904, when he was 24, he married Anna Caroline Black, who was the fourth of Abe and Neomi Black’s 11 children. Anna had helped her future mother-in-law with housework while Angeline picked hops in her family’s fields.
Thanks to June Crocker Strickland Strovas, eldest grandchild of LeRoy Rayton, much of the family history has been preserved in a book she compiled and shared with descendants and now with readers of this column.
After they married, Leonard raised hops for two years but decided to go into the dairy business instead. In March 1906, he and Anna moved to 120 acres near Claquato, which he purchased from his father. Their first child, Norman Edward, was born there on April 25, 1906, followed by a daughter, Dora, on Christmas Day 1907.
While pregnant with her third child, Anna required surgery for appendicitis. When the doctor suggested taking the baby at only six months of gestation, she refused. Their third child, Eva Lena, arrived on Jan. 20, 1911. She was named after Anna’s sister, Eva, who died at 16 from a ruptured appendix. The birth of a son, Lowell, on March 12, 1915, completed the family.
The Raytons and their neighbors — the Whittakers, Paines, Joys, Youngs and Christiansens — established a local school for their young children rather than have them travel to Adna or Claquato, Strovas said. The children initially gathered at the Young family’s old log house, but in 1912, they gathered in a new one-room school built by Raymond Schwartz on land donated by C.D. Young and G.C. Paine. It had a wood shed and boardwalks leading to two outhouses. They called the school Twin Oaks after trees on nearby Pleasant Valley Road. Inside near the door was a pail of water with a tin dipper to fill cups students brought in their lunch pails. A wood stove provided heat for students in all eight grades. Students hung their coats and stowed lunch pails (converted from old lard or tobacco containers) in a cloakroom off the front of the classroom. A small storeroom held school supplies. Blackboards covered three classroom walls while five or six rows of desks bolted to the floor filled its interior.
Schwartz’s sister-in-law, Katherine Marachee, the first teacher, boarded with the Youngs. Parents purchased textbooks, pencils and paper tablets for their children.
“All the girls wore their hair in long braids, and many a lass who had an ‘innocent’ lad sitting behind her would discover that one of her braids had ‘accidentally’ dropped into the inkwell behind her!” Strovas wrote.
When youngsters finished their studies, they could play with crayons, pegboards or sewing cards, Strovas said. At recess they played games such as baseball, marbles, ante-over, Flying Dutchman, Farmer in the Dell, New Orleans and Three Deep. Students put on Christmas programs, decorated a large tree with candles clipped to branches and received bags of candy from Santa Claus. Leonard Rayton stuffed pillows into a red suit to portray old Saint Nick for many years. Spelling and ciphering contests took place at Adna in May during Community Day. Students and parents alike celebrated the last day of school with a picnic, baseball game, and homemade ice cream.
Eighth-grade students needed to pass tough state exams before attending high school. Eva Rayton scored fifth countywide on her state exams.
Guy M. Balfour, a musician who played the organ, taught three years at Twin Oaks until it consolidated in 1923 with Adna, where he taught another three years. Students remembered him as an outstanding teacher who stressed good penmanship. The consolidation brought bus service.
“I can well remember our first school buses,” wrote Eva Rayton Stafford. “There was one long bench on each side, and a third seat bench down the middle. There was always a scramble for the side seats as we all hated the middle benches because there was no back support. If someone sitting on the bench behind you had sharp knees, it wasn’t exactly pleasant.”
Leonard, who served 18 years on the Twin Oaks and Adna school boards, expanded his dairy herd from a dozen to 40 cows, helped charter the Lewis Pacific Dairyman’s Association in 1919, and built a new house for the family, which I mentioned in an earlier column. They grew their farm to 280 acres and added 40 acres of timberland.
As a farmer’s wife, Anna worked hard. She washed clothes on a scrub board, used a hand wringer to squeeze out water and hung them up to dry. She oversaw the children and their chores. She cooked dinner and served it at the same time every night and never failed to feed a hungry hobo from the train running past their property. She made soap, sewed quilts and clothing and taught her girls to do the same. She raised food for the family in a large garden, canned a hundred quarts of blackberries and several pints of jam each year. She canned other fruits and vegetables, made butter, baked bread and gathered eggs laid by the hens. She was deeply religious, taught teenagers and later adults at Sunday School and belonged to the Twin Oaks Club.
Leonard had a reputation for honesty. He never swore or drank and smoked a cigar only during his early twenties while driving a team of horses from Boistfort to Chehalis in the winter as he tried to stay warm. He and Anna paid for everything with cash, never credit. He purchased bulls for breeding for a time. They also grew 40 acres of peas and raised hay for their animals. They built a large silo in 1953.
Leonard and Anna celebrated their 50th anniversary in October 1954. Anna died on May 11, 1960, from hardening of the arteries and pneumonia. Leonard died from cancer at 86 on Jan. 5, 1969.
Norman Rayton
As a young boy, Norman peeled and sold cascara bark and trapped and skinned moles and muskrats. He also entertained his younger siblings by making kites, stilts and rafts for them. He liked to play mumblety-peg (tossing jackknives) and marbles. He often turned the crank when they made ice cream, his sister Eva recalled.
After finishing eighth grade at Twin Oaks School, Norman attended Adna High School. But after his sophomore year, Norman quit school to work on the farm.
When he was a boy, Norman Rayton’s Aunt Dean teased him about his crush on the neighborhood girl, Hannah, so much so that at one point he shouted, “I’ll tear your gingham.” He did just that, ripping one of her dresses hanging on the clothesline.
But Aunt Dean was correct in her observations, and on April 30, 1930, 24-year-old Norman married Hannah Paine after dating her for three years. Hannah once said she met her husband “when he looked into my crib,” according to Strovas.
The couple moved to a house built for them on the family farm by his father and stayed there. He helped his father and younger brother, Lowell, milk the dairy cows and plant and harvest corn, wheat, peas, oats, and beets as the farm grew to 420 acres. They cleared land, blasted and pulled stumps, cut hay, built fences, and shocked grain for threshing, Strovas wrote.
They rose at 3:30 a.m. to milk the Holsteins by hand, ate breakfast at 7, then cleaned the barn and planted crops until returning to the house at noon for dinner. By 1 p.m., they were back outside doing chores and herding cows for milking. After 6:30 p.m. supper, they enjoyed an hour or so of free time before going to sleep before 9 p.m.
At one point, a bull attacked and chased Leonard under the barn as he was leading it to water without using a leading rod in its nose ring. He broke his leg.
The Rayton family stored in their shed the thresher and baler used by the farming community. Hannah and the other wives cooked for the threshing crews on hot summer days. Norman and Hannah both were active in the Grange, where they took to the hardwood dance floor covered by wax flakes. They both belonged to the Grange for more than 75 years.
Their first child, Edith Mary Rayton, was born Feb. 8, 1932, in Chehalis and married her high school sweetheart, Ronald Duncan, on Nov. 25, 1951. Norman and Hannah’s son, Virgil LeRoy, was delivered at home by Dr. Lester Steck on May 19, 1936, marking the third generation born in that same room on the Rayton family farm.
In later years, Norman and Hannah enjoyed spending time at a double-wide mobile home in Westport that they referred to as the Gulls Nest.
Norman, a charter member of the Lewis County Historical Society, died in his Adna farmhouse on Nov. 5, 2004, at the age of 98. His wife, Hannah, a Twin Oaks native, was also 98 when she died on July 10, 2007, at an adult family home in Onalaska.
Dora Rayton Orloske
Dora Rayton, who was born on Christmas Day and married on Christmas Eve, wrote about growing up on the family farm.
“My dad was a good farmer, Mother a good helpmate who fully believed it was just as great a sin to not work six days as it was to work on the seventh day,” Dora wrote. “We never worked on Sunday unless it was necessary.”
When they were hoeing a large field of silage corn to plant grain, Dora told her mother she would never hoe again when she was married. But she and her husband planted 18 acres of strawberries their first year of marriage, so she hoed.
“My mother, being a fun-loving person, didn’t let me forget this,” she said.
Like her siblings, Dora attended Twin Oaks School and graduated from Adna High School in 1927, then attended business college in Centralia and earned $65 a month at the Darigold office in Chehalis. She married Max Orloske on Christmas Eve in 1933 during record Chehalis River flooding. The country was also mired in the Great Depression, and she said, “it was the policy not to employ a woman after marriage.”
Her husband, Max, was a Minnesota native who moved to Centralia from North Dakota. They both belonged to the Grange, which is where they met. Max played on the Newaukum baseball team, and the couple rented a place on Newaukum Hill from his parents and let people pick strawberries for a penny a pound (since the cannery had quit accepting berries during the Depression).
They bought Frank Burlingame’s 50-acre farm on Twin Oaks Road in the fall of 1934 with a $500 down payment. They planted strawberries, picked ferns, milked cows, and raised a large garden. They later planted raspberries.
“Times were not easy for us, but others were also having difficult times,” Dora wrote. “We always had food: our own beef, chickens and eggs, and lots of beans and carrots.”
Dr. Steck delivered all of their children. Their first, Alice Ann, was born in March 1935. Their second child, a son, Larry Max, born in January 1937 lived only two weeks, dying of what was called “crib death.” Lois Irene was born in April 1938, followed by Sharon Lee in November 1941 and Maxine Evelyn in August 1944.
Dora was canning peaches in August 1937 when the chimney caught fire. The blaze destroyed the family’s farmhouse.
“We butchered the chickens, whitewashed the chicken coop, and put up a tent for sleeping quarters,” Dora wrote. “We had a house partially built with the $500 insurance money and moved into it in October.”
In 1941, Max started grading and tallying lumber at American Crossarm in Chehalis, where he worked for more than three decades. They expanded their farm to 80 acres by purchasing another 30 from George Johnson. The Orloskes remained involved in the Newaukum Grange.
Max served on the Adna School Board several years, until he died of a massive heart attack on Dec. 4, 1972, a week after suffering a severe foot injury at work. He was 62.
All four of their daughters graduated from Adna High School. Dora left the farm in 1988 for a home on Dieckman Road in Adna near the school, ballfields, and the church she attended from the time she was 12. She joined the West Crego Garden Club in 1937 and tutored Adna students through the HOST (Help One Student to Succeed) reading program.At the time of her death on April 4, 2007, at the age of 99, Dora was survived by four daughters and a dozen grandchildren.
Eva Rayton Stafford
Eva Rayton also shared childhood recollections with Strovas for the family history book. She described her parents Leonard and Anna as thrifty, hardworking, and neighborly. She remembered helping to turn the hand wringer after her mother scrubbed clothes on a washboard. Later, the girls helped scrub the clothes. They added “bluing” to rinse water for white clothes to brighten them.
They hung the clothes outside or on the porch in inclement weather. Ironing took place in the morning on damp clothes hung overnight on the porch.
They washed breakfast dishes, fixed their lunches, and boarded a bus to school. Eva said they owned two school outfits and wore long underwear, bloomers, black cotton stockings, and high-top shoes. They learned to sew their clothes. Eva remembered wearing her first store-bought dress for baccalaureate and graduation.
The family milked cows and grew much of its food in a large garden, berry patches, and a chicken coop, trading eggs and meat at the John West grocery store in Chehalis. Their mother baked bread weekly and stored it in a large milk can. They also raised beef and pork. They used every part of the animals they butchered—fat for lard, meat in the head for headcheese or mixed with cornmeal for “scrapple.” They smoked hams and bacon over several days.
The family enjoyed summer trips up Deep Creek Road to pick wild blackberries, which they canned or made into jam. For lunch on the outings, they filled a flour sack with sandwiches, boiled eggs, and green onions.
“With so many animals on the farm, there was a problem with flies,” Eva wrote. “Mom would give us a nickel for every 100 flies we swatted. Raid sprays were unheard of. On cold fall mornings, the outsides of the door screens would be black with flies.”
Mailing a letter cost two cents and a postcard a penny.
Eva remembered her mother feeding the tramps walking along the railroad who would at times split wood while she prepared a sack lunch for them. “Mom never turned them down,” she wrote.
She also remembered how everyone in the family except her father fell ill when the Spanish flu swept through the United States in 1918 and 1919. Her father cared for her mother and the four children in addition to milking cows by hand twice a day.
“Mom’s bedroom window faced the barn,” Eva wrote. “Dad hung a newspaper by a string in the window, and the other end of the string was fastened to Mom’s bed. If we needed help, she would pull the string and the paper would drop.”
If the paper had dropped, he’d rush to the house to help.
They never wrapped Christmas gifts. Each child usually received one or two gifts and shared mixed hard candy and a small box of mandarin oranges. Dinner followed.
“When we were small, we didn’t even have a tree,” Eva wrote. “When we girls grew older, we would pull a little sled to what is now the Hokanson place and cut and bring home a little tree.”
They crafted paper chains and strings of popcorn for decorations.
The Raytons and Blacks held family picnics in the summer.
Eva remembered when the nation entered World War I in April 1917, when she was in first grade. Students cut two-inch squares of material and strung them together in bunches of 100, which they sent overseas for soldiers to use as gun wipes.
One time Norman and Dora tied the hind leg of their pet pig Tamey to an old wash tub and put Eva inside it. When Tamey moved, he tried to free himself. Eva screamed as he tore through the rough barnyard. “I still don’t know who was the most frightened—the pig, I, or Norman and Dora.”
Indoors, they played Dominoes, Checkers, Tinker Toys, and card games like Old Maid or Pit. Outdoor games included Drop the Handkerchief, London Bridges, and Flying Dutchman. Boys enjoyed baseball, marbles, and stilt walking.
During her senior year at Adna High School, Eva edited the school newspaper, “The Blue and Gold.” They picked strawberries for George Young to earn money.
“We were paid by the pound, so we didn’t mind picking in the rain as the rain-soaked boxes of berries weighed more!” Eva wrote.
After graduating from Adna High School as salutatorian in 1929, Eva Rayton attended Centralia Junior College on the third floor of Centralia High School for a year before transferring to Central Washington College in Ellensburg to earn her elementary school teaching credentials. She taught first- through fourth-grade students for a year at Newaukum Hill School. One of her third-graders was Ruth Stafford, the younger sister of Howard Stafford. She and Howard met after a Halloween program at a Grange hall. Eva attended Washington State College in Pullman for a year and then taught two years at Adna, where she earned $70 a month.
Her career ended in February 1936 when she married Howard Stafford as married women weren’t allowed to teach. Howard worked as an auto mechanic in Portland. The couple lived with her parents until the birth of their first child, James Ervin Stafford, in February 1937. Howard helped farm and earned money doing housework for a neighbor until after the Depression.
In 1940, the family moved to Puyallup, where Howard sold Guardian Service cookware. They paid five dollars a month to rent a tiny shack on a raspberry farm with only cold water in the kitchen. Eva pruned raspberries.
During World War II, Howard found a job as assistant foreman at Boeing’s plant in Seattle. His cousin Lester Rayton also worked there. They moved near the Longacres racetrack before purchasing a home closer to the Boeing plant. Sheila Jo was born at a Seattle hospital in May 1941.
“Bomber planes quite frequently passed quite low overhead,” Eva wrote. “Large balloons were anchored all along the waterfront as a protection against invading enemy planes. We never knew when there would be a ‘black-out.’ At the sound of a siren, all lights were to be turned out.”
Rationing of gas, flower, sugar, and butter began.
As the war continued, Boeing opened branch plants in smaller communities. Howard was transferred to the Chehalis plant after it opened in June 1943, and the family rented a house near Adna. Their third child, Linda Lee, was born in May 1944 and their fourth, Jo Anne, in December 1945.
Howard did mechanical work in Pe Ell and construction in Oregon. He later worked for Weyerhaeuser, where he retired in 1971. Eva taught at Adna Sunday School for years. She recalled an arsonist who escaped from Green Hill School burned down the old church building in 1962, so they held classes in the Grange.
The family bought an old house on 38 acres on Twin Oaks Road in May 1955.
Howard died of cancer on June 10, 1984, at 75. Eva died on June 24, 2007, at 96. She had four children, 13 grandchildren, and 32 great-grandchildren.
Lowell Rayton
The youngest child of Leonard and Anna, Lowell, worked with his father and brother on the family farm for 47 years. As a boy, Lowell liked to build blinds on nearby swampland where ducks flocked during the winter. He and friends would shoot the ducks, which his sisters Dora and Eva needed to pluck and clean. They saved the feathers for pillows.
Lowell didn’t marry until he was 38, when he wed Myrtle Foister Doming, the mother of five children, on July 30, 1954. Lowell acquired both a wife and an instant family and instilled in the children a strong work ethic.
Lowell and Myrtle needed a big house for their family, so Lowell built a smaller home directly across the road for his parents, Leonard and Anna.
The children helped around the farm where Lowell worked with his father and brother. They rose early, milked cows, and cut and baled hay. They grew peas that they sold to the cannery in Chehalis and stored vines and pods as silage.
Lowell enjoyed teasing, playing pranks, and sharing stories. According to son Dan Rayton, Lowell earned his childhood nickname “Ruke” because of his ability to imitate a crowing rooster. He treated Dan’s mother with love and kindness. On Sundays, they enjoyed trips to the beach and the mountains. Lowell like to fish and dig for clams.
“Dad chewed tobacco, but not in front of Mom,” Dan Rayton wrote. “He hid his chew can behind a cupboard in the garage.”
Like his parents and siblings, Lowell belonged to the Adna Grange and the Darigold Association. He also served on the Adna School Board.
Myrtle died on Sept. 5, 2001, and Lowell was 89 when he passed away on Sept. 17, 2004.
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
