Horner Museum Rocks

Many people remember the Horner Museum's display of fluorescent rocks.  These rocks are currently on display in the Benton County Museum in Philomath and will probably be moved to the new museum in downtown Corvallis.  Recently, Exhibitions Curator Mark Tolonen asked me to check a list of other rocks to see if they fluoresced. All the Horner Museum's rocks are still packed as there were for the move -- wrapped in tissue paper in boxes with many other rocks.  So finding any one item is a tedious process of unwrapping, checking the identification number and re-wrapping.  In addition to the ones Mark asked me to find, I discovered some other specimens which I found visually interesting.

One was a slice of silicified bone.

Silicified bone

You've probably heard of petrified wood.  A similar process produced this sample.  A bone became buried in the sediments from a flood or river or under volcanic ash.  Ground water containing silica entered the bone, broke down the cell walls and left silica in the empty space. Time and pressure turned the silica to stone.

I also liked the patterns in these two samples of wardite from Utah.

Wardite

 Chemically wardite is hydrous sodium aluminum phosphate hydroxide. Named for scientist Henry Augustus Ward, it is famous for its unusual crystal structure.  It is often found mixed with two other phosphate minerals, variscite and crandallite.  The former greenish in color, ranging from yellow-green to blue-green, while the latter creates white veins. Apparently, these minerals often combine to create these patterns that remind me of images of the brain!

By Martha Fraundorf, Volunteer for Benton County Historical Society, Philomath, Oregon

  

Artist Louis Raymond: Around The World From 80 Countries

In addition to all his professional accomplishments which I described in the last post, Louis C. Raymond was also a storyteller and self-taught painter. As a boy, he'd watched his father draw a complete picture without lifting his pencil from the paper.  Ina statement for an exhibition of Self-Taught Painters and Sculptors at SUNY Oswego, Raymond wrote. “One of my first attempts to make painting was after I bought from a “fire sale” a box filled with contorted and leaky artists' paint tubes that were all stuck together as a result of the heat from the fire.  These colors cost me thirty-five cents.  Without any training I set about to render a bird dog in action.  My first attempts won some approval.”

Later, “When I started to travel in different parts of the world, I couldn't resist sketching.  I would make sketches of things that would make an impression on me, send it home to my wife and the kids. When I got home on a rainy day I'd paint some of the scenes.” The Raymonds also used some of his sketches on their Christmas cards. 

The following is a self-portrait from 1976, showing Raymond sketching in the lunchroom of a underground mine, with his tools behind him.

Raymond not only painted scenes from is travels but also wrote about his experiences in the places he painted such as this account to accompany his painting titled “Diamonds in the Rainforest.”

Searching for diamonds and gold in and along the turbulent and muddy streams of the rainforest offers many unexpected experiences to the exploration crew.  A ride in a native bark-canoe is a sensation never to be forgotten wether [sic] the experience is amusing or tragic.  Sheets of bark pulled off a large native tree and roughly shaped and “sewed” at the ends makes a most treacherous craft to maneuver in swift waters.  Combine this with the endless numbers of toppled trees, submerged logs and limbs that clutter the streams, the traveler has all the thrills of a Coney Island chute-the-chute.  The “gringo’s” price of admission is almost sure to be a capsizing into the warm, brackish and silty waters.  A native riding alone down the current is stoically confident with swift dips of his crude paddle.  But with the “gringo” aboard his craft, he has a fiendish look of anticipation in his eyes.  If the warped canoe fails to go over or under or around the next log or snag, the gringo must be sure to come out of the water with a grin too; that is, if he wants to be accepted as passing the test and as a true companion of his guide.”

Raymond also donated a manuscript entitled Samples from 50 Years in the Mineral Industry which includes this selection describing British Guiana in 1947.

         

“The exploration site was reached by a six-week long difficult navigation up the flooded, muddy streams in a dugout canoe powered by a big outboard motor.  The dense forest growth shed endless uprooted trees into the streams....   

Rain, rain, rain, – always dripping through the thick rain forest cover, dim because of the lack of light, dismal from the wetness and the overpowering smell of decay.  The jungle trails were, I large part, swamp crossed with many swollen streams. The major rivers offered no simple passage for dugout canoes.  Twisting channels, shifting currents, fallen tress, and submerged logs....The rain forest was like a giant greenhouse, except that the traveler seldom could see the “windows” or the sky.  One seldom say birds or animals of the forest.  They either lived in the higher tree-tops near the sun light or were nocturnal creatures that crawled in the night.

Everywhere the traveler looked there was decay.  Even the rocks were buried at great depth under lays of decay, making it difficult to observe the geology.  Nor was it possible to escape the smell of day.  What a sentence it would be to have to spend a lifetime in this land of decay!...”

By Martha Fraundorf, Volunteer for Benton County Historical Society, Philomath, Oregon 

         

Louis C. Raymond: Around The World From 80 Countries

The bird whistle (last post) and many objects in the current “Around The World From 80 Countries” exhibition were donated by Oregon State University alumnus, Louis C. Raymond. Fortunately, Mr. Raymond also provided a lot of information about them and about his fascinating and accomplished life.

Although Raymond was born in Vancouver, Washington in 1906, he spent most of his boyhood in Astoria, Oregon.  Even at an early age, he demonstrated wide-ranging interests.  During World War I, he earned money selling the furs of the muskrats and other animals he trapped on his grandmother's property along the Trask River. Later he played semi-professional baseball, traveling to various towns along the Columbia River by boat, entertaining the passengers by singing while teammates played the piano, violin, and saxophone. He also had jobs in the salmon and logging industries.

During his youth, a frequent guest at family dinners told tales of  packing supplies into the Yukon in return for gold nuggets.  In an interview with Horner Museum staff, Raymond said, “ I think that telling me about the gold rush days probably got me interested in geology and mining. So when I went out to college I went to the School of Mines.”  He went on to earn a degree in mining engineering from Oregon State College (now University) in 1930 and then a master's degree in geology from MIT. 

Raymond worked for Mountain Copper Company until World War II when he joined the Federal Trade Commission to help locate and obtain strategic minerals. After the War, his work for Ford, Bacon, and Davis involved exploring, evaluating, and developing various mineral properties. To do this he traveled to Australia, Bolivia, Brazil, British Guinea (now Guyana), Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guinea (now the Republic of Guinea), Honduras, Iraq, Israel, Jamaica, Mexico, Turkey and Venezuela, as well as many sites in the United States and Canada. Getting to the remote sites was sometimes quite challenging, as he described in the following :

“Our exploration camp was situated on top of a high mountain ridge at the edge of the rain forest of Colombia.  Supplies had to be hauled 125 miles by truck and then loaded onto mules for the 20 miles of mule track leading to our camp....Most of the mules had been accustomed to a great deal of freedom and resented being required to earn their living, particularly by being saddled and carrying man around.

Unfortunately, the six best riding mules were also the most adept at trying to dissuade a potential rider.  Each had a personality of her own.  One would suddenly swirl as you were mounting.  One would wait until you barely got seated before the first violent bucking.  One would try to back up as you were trying to mount.  One would swell her belly while the belly strap was being cinched and then deflate promptly as you mounted, causing the saddle to slip to the side after a few galloping paces.”

Sometimes, however, they were able to use jeeps as in this photo.

"Eastern Andes, Bolivia, L. C. Raymond near door of Landrover"

During the trip to Colombia, Raymond acquired this capel or capelling cup found in an old gold mine. Capellation, a process which has been around for centuries, is used assay the contents of ore.   The cup, made of bone ash, holds the ore which is then heated.  Lead and other minerals are oxidized and absorbed into the cup, leaving gold and silver in the center cavity. 

Raymond estimated that this capel dated around 1900.  Working near the sites of ancient civilizations, Raymond became intrigued with old crafts and gradually began acquiring some of them.  As he noted in a letter to the museum, “...word  would get out that I was interested in collecting certain types of craftsmanship, such as old mining artifacts, wherein people and friends would give me such items as miner's lamps, candlestick holders, ...old utility utensils made of copper....I didn't want such artifacts to be destroyed so I bought them.”  His interest in archaeology grew.  When he retired from mining business at age 67, he took courses in archaeology at Pace University in New York and then spent the next ten years working on digs in the Hudson River area.  He wrote “I got hooked on the interpretation of symbols of ancient people of the New World as found on early artifacts.”  This second career led to a book on spindle whorls (the small disks attached to the shaft which makes the spindle turn faster).  

This second career is only one part of his story.  The next blog will tell about Raymond's hobbies.

By Martha Fraundorf, Volunteer for Benton County Historical Society, Philomath, Oregon