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Adelaide Hartwell

Adelaide Hartwell was the daughter of Elias Hartwell and Lucy Pruett, a dressmaker in Briarmont, whom he never married. She grew up with her mother's surname. After her mother died in 1890 she began signing herself Hartwell, and her father let it stand.

She studied botany at the state university in Berkeley, one of a growing number of women there in the 1890s, and her pressed plants, labeled in her hand, are in the college archive. She came home set against what her father's crews had done to the land around town: the bare slopes, the slides, the silt banked up at the creek mouths. When he paid for the survey of the old growth on the upper ridges in 1896, she went up with the crew. The survey's papers say only that she went.

When Elias Hartwell died in 1911, his will named her its executor. Within the year she sold the mill and the works to pay the company's debts, and its crews went looking for work elsewhere on the coast. Her cousin Wesley contested the will and lost in 1913.

The council, with Everett Thayer, wanted the estate on the rise sold. She refused. For years the house stood shut while she argued with lawyers and Town Hall, and the town had no income from the estate it had been left. Twice she walked out of a council meeting before the vote.

In 1918 the town's trust did what she had asked for since 1911 and opened the Oakridge Institute of Forestry and Land Sciences in her father's house. She handed his library over to the trust for the school's use. She stayed on as a trustee for the rest of her life, and for most of those years Everett Thayer sat on the same board.