YONCALLA, Ore. — Don Kingery Jr. feels some pressure as he works and manages the Kingery Ranch.
The same pressure felt by his father Don Kingery Sr. and possibly the family’s other descendants who have worked the ranch since it was established in 1848.
The ranch, located in Scott’s Valley a couple miles southeast of this northern Douglas County community, was designated as a Century Ranch several years ago.
“It’s a priority to keep the ranch in the family,” said Don Kingery Jr., 59, who was raised on the ranch, left it to work and then returned to ranching in 1997. He worked with his father for six years until Kingery Sr. died in 2003.
The family owned, 1,283-acre ranch, with property on each side of Interstate 5, is now home to 200 ewes and 80 mother cows.
“The last couple of years, livestock prices have been good,” Kingery Jr. said of the ranch making enough income to survive the past couple of years. “Droughts in the Midwest and Texas have kept prices up pretty high. Timber prices have also been good this last year.”
Kingery explained that in the past when livestock prices were down, the Douglas fir on the ranch furnished revenue to pay the expenses.
“You can’t get too greedy,” he said. “Don’t do anything on credit. There were years timber carried us.”
The ranch is a combination of pastures and hay fields on the valley floor, hillside pastures and forest.
The ranch was first established by Robert and Caroline Cowan who filed a donation land claim for 640 acres. Robert Cowan’s brother, Thomas, a single man, filed a claim for an adjacent 320 acres. The Cowans had traveled west from Missouri in an ox-drawn wagon train. Robert and Caroline Cowan’s son, James Levi Cowan, was born April 19, 1849, and was reportedly the first white child born in the Umpqua Valley area. Caroline Cowan was the only white woman living south of the Salem area until 1849 when the Applegate family moved to the Yoncalla area.
The Cowan brothers cleared their land of brush and trees with horse and manpower. The focus was on planting fruit trees and large gardens for personal use. Some of the apple trees planted back then are still producing.
According to local historians, Robert and Caroline Cowan’s family was the first white family to settle in the area. Thomas Cowan had the distinction of growing the first radishes, lettuce and peas in the area. He shared and traded his vegetables and wild strawberries with friends and neighbors.
Robert Cowan was killed in 1865 by a falling tree on the ranch during a windstorm, leaving behind his wife and their 10 children, the youngest at the time being 3. Daughter Sarah Cowan gradually took charge of the ranch and was joined in that endeavor by J.W. Kingery after the two were married in 1884. Kingery had migrated west from Illinois. The couple slowly started to buy out the Cowan siblings.
“The children had had enough of hard work and tight living,” said Doris Kingery Means, Don Kingery Sr.’s sister and a Yoncalla historian. “They were looking to go elsewhere.”
The Kingerys continued to raise livestock, but also added percheron horses because those animals were in high demand for their abilities in doing farm and logging work. A horse barn was built near what is now Elkhead Road with lumber that was logged and milled on the ranch. Several years later that barn was moved about a half-mile east onto the ranch by pulling the structure with horses over poles that rolled. The barn is still in use today.
The ranch flourished under the ownership and work of Sarah and J.W. Kingery. They had sheep and goat herds that provided meat, wool and mohair. A dam was built on a spring-fed mountain creek and fresh water was provided for livestock and domestic use and for irrigation of the garden, orchard and pastures. Fields of clover, hay and other grain crops were planted and grown. Additional acreage on the ranch’s east border was also purchased.
The Kingerys had four children, but only one, Dare Kingery, survived to adulthood. He worked with his parents on the ranch and eventually he and his wife Anna inherited it in 1930. They raised cattle, sheep, goats, hogs, chickens and turkeys. They sold meat and dairy products.
The first tractors came to the ranch in the 1920s when Dare Kingery ordered two of the machines. A steam engine was later acquired and the machines were used to power a sawmill and produce lumber. In the 1930s, a shingle mill was added to the ranch.
When Interstate 5 was built in 1953, it split the bottom land of the Kingery Ranch. Dare Kingery’s objections to the placement of the two-lane highway weren’t taken into consideration and construction proceeded with a single-lane underpass tunnel built under the highway to connect the two sides of the ranch.
Don, the youngest of Dare and Anna’s six children, was the only sibling to stay on the ranch as an adult. He became a partner in working the ranch with his parents in the 1950s and became the sole owner in 1987 after his parents died within five months of each other.
“He devoted his whole life to this place,” Doris Means said of her brother. “This was his priority, keeping the farm in the family. He wasn’t the least bit selfish about it. Everybody was always welcomed to come home at any time.”
Don Kingery Jr., the fifth generation to run the business, has maintained that philosophy. He and companion Rebecca Drennen work the ranch on a daily basis, tending to the sheep, lambs, cows and calves, logging, irrigation, haying and fences, but on projects that need a larger crew, family members willingly return to help.
While nobody from the family’s next generation has shown a passion for the ranching life yet, Kingery Jr. is hopeful somebody will eventually have the interest and step forward. He’s concerned, however, that electronics has a stronger pull on the younger generation today than the ranching tradition.
“You don’t get farming done on your phone,” he said. “Your phone isn’t going to split wood, haul hay or feed cows. I’ve got another 20 years left in me so I hope another generation gets interested in the ranch by then.”
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