The Lost Loggers: The Erasure and Exclusion of the Black Logging Community of Maxville, Oregon

Inspiration Dissemination

In the small town of Maxville in eastern Oregon there's a story that often goes overlooked. Like many Oregon towns, Maxville was a timber town, but unique to Maxville is the community of Black loggers that lived and worked there after the Great Migration of the 1920s. Lonni Ivey is a logger’s daughter. While in her MA program in History, she learned about the community of Black loggers in Maxville and immediately knew she had to learn more. Lonni devoted her research to discovering more about Maxville and giving this story the attention it deserves, leading to her capstone project “More Than a Footnote: Erasure, Exclusion, and the Remarkable Presence of the Black Logging Community of Maxville, Oregon, 1923-33.” Lonni was inspired by Gwendolyn Trice, the founder and executive director of the Maxville Heritage Ideology Center and herself the descendant of one of the Maxville Loggers.