10. The Sherwood "Steeple"

This is about the relationship between Old Sherwood Town and the Fourth of Aristotle's Four Elements, namely water. It is also about an interesting topic relating to sustainability.

Sherwood's water supply has been a source of great pride since the town's beginning. J.C. Smock knew where the dry land separated from the wet, probably because the area had just experienced a severe rainy season at the time Smock platted the town. Owing to this wise choice, Old Sherwood Town has never known surface flooding at any time in its history. In 1996, a 100 year flood nearly swamped downtown Portland and Tualatin, and completely over-ran the state highway between Sherwood and Tigard while senior citizens visited at the I.O.O.F Hall in Old Sherwood Town and drank their Saturday morning coffee and lectured a local reporter about a much more newsworthy flood that occurred between Portland and Vancouver Washington in the spring of '48.

While flooding never interrupts social life above the ground in Old Sherwood Town, enormous amounts of water flow just beneath the surface. Few houses have basements, owing to the unpredictablility of these underground springs year-round.

There is a fault line just across the tracks from Old Sherwood Town. It creates a geologic formation that serves as a deep reservoir. Some well drillers say there is an underground river flowing through this reservoir. During the 1950s and 1960s, with the railroad era long past and the Interstate Freeway passing her by, Sherwood's dreams of Empire were fueled by the abundance of her water supply. If someone built a water line, inside or outside the City Limits, the Mayor proclaimed in the Sherwood Valley News, Sherwood would supply the water. Even today, now that the State of Oregon has placed limits on the City of Sherwood's pumping capacity, owing to concerns about the declining water table regionwide (and indeed, nationwide), the underground reservoir may still make history. Plans are underway to inject water from the Tualatin Valley Water District into the reservoir. If this plan is successfully carried out (and there are many pitfalls), future historians may report that Sherwood's most important contribution to global sustainability was that she put as much water back into the ground as she took out.

The View of First and Main from five stories up, circa 1925. The shadow on the lower left is from the tower itself. Notice the teenagers cringing against the building across the street, which still stands. A corner of Smock House is just visible, upper left. (The picket fence is in disarray. The twin front doors are faint but visible.) The corner store is only one story tall today.

The saga of the Sherwood water empire begins in 1896 when Sherwood paid a man to dig a well on the Town campus at First and Main. The hand dug well measured six feet across and was 23 feet deep. A wall of oaken staves was installed to hold back the sandy soil. A picturesque platform complete with a rope and a bucket provided access to the water, but this device was soon replaced by a grandiose tower that stood five stories high. Alas, like so many other projects the Victorians undertook across America, appearances mattered more than substance. The Great Fire of 1911 managed to wipe out half the buildings on Block Number One before enough water could be produced to quell the flames. As well, there was a social issue involved in the construction of this tower that was worthy of Doctor Freud. While Sherwood town fathers were photographing and bragging about their five storey tall water tower, saloon owner Tom Woida was sitting behind curtained windows fuming with rage that he and his profession were being treated as the enemy. Prohibition was gaining steam and Sherwood would soon vote to go dry (or pretend to do so. As one historian reports, all across America, citizens routinely stuffed the ballot box while Town offials counted the votes any way they pleased.), and yet it was receipts from the Liquor License fee that paid for the water tower, as well as the schools and all other public improvements. People would cross the street rather than shake the saloon keeper's hand.

It was time for one of those events Robin Hood is associated with, what the British call An Act of Misrule, and which Americans call a Public Demonstration. John Woida would view the water tower as just another mountain to climb. Sherwood historian Ronald Sherk tells the rest of the story: "Now Woida was a corpulent individual and the tower was tall and not easy to climb, so some of the men bet old John that he couldn't climb it. But climb it he did, one evening after supper. He got up all right and looked around, but when he attempted the descent his nerve failed him and he pleaded for help. Four of the interested spectators: J.E.Young [See Site Number 13], Jim Anderson, Ora Johnson, and George Reisner [Sherwood's first Mayor] went up to help him. They tied a rope around his rotund stomach and let him down the outside, kicking and screaming like a big spider on the end of a cobweb. His cries were heard all over town and everyone came out to see the sport." —History of Sherwood, page 19.

It is only right that a protest demonstration should begin in a saloon. The saloons were important to the Sherwood vision, as much as the barber shop, the general store, or the church. The phrase "In Vino Veritas" originates in the saloon, and is excellent advice. "In Wine is Truth." Or, as Thomas Jefferson put it: "State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules."