I think we shall [remain virtuous and independent citizens] as long as agriculture is our principal object.
—Thomas Jefferson, 1787

During the teens, so much lumber was being shipped off to Portland, it is said, that a child could walk from Saint Paul's church to Old Sherwood Town without touching the soil. Stacks of cordwood provided the platform. The last stands of virgin timber had disappeared and landowners switched from logging to farming. The soil, much to everyone's pleasant surprise, proved to be suitable for a wide variety of crops. However, the old Jeffersonian vision of a self sustaining yeomanry had been replaced by a free market philosophy. Alas, it was a kind of "freedom" that did nothing to liberate the farmer.

So you'd pick these strawberries, haul them to Portland to the early morning wholsesale market that opened at four o'clock in the morning in the old Model T touring car and try to sell them. The buyers would come through the market and look at all this produce and pick out what they wanted and buy it as cheap as they could, and if you were lucky, you sold it all. If you weren't lucky, on the way home you'd dump the strawberries off at the side of the road, and you'd come back to the strawberry field and fill the crates up again and you'd try it again the next day... They had to be, you know, perfect, fresh and everything. There weren't canneries. They weren't frozen.
—Bob Heater Oral History, World Forestry Center, 1998, pp. 18,19.

The cannery employed up to fifty people at a time— mostly women and children, but that does not include those who worked in the fields. "We never learned to swim. We never went camping or mountain climbing." one former child laborer recalls,

Trips to the Coast in summer were rare if they happened at all. Polio was rampant, but we all drank from a water bucket with the same ladle. School buses brought 'winos' from Portland, and we and the winos [homeless men who were observed to spend all their earnings on alcohol] sat together on the same bus that carried us up to the fields. Strawberries, blackcaps, pole beans, weeding onions occupied our time during the summer. In September, we spent our Saturdays and afternoons picking up walnuts and prunes. It wasn't unusual for us to work 10 and 12 hours a day during peak season. We'd pray for rain so we could go inside and sit by the stove for awhile. --Lois Matz nee. List

There were three industries and they all stank. the worst was the tannery.... All the tannery's effluvium was dumped into the creek that ran through the town much to the disgust of the people living along its banks.... the Nickel Cadmium Battery factory contaminated air water and the general environment with lead. --Thomas L. Stern M.D.

Even after sacrificing the natural environment, most of the truck farms surrounding Old Sherwood Town eventually lost their competitive edge. With the closing of the cannery in 1971 Sherwood's status as a "farm town" disappeared. There were no frontiersmen left to restore the older sustainable vision. . . although heavy salmon runs on the Tualatin River remained a clear memory for folks who lived into the 1990's.