Knowing Your Land

A Reference Guide to Researching Your Land's History

Bob Zybach, PhD

NW Maps Co.
Cottage Grove, Oregon

First edition, October 2026

About this edition

This is the adult edition of Knowing Your Land. It is written for a curious reader with no training in history, surveying or law, at about the level of a good high-school textbook.

Two more editions are planned. A Kids edition will tell the same story in shorter sentences and with more pictures, for young readers and their teachers. A Professional edition will add fuller citations and the technical detail that surveyors, foresters, archivists and title researchers need. All three use the same method and the same running example, a tree farm near Pedee, Oregon, so a family can read them side by side.

This is version 1.1. Records move, offices change their hours, and web addresses break. The guide will be revised as readers report what has changed.

Foreword

I have a handful of folk heroes, people whose ideas were so original that they changed how I think about the world. I was trained in information systems, so most of them come from that field: Linus Torvalds, who wrote the Linux kernel in 1991; Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web in 1989; and Craig Newmark, who started Craigslist in 1995.

Bob Zybach is less famous than any of them, but he easily tops my list. He found the original documents that show how people and nature have shaped and reshaped Oregon's forests for thousands of years. He changed how I see the world, and he did it with a library card.

In the 1990s, government scientists, environmental groups and many others were saying that Oregon had once been covered with vast forests of old-growth trees. It sounded plausible, so I simply assumed it was true. Then I started going to the talks and history tours Bob gave for free. He understood early Oregon and its forests better than anyone I had ever met, by far. I listened carefully, and I came away from each one knowing something I had not known before.

In 1996 Bob cofounded Oregon Websites and Watersheds, a nonprofit that teaches students to use the records of their own watersheds. In 2003 he earned his doctorate in environmental sciences at Oregon State University. He is a forest and wildfire historian, and his work exposed Oregon's actual history, which is very different from the popular myths about earlier times.

When the first settlers arrived, much of the Willamette Valley was prairie and oak savanna, grassland with scattered oaks, kept open by the burning that Native people did. The conifer forests were more like islands of green surrounded by tall grass. After the 1850s, much of that open ground filled in with trees. In the Soap Creek Valley oral histories, a series Bob edited, a logger said it in one sentence: "the oaks were there first and they'd died off because the firs grew up and shut off the sun."

West of the valley, in the Coast Range, the forests were shaped by great fires. Bob's dissertation, The Great Fires, follows Indian burning and catastrophic forest fires there from 1491 to 1951. The Elliott State Forest, in Coos and Douglas counties, is the one I know best. Bob and I first went there together in February 2020, to look at an old fire lookout. The state put the Elliott together around 1930 by trading scattered school lands to the Forest Service for one block of burned-over timberland south of the Umpqua River. Roughly 90 percent of it had burned repeatedly. A 1929 report of the State Forester says that in 1868 a fire "leaped the Umpqua river" and "burned over all the forest, with the exception of the southeast portion." In 2020, working from a 2016 timber cruise, I figured that the Elliott had about six times as much timber as it had in 1930. It was never an untouched forest. Most of it is a burn that grew back.

None of this was secret. It was in the public record, scattered and half forgotten, and open to anyone with a library card: the surveyors' field notes of the 1850s, early reports of the Department of the Interior, ships' logbooks, old maps and photographs, pioneer diaries, the journals of early scientists, and the recorded memories of people who knew the land before he did. The list goes on and on. Bob reads the original, not somebody's summary of it, and he finds out how each record was made before he trusts it. He checks one kind of record against another. Then he goes outdoors and looks.

He is just as careful to say what the evidence does not show. After weighing all of it for the whole Coast Range, The Great Fires reports "a strong correlation between Indian burning practices in the Oregon Coast Range and subsequent Great Fire events; however, it has not demonstrated a cause and effect relationship between the two." My own research at Oregon State kept returning to how numbers and models mislead the people who rely on them. I have rarely seen a scholar draw that line so plainly.

Bob has paid a price for this work. Few people can argue with his evidence, because there is so much of it and it fits together. That does not mean they like being proven wrong.

It took me far too long to apply his lesson to my own land. I bought my tree farm west of Pedee in December 1989. It had just been logged, and I paid for it by maxing out my credit cards. In 1990 I planted about 25,000 Douglas-fir seedlings on it, mostly by myself on weekends, at 22 cents a seedling. My own management plan said the land "was homesteaded around the turn of the century." I believed it.

This October, Bob and I went looking for the farm's first records, a story he tells in his preface. They did not agree with my plan. Only about 7 of the farm's 211 acres were ever homesteaded. Of the 23 trees the surveyors marked at corners on and near the farm in 1854 and 1855, 15 were oaks. Only one was a Douglas-fir. In 1855 two pioneer families, the Tedrows and the Johnsons, lived about 400 feet apart on what is now my tree farm. An aerial photograph from 1955 shows most of the place as open grass with scattered trees.

I had owned that land for almost thirty-seven years and had never read a word its first surveyors wrote about it. Every one of those records was public, and most of them were free.

That is where this guide and its website came from. Bob has spent thirty years teaching students to do this kind of work. Once we saw what a few evenings with the records did for 211 acres near Pedee, we wanted anyone to be able to do the same for their own land. The website Your Land History gathers the scattered records for a piece of Oregon land. This guide teaches what the website cannot: how to read them the way Bob does. Start with the original. Learn how it was made. Check it against the others. Go and look. Say plainly what you know and what you don't.

Like most really good ideas, it is simple and obvious in retrospect, but not necessarily obvious to start with.

Pick a piece of land you care about, find out what its first surveyor wrote, and see whether the story you were told holds up.

Dave Sullivan
Pedee, Oregon
October 2026

Preface

On October 1, 2026, I asked my friend Dave Sullivan a simple question: whether the AI tools he uses could find the original survey notes and the old aerial photographs for his tree farm near Pedee. The survey notes and maps came back the same day. The photographs came soon after.

The records did not agree with the farm's own management plan. For years the plan had said the land "was homesteaded around the turn of the century." That could not be right for most of it. Settlers could no longer start donation land claims after 1855, and the Homestead Act was not passed until 1862. A second look at the records found that homesteading accounted for about 7 of the farm's 211 acres. Most of the rest came from two pioneer land claims surveyed in the summer of 1855. The computer found and assembled the records. Reading them took practice.

I am a forest and wildfire historian. I earned my doctorate in environmental sciences at Oregon State University, and I have spent decades with the records of Pacific Northwest forests: survey notes, old maps, aerial photographs, the journals of early travelers, and the memories of people who knew the land before me. In 1996 I helped found Oregon Websites and Watersheds, a nonprofit that shows students how to use those records to understand their own watersheds. The habits in this guide come from four of my studies, which Chapter 4 describes.

Most of the records about a piece of land are public. They are also scattered among dozens of offices and websites, and many are written in old handwriting, old units and the language of another century. A skilled researcher knows which ones matter, but gathering them by hand is slow. A computer can gather them quickly, but without someone who knows what they mean, it produces a heap of paper that makes no sense to anyone. This guide is for the person in between: the owner, neighbor or student who wants to know the story of one place and is willing to learn how.

It shows how the work is done, which records exist, where they are kept, and how to read them. Dave's tree farm is the example in every chapter, because it is a place where every kind of record turned up something, and because its owner agreed to let it be the example. It is also where the idea for this guide and its website began. Dave calls this eating your own dog food, a software term for using what you build. The method is general. Your land has its own story.

If you try this on your own land, I would like to hear what you find, and where this guide let you down. Send corrections and additions through the Your Land History site: the About page, or the "That's wrong" link beside any record.

Bob Zybach
October 2026

Acknowledgments

Two Oregon organizations made this guide possible: Oregon Advocates for School Trust Lands and Oregon Websites and Watersheds. Much of the information in it comes from their work and their collections.

Dave Sullivan did the computing, built the website Your Land History that goes with this guide, and offered his own tree farm near Pedee as the example that runs through every chapter.

The records come from public agencies and libraries, and from the people who keep them: the Bureau of Land Management's Oregon State Office; the National Archives; the Oregon State Archives; the Oregon State University Libraries' Special Collections and Archives Research Center and Oregon Digital; the University of Oregon Libraries, for Historic Oregon Newspapers and the aerial photograph collection; the Oregon Historical Society; the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries; the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service; the U.S. Geological Survey; the Library of Congress; and the Polk County Clerk, Assessor and Surveyor. Their records are open to everyone, and that is the reason this guide can exist.

Any mistakes are mine.

How to use this guide

Read Part I first. Its five short chapters explain how to begin, how to describe your land the way the records do, where the approach comes from, and how the website Your Land History fits in.

Then go where your question leads. Part II covers the sources, grouped by the four kinds of evidence: written documents, images, the land itself, and living memory. Each source is described the same way:

What it tells you
Where to find it
How to read it
What it costs
A caution
On the tree farm, an example from the farm near Pedee

You do not need to read Part II in order, and you do not need all of it.

Part III puts the pieces together. It shows how to organize what you find and weigh it, follows the tree farm from beginning to end, tries the same method on a house in town and a wheat field, suggests what to do next, and ends with a directory of Oregon offices and websites, with addresses and costs.

A few conventions run through the book. A term printed in bold inside a sentence is explained in the glossary at the back. Small raised numbers lead to the notes at the back, which give the source of every fact; you never need them to follow the story. Measurements are in feet, miles and acres; where an old record uses chains and links, the guide converts them. Web addresses were checked in October 2026. If one fails, search for the name of the office or the collection, which lasts longer than the address. Most sources are free. Where a source needs a free account, charges a fee or must be visited in person, the guide says so.

The examples are in Oregon, and the directory is Oregon's. The method works anywhere, and Chapter 3 explains what changes in states that were never surveyed on the federal grid.

Part I. How land history is researched

Part II. The sources

Part II takes the sources one kind at a time, in the four groups Chapter 1 describes: written documents, images, the land itself, and living memory. Each chapter says what a source tells you, where to find it, how to read it and what it costs, and shows it at work on the tree farm.

Written documents. Written documents name people and give dates. The five chapters that follow take them in rough order of time, from the first survey to the newspapers and the gravestones.

Images. Images show what a place looked like, or how it was laid out, at one time. The next two chapters start with maps and go on to photographs taken from the ground, from the air and from space.

The land itself. The land keeps records of its own, in rock and soil, rain and rivers, plants, and the marks people left on the ground. The next five chapters read them from the oldest layer up: the rock, the weather and water, what grew there, the first people, and what you can still see on a walk.

Living memory. Living memory reaches back to about the 1940s, and it holds what no office files: who did the work, why a road moved, what the place was called. The last chapter of Part II covers interviews, and the papers and photographs families keep.

Chapter 18. What people remember, and what families keep