The Swett-Ricen history

by Arnold Chamove

In 1958, Theodore M. Swett answered a questionnaire from the Jewish Institute of Religion at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. He detailed his experience of New Odessa, a short-lived Jewish agricultural colony located near present-day Glendale, Oregon when Swett was a child. His comments about its history are one of the few surviving first-person accounts. They are incorporated below as repeated in a letter to a descendent several years later about the Swett - Ricen families of Odessa.

In the Ukraine in 1881, one of the emigration organizations formed to assist refugees was called Am Olam (“the eternal people”), which encouraged Jews to resettle in Palestine and in the USA as agriculturalists, traditions documented in the bible. The first group of “Am Olamniks” arrived in New York in January 1882, and they sent scouting parties to Texas, Oregon, and Washington before deciding to locate their community in Oregon’s Douglas County. In September 1882, 34 arrived in Portland, buying 760 acres of heavily-wooded land between Wolf and Cow creeks in the upper Umpqua River Valley from Hyman and Julia Wollenberg in March.

By 1884, the population of New Odessa had grown to 65, mostly single men. The community cut and sold timber to the Oregon and California Railroad for use as railroad ties and fuel. For food they planted vegetables and wheat on more than 100 acres of their land. By 1885 the community had split, and during the next two years, the population of New Odessa abandoned the community, most returning to New York.

BELOW FROM A LETTER FROM THEODORE SWETT, b. 1905 Portland, Oregon, USA, d. 1986, Portland, Oregon.

Swett, Theodore M. Hilltop Drive, Roads End, RT 1 Box 344, Otis, Oregon 97368, USA 20 Sept 1971 [Otis, a wide spot in the road on the north Oregon coast].

About the Swett-Ricen history: I am the only surviving member of the family to be able to assemble whatever knowledge remains, because I lived with my mother and father for 59 years.

In Odessa, both the Ricens and the Swetts had enough money to provide proper educational opportunities for the children. In Odessa the Ricens owned a rather large apartment house. As I recall, it was about a block square, walled on the outside as most were in those days. It not only took money but also influence (bribes) to get a Jewish boy into college. And in Odessa, not as in the villages, Jews had some opportunities to avail themselves of the arts. I remember my mother and Uncle Will recalling how they would go to the opera, high in the balcony. The family did study Hebrew, but when they came to this country, they quickly learned English, and I know than they knew very little of Yiddish but more of Russian.

It was the Swetts who came first to America, my grandfather, Leon Swett, in 1882. The family was the first Russian Jewish family to settle in Oregon. At the time he came, he was married and had a wife and two sons an two daughters. From what I heard of family legend, the family emigrated from Palestine after the fall of the Temple in the year 70 A.D.. They then went to Spain, thence to Germany, after the inquisition of 1492. That is why, perhaps, we find that my grandfather, father, brother, me all have blue eyes. They undoubtedly found their way back to Odessa because of the loss of a Protective duchy.

A group of idealists, calling themselves the Am Olam set out for Oregon early in 1882 to settle on a farm, a commune, in southern Oregon, in the belief that the Jews should get back on the land, till the soil, and live together in harmony and without persecution. The ship stopped at New York for about three weeks, then went on to the Isthmus of Panama. The groups then crossed the Isthmus by wagon or train, and then boarded another ship directly for Portland. When the group arrived in Portland, my grandpa Leon decided not to join the group. You see, he was the eldest, and with a family of four children. The others in the group were young, unmarried. And the country to which they were going was primitive and rugged. He felt that it would not be a good place for the growing-up of the children. Grandpa Leon Swett was born in Odessa and was a very soft-spoken, genuine and kindly man. I cant imagine him as much of a revolutionary, and that’s probably one of the reasons why he did not join the group. Instead, he obtained a homestead at Buxton, Washington County, Oregon, about 40-50 miles from Portland on the way to the Oregon Coast. And he farmed there for 25 years, clearing the land and building a house and barns. My father was not quite 12 when they arrived in Portland, but soon after setting on the farm, he came in to Portland to get a job to help support the family in the farm.

In 1886 Aunt Mary, the oldest child, married William Galvani who owned the adjoining homestead. William Galvani was from St. Petersburg, and was an engineer. Shortly after Mary and he were married, while they were preparing for a Sunday morning’s hunt, his gun went off and shot and killed Aunt Mary as the newspapers tell it. After that, because of the tragedy I guess, Galvani was not close to the family and went his own way, becoming a famous engineer in the early days of railroad engineering in Oregon. He had a great library, which he gave to Oregon State University [University of Oregon] which made him an L.L.B. I knew him in later years, and found him to be a kindly man. My uncle Isaac, my father’s brother, then came in to Portland, and became one of Portland’s first Jewish Lawyers. But, peculiarly, my Aunt Nadia, the youngest daughter, never married, once spent some time in Palestine, in the 1920 as secretary to Henrietta Szold, but was a rugged individualist and became a farmer! Aunt Nadie (Nadia) can be claimed as the only Jewish farmerette in Oregon, and my grandfather can be claimed as the only true, full-time Jewish farmer in Oregon. When he left the homestead in Buxton, he brought a 16 acre farm at 60th and Glisan Streets in what is now the center of Portland.

My grandfather, although he did not join the Am Olam group, remained friendly with them, as did my father in later years. But the scheme finally failed. First, I must say that all of them were strong individualists, and that does not make for communal living. They had a fine library there, had a contract with a railroad to make railroad ties, but a disastrous fire, plus those other things, and desires to move on, led to the downfall to the experiment.

In later years I met some of the children of this group, one or two born there. Wonderful people. Too bad the history is so fragmentary. No one kept a going diary or record at the time.