Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 26.djvu/166

138 A pulpit was placed in Jefferson Institute. The cabin was used for church and for all general gatherings. Lyle was a Presbyterian. Denominational differences were ignored and missionaries of all churches were welcomed. MacWaller preached there, as did John Boone and Glen O. Burnett. People came from miles away and through the Sabbath morning could be heard the men's voices urging their ox-teams as they approached the Institute. Hospitable cabins welcomed the arrivals and happy hours of visiting followed the religious service before the slow moving oxen were turned homeward.

In summer additional shelter for the congregation was provided by setting forked tree limbs upright across the front of the building and covering them with fir boughs. The young girls sometimes decorated the room, filling the fireplace with greens and inserting yew boughs along the log walls. When they had finished, says Mrs. Hayter, they carefully swept the litter from the doorway with branches of snowberry.

Court, too, was held in Jefferson Institute during that year. The provisional county circuit court was convened on September 6, 1846. On a high steel shelf in the vault of the Polk County Court House at Dallas lies a worn volume that bears on time yellowed leaves the clear and legible record of the first circuit court of Polk County. In some providential way these records escaped when the court house burned in 1898. On the first page of the old record is written:

"Be it remembered that, at a circuit court, begun and held at the Jefferson Institute, within and for the county of Polk, on the first Monday in September, it being the sixth, A. D. 1846, when were present the Hon. A. A. Skinner, judge of the Circuit Court Oregon Territory, and Benj. F. Nichols, sheriff of said county. When the court was opened in due form of law by the sheriff the court ascertained that no venire for grand jury had been issued, also that the office of the clerk of the county