Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 3.djvu/297



The following are personal recollections in regard to one of the most worthy and beneficent of all the pioneers of Oregon, Mrs. Tabitha Brown, whose school at Forest Grove formed the nucleus of the academy founded later by Rev. Harvey Clark, and Dr. G. H.Atkinson, and was extended still later by Dr. S. H. Marsh into a college with an outlook and endowment warranting the name university.

It is expected later to present a paper touching more fully upon the entire life of Mrs. Brown, which will be prepared by Mrs. Mary Strong Kinney of Astoria, Mrs. Kinney being a great granddaughter of Mrs. Brown. The recollections of Mrs. Smith, however, who was an inmate in Mrs. Brown's schoolhouse, are of unusual interest, and in accordance with the views of all writers on history, we should fail as collectors of historical facts unless we placed on record where possible all that may be obtained of the pioneer characters. Mrs. Smith is a daughter of Robert Crouch Kinney, who was well known all over Oregon in the early day as a pioneer farmer and fruit grower in Yamhill County; and later as the pioneer export manufacturer of flour from Salem. Jane Kinney was but ten years old when coming to Oregon, with her father's family, but remembers many details of the journey across the plains, one of the most exciting occasions being in the Umatilla country when two young Indians rode alongside a daughter of Samuel Kinney,