Irene, Harriet and Elizabeth Joy Buckner

Irene, Bucky and Hobbie Buckner in 1937.

Courtesy the Buckner Homestead Heritage Foundation.

Article Written By Emma Chapman

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Sisters Irene, Harriet, and Elizabeth Joy Bucker grew up on a family homestead in the Stehekin Valley in Chelan County, Washington, which became part of the Lake Chelan National Recreation Area. Their early lives at the northern end of Lake Chelan exemplify the family labor system essential to rural homesteads in the first part of the twentieth century.

The sisters were born to Harry and Olive Buckner. The oldest, Irene Myra Buckner, was born in 1919 while her father was posted briefly in France at the end of World War I.¹ Harriet Olive Buckner, who went by “Hobbie” throughout her life, was born in 1921.² The youngest, Elizabeth Joy Buckner, who went by “Bucky,” was born in 1926.³ The three lived with their parents on a homestead that their father took over after their aunt’s death during the 1918 influenza pandemic.⁴ There, the family cultivated an apple orchard, grew alfalfa, raised cows, pigs, horses and chickens, and grew a large kitchen garden of vegetables. Much of the girls’ time was taken up with chores and work around the household and farm. They tended the chickens and cows, hauled hay, weeded the garden, helped with the weekly laundry, cleaned machinery, and built apple boxes. When the sisters were old enough, they drove their family’s cars and trucks to haul boxes of apples to the docks on Lake Chelan or to fetch cords of wood from the forest. These were important chores as they earned their income from shipping apples by barge from their orchard to other places outside of the Stehekin Valley. In the 1930s they drove a pair of cars they called Franklin and Eleanor, after the president and first lady.⁵  

Their childhood was isolated. Stehekin was only accessible by boat or mountain trail. The family home did not have running water, gas, or electricity for much of the 1920s and 1930s, and the sisters attended elementary school in a one-room schoolhouse with only a handful of other children.⁶ However, in the memoir the sisters co-wrote, they remembered details of their childhood fondly. During their leisure time the sisters picnicked, rode horses, went camping at Rainbow Pass, and listened to popular radio programs.⁷ In the winters they ate what they caught or grew in the fall and summer, including many pies and dumplings made with apples from their orchard.⁸ In the summers, they made ice cream with winter ice stored in the icehouse, and they cooled bottles of homemade root beer in the horses’ water trough.⁹ They also hosted dances in the family packing shed for community members and forest service workers, sprinkling the floor with soap flakes to make it smooth for dancing waltzes and foxtrots late into the night.¹⁰

As teenagers in the 1930s, the sisters boarded with their grandparents and family friends in Chelan, fifty-five miles away, in order to attend high school.¹¹ Entering adulthood during the Great Depression, they had to forge new, separate identities in a rapidly changing West. Irene met a Civilian Conservation Corps instructor from Chicago named Anton “Tony” Sargo who came to work around Lake Chelan. They married in 1941 and spent the war many lonely years apart—he was in the army overseas, she was a secretary in California.¹² During World War II, Bucky went to college at Washington State University and came home during harvests to help with the family orchard. She and Hobbie became important contributors to their family’s income, as their labor in the orchard replaced the male farmhands who had been drafted in the war effort.¹³ In 1946 Hobbie married carpenter and orchardist Kenneth Morehead and became a step-mother to two children.¹⁴ In 1947 Bucky married Navy veteran and mining engineer William Gans, earning her bachelor’s degree in history from Washington State University around the same time.¹⁵

Irene and Hobbie raised families in Manson, a small town on the southern end of Lake Chelan, and Bucky raised hers in places around the world, including Wenatchee, Brazil and Mexico.¹⁶ Their father sold the homestead and orchard to the National Park Service in the 1970s, but the sisters continued to gather often at Stehekin. Irene and Hobbie together took their children, their children’s friends and female friends on backpacking trips around Lake Chelan.¹⁷ Hobbie and Bucky went on bushwhacking trips together well into their eighties.¹⁸

Irene died in 2007, followed by Hobbie in 2018 and Bucky in 2020.¹⁹ Their family homestead and its rural rituals became important touchpoints of collective memory and reunion even as their adult lives took them away into the sweeping political and social transformations of the twentieth century.²⁰

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¹ - Chris Rader, “Buckners Active in Stehekin for More than 100 Years,” The Confluence, Publication of Wenatchee Valley Museum & Cultural Center, vol. 34, no. 4 (2018–19): 10; “Washington, County Birth Registers, 1873-1965,” database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:812T-ST3Z: 10 September 2020), Irene Mira Buckner, 1919.

² - Rader, “Buckners Active in Stehekin,” 10; "Washington, County Birth Registers, 1873-1965", database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:DXS1-Y8PZ: 5 November 2020), Harriet Olive Buckner, 1921.

³ - Rader, “Buckners Active in Stehekin,” 10; "Washington, County Birth Registers, 1873-1965", database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:DXS1-YD3Z: 5 November 2020), Elizabeth Joy Buckner, 1926.

⁴ - Rader, “Buckners Active in Stehekin,” 10.

⁵ - Irene Sargo, Harriet (Hobbie) Morehead, and Elizabeth (Bucky) Gans, The Stehekin We Remember (Centralia, WA: Gorham Printing, 2007), 88–99.

⁶ - Sargo, et al., The Stehekin We Remember, 15, 26, 27, 48–55.

⁷ - Sargo, et al., The Stehekin We Remember, 13, 55, 106-107, 110-23.

⁸ - Sargo, et al., The Stehekin We Remember, 25.

⁹ - Sargo, et al., The Stehekin We Remember, 26–27, 83.

¹⁰ - Sargo, et al., The Stehekin We Remember, 103–106.

¹¹ - Rader, “Buckners Active in Stehekin,” 8; “United States Census, 1940,” database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:K998-SFZ : 6 March 2020), Elizabeth J Buckner in household of Merritt Fields, Lake Chelan Election Precinct, Chelan, Washington, United States; citing enumeration district (ED) 4-15, sheet 1A, line 39, family 124, Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940, NARA digital publication T627. Records of the Bureau of the Census, 1790 - 2007, RG 29. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 2012, roll 4332.

¹² - Rader, “Buckners Active in Stehekin,” 14; Sargo, et al. The Stehekin We Remember, 76-77.

¹³ - Sargo, et al. The Stehekin We Remember, 41, 93.

¹⁴ - Sargo, et al. The Stehekin We Remember, 202; "Washington, County Marriages, 1855-2008," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QPML-V3ZV : 28 November 2018), Kenneth Morehead and Harriet Buckner, 18 Jan 1946, Chelan, Washington, United States, Washington State Archives, Olympia; FamilySearch digital folder 004962511.

¹⁵ - “Obituary: Elizabeth ‘Bucky’ Gans,” Santa Barbara News-Press (Santa Barbara, California), March 7-11, 2020; "Washington, County Marriages, 1855-2008," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QPMJ-L5CQ : 28 November 2018), William C Gans and Elizabeth J Buckner, 18 Aug 1947, Chelan, Washington, United States, Washington State Archives, Olympia; FamilySearch digital folder 004962512.

¹⁶ - “Obituary: Elizabeth ‘Bucky’ Gans,” Santa Barbara News-Press (Santa Barbara, California), March 7-11, 2020; “Brasil, Cartões de Imigração, 1900-1965,” database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:V1SR-ZTG : 8 May 2019), Elizabeth Buckner Gans, Immigration; citing 1958, Arquivo Nacional, Rio de Janeiro (National Archives, Rio de Janeiro)

¹⁷ - Rader, “Buckners Active in Stehekin,” 14; Sargo, et al. The Stehekin We Remember, 118–119.

¹⁸ - “Obituary: Elizabeth ‘Bucky’ Gans,” Santa Barbara News-Press (Santa Barbara, California), March 7-11, 2020.

¹⁹ - Sargo, et al. The Stehekin We Remember, 202; “Obituary: Harriet Olive “Hobbie” Morehead,” The Wenatchee World (Wenatchee, Washington), September 20, 2018; “Obituary: Elizabeth ‘Bucky’ Gans,” Santa Barbara News-Press (Santa Barbara, California), March 7-11, 2020.

²⁰ - Rader, “Buckners Active in Stehekin,” 9.

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Acknowledgements:

This project was made possible in part by a grant from the National Park Foundation.

This project was conducted in Partnership with the University of California Davis History Department through the Californian Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit, CA# P20AC00946