Story Contributors

The timber industry was at its peak when I was a kid in Gopher Valley. Lumber mills were running at capacity. Logging trucks, at first with single axles and gas engines, followed by heavier diesel trucks, poured out of the hills around Sheridan. Sometime after the mid-1930s, Murphy Brothers was the first company to use

Having a Ball at the Community Hall! Thanks to Marilyn Bride Levy, we now have ALL the names of the Gopher Twirler Square Dancers in this photo! Marilyn says the two mystery women on Alta Bradley’s right side (left as you look at the picture) were Bernice Smelzer and Evelyn Enhes. Back Row Left: Caller

Donna Sanders (left, above), the first-born Remington daughter, remembers the years around 1948 or 1949 when her family lived at their 60-acre place about halfway up Gopher Valley. The farm across Gopher Valley Road (to the west) of them, on part of the original Kerr Brothers Donation Land Claim, was owned by Frank Shannon and

Before the Thomson Brothers built their sawmill in 1929, the area was known as Beaver Dam. Beaver Dam, named for real dams on Beaver Creek, is where my mother, Alta Sanderlin, was born in 1918. Her grandparents–Floyd Levi and Alabama Long–bought a few hundred acres in the area around 1895. They had moved west from

Things You May Not Have Known, or Maybe You Did! Have you ever heard of Gopher Valley’s “flume,” its treacherous “plank road,” or “the Deer Creek Community Hall?”  The meteorite strike in Wiley Canyon? Or that two of the early settlers’ feisty French ancestors helped overthrow British kings?   If you have stories from the