“This is the McKee Bridge Tabletopper I made for a friend whose uncle donated the land upon which the McKee Bridge was built. The covered bridge was built in 1917 and has now been decommissioned and is used for foot traffic only. While owned by Jackson County, Oregon, the Mckee Bridge Society pays to maintain the bridge so that it passes all safety inspections. On each corner of the tabletopper is a yellow “Logtown Rose”, descended from a rose start that my friend’s great aunt carried on the wagon train with her on the Oregon Trail. The rose start was carried in a potato and soaked each night in some of the water set aside from that which ended up in the cooking pot.
More of the story can be read in: “Maryum’s Yellow Rose: Story of a Pioneer Woman” by Evelyn Williams. The rose is now growing along the fence of the Logtown Cemetery outside of Ruch, Oregon. The actual town of Logtown is long gone but the roses are still there, as is the cemetery and many old (for this half of the country, anyway) graves. :-) The idea for the tabletopper came from Claudia Dutcher’s Dutch Treat Designs tabletoppers but the bridge and roses were charted from photographs of the bridge and the roses at the cemetery. In my “spare time”, I have plans to make an actual working chart of the McKee Bridge and of the Logtown Rose, so that those two groups can sell them to raise money for bridge and cemetery upkeep. The tabletopper reminded me, however, that, while stitching is lots of fun, designing can be a real pain!!!!!!! :-)))
For the bridges, I used leftovers of two different “brown” overdyed threads and for the roses, I used a yellow overdyed and started in the middle, spiraling outward until the edges matched the chart I had drawn from the photograph of the rose. The wave around the outside border represents the Applegate River and came from the “who knows where” of water borders. I made the tabletopper back in 2007 & 2008 for the 50th anniversary of my friend and her husband.”