Earlier this week a big, green, old-fashioned parcel post scale appeared in the west window of the Oysterville Store.  Surrounding it are several leprechaun-ish looking creatures and sitting directly on top, weighing in, is a tiny, wooly lamb.

My immediate thought when I saw it was “Happy Saint Patrick’s Day,” but the more I looked, the more I thought that if I thought about it (got that?) the display might be heavy with symbolism.  I also wondered if it was a scale used by Minnie Andrews when she was postmaster.  It is a 1925 model which would be just about right.  Minnie was in charge of Oysterville’s mail from 1918 to 1945.

Mostly, though, the display made me think about the story of Bridget Tanger, the only Irish resident of Oysterville that I know anything about.  Bridget came to the United States from County Mayo, Ireland, with her husband Carl.  They lived first in Illinois, and then came to Oysterville, Washington Territory where Carl found work in the oyster industry.  They lived in Diamond City at the north end of Long Island but had taken out a claim on the Naselle River.

On January 1, 1873, when Carl was 44 years old, he and his friend, Julius Mac, left Oysterville for Naselle towing a raft of lumber and other materials for the home he was so eagerly planning.  As they were crossing the bay, a sudden squall wrecked the boat and both men were drowned.  His body came ashore just a few feet from his family’s home at Diamond City.

Years later his daughter Ella (who was five at the time of the drowning) wrote this in her diary:  My earliest recollections are of our trip across the stormy bay the day of my father’s funeral.  There were the two caskets in one boat, and the rest of us in the other.  Father’s body was the first buried in Oysterville Cemetery; he and Julius Mac share a common grave.  (I’m not totally sure about Ella’s facts here.  There is a gravestone in the Captain Stream plot which says simply, “Our Baby 7/21/1870.”  Perhaps the remains were moved from somewhere else at a later time?)

After the tragedy, Bridget moved to Oysterville where the people took up a subscription and built her a house at the south end of town near Andrew Wirt’s place and across the street from Ned Osborne’s home.  Her fifth child was born eight months after Carl’s drowning and, to support her family, she took in washing.  Her specialty was the white, stiff-bosomed shirts worn by the men working at the nearby Court House.  Bleached snowy white, starched, ironed and delivered – twenty-five cents each!

A few years later, Bridget married Marshall Soames and they homesteaded on the Wallicut.  The four older children rowed three miles down a slough each day to a one-room school and they were gone from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon.  Asked if she didn’t worry, given the fate of their father, Bridget’s answer was always:  If they’re born to be hung, they’ll never be drowned.”

            According to Bridget’s granddaughter, Eleanor Barrows Bower, who wrote up her grandmother’s story for the Spring 1968 Sou’wester magazine, all of Bridget’s children grew to maturity and led prosperous, productive lives.  None drowned and none were hanged.