History
On May 5, 1945, Reverend Archie Mitchell took his pregnant wife and five Sunday school children, from the Christian and Missionary Alliance church where he was minister, on a picnic and fishing trip. The group found the logging road they followed blocked, so they stopped next to Leonard Creek, eight miles (13 km) east of Bly near Gearhart Mountain. While Mitchell was unloading the food, he heard one of the children say, "Look what I found!" His wife and the children ran to see what had been found. Moments later, there was an explosion. Mrs. Mitchell and all five children were killed instantly.
The children had found the remains of a Japanese balloon bomb, one of approximately 9,000 balloon bombs launched from Honshū, Japan between November 1944 and April 1945. The balloons drifted across the Pacific Ocean to North America via the jet stream in about three days. The hydrogen-filled balloons were 33 feet (10 m) in diameter and carried five bombs, four incendiaries and one anti-personnel high explosive. It is believed that as many as 1,000 balloons may have reached the United States and Canada. However, there were only 285 confirmed sightings on the west coast, and two balloons were later found in Michigan. Except for Elyse (aka Elsie) Mitchell and the five children killed near Bly, the bombs caused no injuries.
The Mitchell Monument site was originally owned by Weyerhaeuser Corporation. In 1998, Weyerhaeuser donated land around the monument to the Fremont National Forest (now the Fremont-Winema National Forests). A small picnic area was developed around the monument.
Read more about this topic: Mitchell Recreation Area
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passé abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“Systematic philosophical and practical anti-intellectualism such as we are witnessing appears to be something truly novel in the history of human culture.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)