Town Hopes Namesake Will Prevent Extinction

Karen Koskela crouches over a deep hole cut into a hillside behind Wheeler High School and carefully picks through thin slabs of chalky shale, scanning each one for signs of fossilized insects and leaves.

Koskela has come here on a chilly afternoon to show two visitors this tiny town’s treasure -- a prolific public fossil bed in one of the most geologically diverse regions in the United States.

“It’s a gift from God,” said Koskela, as she examined a fossilized worm still marked by traces of organic matter. “Every time we get company, we bring them up here.”

Fossil hunting has long been a local pastime in this town, where 40 million years of prehistory are preserved in layers that record the region’s transition from ocean to tropics to desert. The town got its name in 1876 when early settlers discovered a fossilized elephant and other unidentifiable animal bones in the nearby hills.

But now the fossil beds, which stretch for miles in the remote, rolling hills, may become the town’s next economic engine. Fossil, a dying timber town, has pinned its hopes for the future on the ancient past in its backyard.

“We’ve got to quit lamenting that the timber isn’t here anymore and start looking to other things. Now, everyone realizes they have to branch out,” said Lyn Craig, a business owner who hopes to build a paleontology institute and a teaching academy here.

“There’s so much out here to discover,” she said. “Once people hear about it, more and more people will come.”

For generations, Fossil kept to itself, a timber and ranching town tucked away among miles of windswept hills.

But when the Kinzua timber mill, just seven miles outside town, shut down in 1978, the sleepy hamlet quickly lost jobs and people. Fossil’s population dropped from 750 people to 430 as the younger generation moved away.

School enrollment fell until just 97 children attended school in Fossil in 2002-03. The high school routinely graduates just a handful of students -- one year it graduated only one -- and residents now worry about the town losing its schools too.

“Every time a family moves into town with kids, we want to go grab them and say, ‘Quick, enroll them in school,’ ” said Vada Schurtz, who runs a hair salon behind Our Little Country, a gift and flower shop. “Until they get some form of income for younger people, this town won’t grow.”

Several years ago, county officials began an aggressive, multimillion-dollar campaign to bring tourists, scientists, students and teachers to Fossil to study the region’s rich paleontological history at a nationally recognized research institute. The center will offer lengthy seminars, field trips and fossil digs at the three units of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, which fan out south of town.

Plans call for converting Wheeler High School, home of the public fossil dig, into a state-of-the-art learning center called the Oregon Paleo Lands Institute. What is currently Fossil Elementary School will be renovated to hold all 12 grades.

The Paleo Academy, a summer program that offers Oregon teachers science certification, is in its second year and will expand from several dozen to hundreds of participants, Craig said.

The Paleo Project will boost local schools too.

County leaders have already created mobile classrooms equipped with an interactive communications system for six rural school districts. The so-called Frontier Learning Network will soon be upgraded to broadcast “virtual digs” worldwide from the vast fossil repositories near town.

Converting the schools alone will cost between $8 million and $10 million, with funding planned from a combination of local, state, federal and private money.

“For a long time, we went through a sleepy period,” said Mayor Linda Fleming. “But now there’s a kind of resurgence of energy. Once you have success, it breeds motivation.”

The town’s efforts have already paid off.

In the past months, tourists from Germany, Holland, Sweden and Switzerland have wandered into town, looking for the famous fossils. Fossil recently made the final round of the 2003 All-America Cities contest, sponsored by the National Civic League in Washington, D.C. Fossil lost out in the final decision to much larger cities such as Miami Beach, Tempe, Ariz., and New Haven, Conn.

“Just being chosen in the first place was a compliment. We didn’t expect that,” said Fleming.

Sixteen Oregon teachers attended the Paleo Academy in 2002, its first year, and Craig expects twice as many this summer. And the town recently secured $500,000 to design the research institute. The Paleo Project also won the Oregon Award for Sustainability in 2002.

“We understand that it’s a costly project for such a rural area and we’re going to have to get funds piecemeal,” said Craig. “But people seem to like Fossil. They like to invest where they know that the people are going to follow through and really care.”

The project’s initial success has helped restore faith among Fossil’s residents, who have long prided themselves on self-reliance and a strong community spirit.

“I think people are excited about the town growing,” said Tom McNeill, owner of Fossil General Mercantile, which opened in 1883. “There’s some good prospects with more tourists coming in. We could stand a little bit of growth.”

But others worry that Fossil, with its two bars, five churches and turreted county courthouse, will change too much if the Paleo Project succeeds.

Residents whose roots in Fossil stretch back generations are wary of tourists and the outside influence they will bring -- but they also know the change is inevitable if the town is to survive without logging.

“Every time we open up and talk to someone, it changes,” said Koskela, who was born in a logging camp outside Fossil. “But everything changes. And we are absolutely at the end of an era.”