The mill town
Bridget Nolan, a widow from County Cork, cooked for the camp from 1858 and opened a boarding house in 1866. Widows kept several of the other boarding houses on the mill road, some of them married to men killed in the woods or at the mill, and the company's men paid them board instead of eating on its account.
Lydia Lathrop raised Horace and Cordelia over the store and worked its counter while Orrin went round town for the chapel money.
Lavinia Pratt came out from Massachusetts in the 1860s to marry Lyman Thayer, the company's paymaster. Their son Everett was born in 1866, and she lived on in their house until 1915.
Esther Doane married Hiram Spurling in San Francisco in 1869. From the house above his landing she settled its accounts with the schooner captains, for Hiram and, after he died in 1903, for their son Gus.
Lucy Pruett made dresses in Briarmont, the company clerks' wives among her customers, and raised her daughter by Elias Hartwell under her own surname. He never married her, and the girl was a Pruett until Lucy died in 1890.
The 1890s on
Adelaide Hartwell, Lucy's daughter, studied botany at Berkeley and went up to the ridges with the 1896 survey crew. When the town's trust opened the Institute in her father's house in 1918, she became a trustee, the only woman on the board for the rest of her life.
In 1901 Cordelia Lathrop and other women started the Briarmont Improvement Club at the back of the store, after Hartwell's office refused them a lot for a garden. In 1918 the club planted the Crenshaw Oak.
Agnes Corliss enrolled at the Institute in 1919, one of its first women students, and took the salmon creeks for her field. Most of the women who came after her did the same, and their creek counts run without a gap in the college archive into the 1950s. In 1947 she became the first president of Oakridge College.
The harbormaster today is Kristin Spurling, Esther's great-great-granddaughter.
Out of character. A player who wants a woman character with roots in town can play a descendant or in-law of a founding family with the owner's OK (see The Lathrop Family, The Spurling Family and The Thayer Family), or a member of the Improvement Club.