Quirk of the Week 012225

Yamhill County is home to a large number of distinct twin-cities situations.

Granted, it’s hardly unique; Washington County has Forest Grove/Cornelius, Polk County has Monmouth/Independence, and Marion County has Sublimity/Stayton.

However, this county seems to have a concentration of pairs of small communities of similar size located close together. (No attempt here in comparing and contrasting these places’ respective “character”; that’d be a smorgasbord and we’re just nibbling right now.)

Here in Yamhill three pairs of towns are located just 2-3 miles apart: Newberg/Dundee is an outlier given that one is about seven times the size of the other. (Population 26,015 and 3,179; figures used throughout are from 2023.)

Carlton/Yamhill and Sheridan/Willamina, meanwhile, are seemingly similar in size, though in both cases the first is about twice the size of the second. Both sets of towns nearly abut yet are fully separate jurisdictionally. Dundee and Newberg share a police department and school district.

Meanwhile, 10 miles separate Amity (1,763) and Dayton (2,650), yet their long-standing school rivalry puts them in the same kind of dyad category. (And, while not incorporated like the rest, it’s too tempting to resist noting that in our area are the three-B locales: Ballston, Bellevue and Broadmead, roughly five miles apart in a south-county triangle.)

Sheridan and Willamina have populations of 6,482 and 2,253, respectively. One thing the two communities have in common, not surprisingly, is two distinct commercial districts separated by a river.

Yamhill is 1,253 and Carlton 2,248. They have a blended Yamhill Carlton School District.

So, demographics aside, we look to these towns for a paired Quirk of the Week this week, one in each town, in recognition of the way unusual things are to be found in both places. (Unusual yard art and other features from both towns were mentioned a few times in Calendar of Quirk last year.)

The ones we look at today are simple ones, visible in front yards, but you have to know where to look.

In Yamhill, next to the north border of the high school parking is a modest 10-by-10-foot garden shed bearing a sign with the incongruous words painted in block letters: HEY LOOK ME OVER.

The Quirk is that it may be the only garden shed in the world invoking American musical standards.

And here’s where the twins concept kind of folds back over: there are two songs with that title, both from the 1950s and 1960s. One is by Lucille Ball and Paula Stewart and another, “Hey, Look Me Over” — with the comma — by Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh. Louis Armstrong made it famous.

Meanwhile, on Pine Street in Carlton you may have seen the stump-monster sculpture, near Harrison Street. Affixed to the trunk are a scary green-cast face to give Nosferatu a run for his money, and two unevenly spaced, antler-like arms twisted at odd angles. All this on what appears to be the bottom 10 feet of a rotting fir tree, an array of knots and burls peering out like so many more ghoulish eyes.

Nice Quirk if you can find it.