Aliquis 8, 2014

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GatewayStories about people

Treat it wellThere are many ways of taking care of your horse. Know what are the best practices. P.16

Country lifeLearn why you never understood country folk. Hint: it is all about feeling human again. P.8

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herry Millican“As you do your work you can think about how many hands have held this.” P.24

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“When I look out on the field, I can see my great grandfather tilling the land. They were heartier people than I.

Sherry MillicanCultivating the land for the future

1865barn that towers over the acreage is one of the oldest in Lane Coun-ty. Additionally, the same white, two-story house where Millican was raised has sat at the top of the dirt road for over a century. She and Richey follow in her ancestor’s footsteps by preserving the original buildings, raising goats and horses and growing their own hay. They even use Robert’s remaining agricul-tural tools.

“As you do your work you can think about how many hands have held this, how many hours of work and tedium and love have gone into making something that is great,” Millican says as she gazes out the wide kitchen window at the land that bound her family together for hundreds of years. “When I look out on the field, I can see my great grandfather tilling the land. They were heartier people than I.”

She always knew keeping the ranch in the family would be a challenge. But she never imagined it would start so soon. Two years ago, the death of Millican’s mother, Neva Millican, sparked a family dispute regarding her will. Neva left a quar-ter of the ranch to each of her four daughters, three of whom had no interest in living or working on the family’s land.

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Every time Sherry Millican drives her ‘94 Jeep Cherokee down Oregon Route 126, she passes a town marker crafted of oversized, chestnut-colored logs on the right-hand side of the road. The large white letters on the sign read “Walter-ville.”

The town is named after Walter Milli-can, one of her ancestors who helped settle the McKenzie River Valley in the early 1900s. As the rolling green farm-land whips by, she passes a street sign for Millican Road—a nod to her great grandfather, Robert Millican. About a mile further, she approaches a wooden arch at the entrance to a gravel road. A rustic metal nameplate that reads “Triangle 5 Ranch” sits overhead as she drives under the arch onto the dirt road and up to the 640-acre ranch that five generations of her family have called “home.”

Millican is a homesteader–someone who makes both her home and her living on the same plot of land. For her, it’s more than her preferred lifestyle—it’s the family business. She and her husband, Todd Richey, own and operate a ranch on her ancestor’s homestead. It’s a tough job that requires demanding labor from sunup to sundown as they struggle to keep the ranch afloat and meet modern standards. But the way she sees it, if the next generation can continue to drive under the Triangle Ranch 5 sign, it will all be worth it.

“The future of the ranch—it can be anything we want to build it to,” Richey says. “We’ve got the ground to do any-thing. Time is our biggest problem.”

Though they are in their 60s, the couple

ABOVE: Sherry Millican and her husband doing farming stuff.

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continues to wake up every morning and care for their animals, just as gen-erations of Millicans have done before them.

In 1865, Robert Millican joined the wave of pioneers settling the west in response to the Homestead Act of 1862. After boarding a ship in New York, sailing around the Isthmus of Panama to Portland, and walking from Albany to Eugene, Oregon, Robert received a John Latta Donation Land Claim and settled in Lane County.

Four name changes and 148 years later, Triangle 5 Ranch is still run by the Millican family.

Today, the ranch boasts three original hand-built barns that stand as a tes-tament to Robert’s meticulous crafts-manship. The massive charcoal-grey

‘ “Sherry’s mom probably thought the sisters would play well and try to sell [their portion of the ranch] to Sherry,” Richey says. “Well, that wasn’t the way it went at all.”

illican’s three sisters didn’t see ranching as a practical means of making a living. Kathy Millican, her oldest sister, pursued her dream of having her own ranch and has since retired on a smaller acreage. Her other two sisters, Karen Coreson and Sandra Welker, chose a different lifestyle altogether.

“As I matured, the ability to earn a living on any farm decreased. The single-family farm became obsolete as a means to make a living,” says Welker, a retired dental hygienist. “So I gravitated toward where I could make a living and that was away from the land.”

Though she acknowledges that Millican has a better understanding of the ranching lifestyle, Welker and her sisters had other plans for the land. Not seeing the ranch as a practical or profitable venture, they decided to place their portions of the ranch up for general sale.

Lawyers were hired, negotiations were made, and bitter feelings transpired. Millican’s sisters wanted to sell the land to a cattle rancher for around $2.4 million, which would be split between the four of them. It was an offer that Millican and Richey couldn’t afford to counter. Devastated by the potential loss of

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the family homestead and all the sentimental value that it carried, the couple was determined to fight in order to save the land.

“I said to the girls, ‘I cannot sit here and see everything that has been our heritage bulldozed into a heap and burned,’” Millican says.

Despite what Richey describes as a strong reluctance from the three sis-ters to sell the land to his wife, they decided to hear the couple’s busi-ness plan. Scrambling to counter the offer, Millican and Richey proposed to log $2.6 million worth of trees for a profit that would be distributed three ways. The sisters weighed the couple’s proposal and ultimately decided to take their offer.

“It was sort of like, we traded the

trees for the land,” says Welker. “[Sherry] has the knowledge and she is the best one to serve the ranch, and it’s a means of keeping the ranch in one piece. I’m very happy that way and I’m sure [Sherry] is too.”

According to land usage data from the Environmental Protection Agen-cy, small family farms represent the majority of farms in America, but economies of scale increasingly favor growth in large industrial farm operations. Data from the National Agricultural Statistics Service in 2002 indicates that every week, 330 farmers leave their land.

Hoping to avoid joining that statis-tic, Millican and Richey mapped out

I cannot sit here and see everything that has been our

heritage bulldozed into a heap and

burned.

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ABOVE: Sherry’s family having dinner.

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Credits: That badass photographer.

It’s hard work but I can’t see myself living in a cul-de-sac.”

But while Millican and Richey’s passion continues to fuel the ranch, its future remains uncertain. The fate of the land, the traditions, and the Millican homesteading lifestyle rests in the hands of their only son, Curran Manzer.

Manzer lives on the homestead with his wife, Michelle. After moving back to his ancestor’s land to help care for his grandmother’s shop.

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a way to continue to make a living off their land. When they married eighteen years ago, Millican tended the ranch, took care of her elderly mother, and worked a forty-hour-a-week job. But once they launched a trail riding business on the ranch, Millican was able to quit her job.

“e were taking people horseback riding every weekend. Every week-end in the summer [it] was either friends, friends of friends, or family,” says Richey. “Nowadays we probably see a thousand people a year.”

In addition to trail rides, the couple is in the process of building an arena for roping cattle and horseback rid-ing lessons. Millican estimates the overall cost of the arena could reach up to $90,000 and take five years to complete, but that the profit would outweigh the costs. Other modern ventures include logging trees and renting out a portion of the land to various agricultural companies, which would provide enough finan-cial support to help sustain their traditional ranching lifestyle.

“The ranch is a living, breathing entity,” says Richey. “It’s no different than a sibling, or your son or daugh-

ter, and you have to take care of it. It just doesn’t take care of itself.”

Every day the couple feeds and cares for their fifty goats, sixteen horses, and a single llama named Fuzzy. Millican, who knows every animal by name, takes special care of the elderly animals, examines goats for possible pregnancies, and disbuds baby goats by removing their horns.

“[The animals] don’t care if you’re sick, they don’t care if you’re hurt, they don’t care if it’s Sunday, they don’t care if it’s Christmas,” Millican says. “You either love it or you hate it.

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ABOVE: Sherry Millican and her husband doing farming stuff.

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Credits: That badass photographer.

RATIONALE - COVER

Since the purpose of the magazine is to “tell stories about people”, I tried to stick to my previously idea that was to emphasize visuals more than text. The photo I used to produce the cover is one that I believe has a strong concept about what the story is about. The picture rep-resents Sherry’s emotions and life by being extremely simple. Also, the colors I chose were all select based on the pallet of colors of the main photo. The master head green color reflects Sherry’s hat and the UO logo. As for the white color, I used it to balance the mix of colors of other object (bar code).

I tried to follow the Z pattern but since the texts are all in white, I had to find a position for them that wouldn’t affect its readability. That was the biggest challenge. I also tried to use diverse design elements in or-der to balance the image as more as possible. For example, the black and white lines under all the titles in the cover. Also, I have putted for the “Main Article”, a big “S” in order to address the attention of the reader to that story.

RATIONALE - SPREADS

Hopefully I have designed the spreads in a way that it kept simple and visually interesting. By adding visual elements on the text, like the “1865” date and huge quote symbols, I tried to make everything more visually attractive for the reader.

I also used photos that would add something to the story instead of stat-ing (redundancy) again what was written on the text. The main image on the first page is supposed to show the reader the kind of personality Sherry Millican has. Following this “first judgment” the reader might have, there is also a quote on the page that is supposed to represent her emotions on the image. Also, it serves as a description of the article.

I decided to use Mesquite STD as a font style thus it is the one found that most combine with the “cowboy way of life.” Pretty much all the brown colors I used are supposed to follow the jacket Sherry Millican is wearing.