About Gheen

Robert Lee Gheen was born to a prosperous family in Harden Township in Illinois. His father, John Gheen was an attorney, but Robert wanted to go into business for himself. He and his brother, Glenn, opened a butcher shop in Nebo, Illinois. Union Stock Yards, one hour away, in Chicago, was one of the largest stock yards in our nation, processing more meat than any other place in the world, so Robert’s butcher shop was a center of fresh meat in their small town. As the butcher shop flourished, so did the Gheen Family. Robert married Martha Jones and had a son, Earnest. His brother and sisters married too. In the years up until the Great Depression, the stock yards processed at least thirteen million livestock a year, reaching as high as eighteen million some years. In 1929, when the Great Depression started, the stock yards were booming, but over the next 2 years, many farms were forced to close due to the dustbowl and economic crisis.  

Robert had a hard decision to make. During the depths of the Great Depression, many hard-pressed American farmers were forced to make the difficult decision to leave their farms and relocate to more hospitable conditions in order to provide for their families and feed their children. In 1930, Robert Lee Gheen packed his growing family and all earthly possessions into a Hudson Auto and drove 1927 miles across many dirt roads from Nebo, Illinois to Lodi, California. Instead of being met with the land of milk and honey, he was gazing at yet another bone-dry field. After a year, a drought, and a flood, in 1931, Robert Lee Gheen had the grit to relocate a second time, leaving everything his family knew in California and moving to the Willamette Valley. Robert bought a six-acre farm on Willagillespie Road in what is now the heart of Eugene, Oregon.  

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The Willamette Valley had a booming agricultural community. In 1908, eighty growers founded the Eugene Fruit Growers Association in a small warehouse, later known as Agripac. The Fruit Growers Association grew through the Great Depression by canning everything from green beans to dried fruit and nuts. Over 42 million pounds of produce were being handled, earning half a million dollars by 1940. Like most farmers in the area, Robert wanted to contract with Eugene Fruit Growers Association and grow pole beans to sell to the cannery. To do this, he needed proof that he had land, power, and water.   

Robert Lee Gheen had two of the three; he had land and power, but water did not come easily. Rain is abundant in Oregon, but a farmer cannot rely solely on the weather. Many farmers used a local slough that ran from Willagillespie Road to what is now Country Club Road to irrigate their crops by flooding, but the Gheen family farm was above the flood plain. Robert needed irrigation pipe, but the available steel pipe was too expensive for a farmer trying to rebuild his livelihood during the Great Depression. The solution he found not only irrigated his green beans and the beans of his neighbors but built a legacy that continues to be a true example of the American Dream. 

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Oregon is more known for its timber industry than its beans, so as Robert sought inspiration, it is not surprising he discovered it in the mountains surrounding Eugene. During early logging days, logs were manually pulled by horses, mules, or oxen. By the 1930s, steam-powered mechanical skidders, called steam donkey engines, had become increasingly popular for their independence from livestock. Steam donkey engines were expendable and often left where they stood, to rust away on the mountain when it was time to move to the next logging site. Robert Lee Gheen learned of the rusting remnants and had the vision to recognize a second life for the forgotten boilers and recondition the coiled pipes within their bellies.  

Robert Lee Gheen enlisted the help of his family and neighbors, which galvanized a life-long friendship with the Gaskill family. Relocating rusting boilers from mountain logging shantytowns to the valley floor on muddy, rutted skid roads with a modified Hudson car, straight out of a John Steinbeck novel, was no easy task. 

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“They made a flatbed truck out of the Hudson auto that could also pull a trailer," said Leo Gaskill. 

The Gheen and Gaskill men would park the “truck” as far up logging roads as they could and then hike a few miles to the abandoned sawmills. The rusting boilers were over 10 feet tall and weighed nearly 3 tons, Robert and the other men had to cut the shells into sections of four or six tubes. Even then, moving tons of dilapidated pipe down a mountain is an arduous process. Robert soon realized this was truer in the winter. To make trudging through the snow more bearable he made sleds to drag boiler tubes down the hill to the old Hudson.   

"This old rig wasn't very dependable because it had single tires. It was easy to overload it. The return trip could be difficult depending on the load and if the tires picked up sharp rocks on the roadway," Leo Gaskill said. "It was not unusual to have many flat tires. It took a lot of patience. It took a lot of work"  

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After the men returned from long trips of gathering pipe, they started the tedious transformation process of cutting and welding tubes before they are laid in the fields as main lines. Now, Gheen could irrigate his beans when he wanted, and he could provide precisely the right amount of water in contrast to the uncertainties of flood irrigation. Neighboring farmers saw Robert’s pipe irrigation system and wanted one for their farms. He began to gather more tubing from the mountains, making and selling more irrigation systems for farmers.  Soon, he was manufacturing fittings for his immediate community. Word spread about Gheen’s irrigation systems; as his company flourished, his small workshop in his backyard grew and soon expanded, replacing the bean fields. 

Gheen Irrigation Works has been built on this legacy and now serves agricultural communities in America’s heartland and around the globe. 

This story has been revised based on a 1997 version authored by Stephanie F. Rea, 15, a sophomore homeschooler from Eugene who was tutored in writing by her grandfather, semi-retired editor and journalism professor Dean F. Rea. She is a great-granddaughter of Frank Gaskill, cited in the article.