Pioneer Profiles – March 2019
“Aunty” Zany Ganung is a Jacksonville legend. According to that legend, Zany returned to Jacksonville in May of 1861 after an “all-nighter” nursing one of her physician husband Lewis’s patients. What did her weary eyes behold but the Confederate Palmetto flag hoisted on a California Street flagpole across the street from her house!
At the time, Jacksonville was divided between Union and Confederacy. The Mexican American War of 1848 had attracted soldiers from all over “the States” who then came west with the gold rush. However, Southern Oregon may have included more Confederate sympathizers than other parts of the state. Successful mercantile owners Reuben Maury and Benjamin Davis even severed their almost decade-long partnership when Maury became a Union Army officer. Davis, the nephew of Confederate President Benjamin Davis, supported the Southern cause.
There was no question of Zany’s loyalty to the Union. Zany supposedly took one look at the Confederate flag, armed herself with a revolver and an ax, marched to the flag pole, chopped down the offensive symbol, removed the banner, and returned home where she used the flag to stoke her fire. No man dared stop her. While her aim may not have been true, they knew she would not hesitate to shoot—after all she was “Indian fighter” Colonel John Ross’ twin sister (see Pioneer Profiles, July-September 2017).
It’s a great story! Some parts of it may even be true….
What we do know is that she was born Mary Ross on February 15, 1818, in Madison County, Ohio, twin sister to John England Ross. She was described as having “a strict consciousness, combined with a quiet hopeful cheerfulness.” Zany (formally Zana) was a family nickname for her also being a headstrong character.
When 10, she moved with her family to Indiana and four years later to Illinois. In 1840 she married Dr. Lewis Ganung in Geneva, Illinois. In 1853, the Ganungs “crossed the Plains” to Oregon. They settled in Salem where Zany was partner in a millinery shop. As an adult she was described as “a large dignified woman, unusually good looking and always wearing a crisp cap with perky lavender ribbons in it.”
Listed as a passenger on the Willamette River maiden voyage of the steamer Gazelle, a pleasure excursion attended by “the beauty and the chivalry of Salem, Takenah and Corvallis,” Zany may have participated in the “spirited Women’s Rights meeting” which followed.
Shortly after the Ganung’s arrival in Jacksonville around 1855, Zany may also have attended a local women’s rights meeting at the Methodist Church—although other accounts described it as “an indignation meeting” denouncing the men’s being sent into the field during the Rogue River Indian Wars, leaving women, children, and the elderly undefended from potential hostile Indian attacks.
According to A.J. Walling’s 1884 History of Southern Oregon, local “wags” responded to the ladies by hoisting a woman’s petticoat up a flagpole in front of the Beekman Express office. It may have been intended as a flag of truce, but it was like “a red flag to a bull” and was “met with a spirit of outraged femininity.” The women demanded that the men “hoist down their colors.” When there was no response, two of the women began hacking at the flagpole. Eventually Dr. Charles Brooks, whose drugstore shared the express office location, stepped forward and hauled down “the hateful bit of apparel.”
But this was not the end of the “petticoat wars.” Walling reports that the men then suspended male and female effigies from an immense pine tree on Daisy Creek, placing the female in a subordinate position to indicate “man’s superiority.” “There was no woman strong enough to chop the tree down, none bold enough to climb it, and no woodman could be found who dared bury his ax in the sacred trunk” and so there they hung, allegedly evidence of women being the “weaker sex.”
Despite the outcome, if Zany was not the instigator of the “petticoat wars,” she may have wished she had been. As to her role in the 1861 flagpole event, here’s what the Pioneer Society had to say in Zany’s 1888 obituary: “We remember the day when Auntie Ganung put her axe on her shoulder, her revolver in her belt, and faced hundreds of angry men, demanded and rescued our National Flag from desecration.”
The “National Flag”? Wait a minute! What happened to the Confederate flag?
1861 accounts in the Jacksonville secessionist newspaper, the Oregon Sentinel, reported that “a new liberty pole” was being raised “to take the place of the one on California street, opposite the United States Hotel” and that “a nice flag ordered from San Francisco, with which to ornament it.” In June, “A new flag-staff was raised during the week on the corner of California and Third Street, and from it floats that beautiful banner, the emblem of our Country’s greatness.”
However, an 1861 article in the Portland Oregonian may shed light on the discrepancy: A friend writes us: “I have just returned from Southern Oregon. While in Jacksonville I saw two flags raised—the glorious old Stars and Stripes, and the palmetto and rattlesnake flag. About the palmetto flag-staff there were a few staggering drunken men, who were hardly sensible of what they were about, and who were put up to do what they did by others who were in the shade; while the flag-staff of the Union was surrounded by a large crowd of intelligent and well-appearing citizens, and a goodly number of ladies. The ladies raised the flag, and as it spread to the breeze, there went up such a shout as never was before heard in Southern Oregon. Union is the strong prevailing sentiment here.”
An unnamed correspondent also wrote the Oregon City Oregon Argus: “The vagabond ruffian class have been hoisting the flag of [disunion] in Scott’s Valley and Jacksonville. The good citizens of the town tore down the treasonable flag as soon as it was discovered, for it was put up in the night.”
Only one rebel account of the event survives in a 1931 master’s thesis: “At one time during the early days of the Civil War southern Democrats gained control in Jacksonville. Although this lasted but a short time, the pro-slavery men proudly boasted that for a time the Stars and Bars floated over Jacksonville as a southern city.”
So was Zany Ganung really involved in chopping down a Confederate flag? We may never know. But it does make for a good story, and who doesn’t like a good story!
Hi Carolyn,
I enjoy your column. I would like to know more about the following topics:
-There were several Jewish mertchants in J’Ville, where did they worship.
-According to descendants of the Dean’s on Old Stage Road, J’Ville was first populated by “500 Chinese and 14 white men”. Is that true? If so, why no dedication of street or place names to Chinese pioneers?
-The first free blacks in Jacksonville were Nellie Mathews and her children.
-How did Hangman Way get its name. Was there a hanging tree, and if so, what happened to it?
Thanks again for your research and writings.
Joan, I can answer some of your questions.
Jewish synagogue services were held on the 2nd floor of the 1856 McCully Building which later became the Odd Fellows Hall. The synagogue shared the space with McCully’s Theatre which hosted traveling shows.
Jacksonville, originally Table Rock City, was first populated by about 3,000 miners who surged over the Siskiyous when the local discovery of gold was announced. A few may have been Chinese, but most of the Chinese were brought in later by Chinese “labor bosses” to work existing mining claims. Most came from what was Canton Province, now Guangdong, with the goal of finding riches on “Gold Mountain” and then returning home so almost all of the Chinese immigrants were male. Although Oregon was admitted to the Union as a “free state,” laws discriminated heavily against non-whites. The Chinese had to pay higher taxes and fees; were not allowed to vote; and they were not allowed to file an original mining claim although they could buy existing claims. In the 1880s, the State passed what was known as the Chinese Exclusion Act. No more Chinese were allowed to immigrate to Oregon and those living here were not allowed to gain U.S. citizenship. Most returned to China. The bones of most of the Chinese who died here were also returned to China since it is/was Chinese tradition for bones to be buried in ancestral soil. As to why no dedication of street or place names, remember the victors write the history. However, in more recent times a sluice box mining monument on W. Main Street (Jacksonville’s original Chinatown and the oldest Chinatown in Oregon) and a bronze monument in front of the Jacksonville Library recognize and honor these original Chinese laborers. You can read more about the Chinese in a former Pioneer Profile of Gin Lin, a prominent labor boss who became a millionaire: http://jacksonvillereview.com/gin-lin-prominent-mine-boss-contract-labor-broker-businessman-carolyn-kingsnorth/
As to Nellie Matthews, I’m not familiar with her story. See my comment above about Oregon being admitted as a “free state,” however, the original 1857 Oregon constitution denied the vote to Chinese, mulattoes and Negroes. A lot of towns also had “sundown laws” prohibiting blacks from being within the town limits after sundown. And I seem to recall a free black being a local barber. Let me see what I can find out.
Ditto for the origin of the Hangman Way name. The area between the historic Jackson County Jail (now Art Presence) and the historic Jackson County Courthouse (now New Jacksonville City Hall) was the formal site of any gallows, and the last hanging in Jacksonville was Louis O’Neil in 1886 for the murder of his lover’s husband.