TILLER – The last meal ever served to Tiller Elementary students by lunch
ladies was a breakfast burrito. The day’s menu is still visible on the dry eraseboard at the shuttered school. The school has sat empty since 2014, when five current Days Creek Charter School students were kindergarteners and first graders.
Natalie Harris, Shayleigh Lynn, and Keegan Stufflebeam are set to graduate this month. That will leave juniors Camden Stufflebeam and Dylan Stern, kindergarteners in 2013-14, as the last vestiges of Tiller in the school district.
Douglas County School District 15 used to send grades K-6 to Tiller Elementary while grades 7 and up attended Days Creek School. When faced with a budget crisis in 2013-14, the school board made the difficult decision to close Tiller and its mounting maintenance issues and send all 13 grades to Days Creek. The school had been in operation in Tiller since the late 1800s, when it was a one-room log cabin schoolhouse.
“I was sad about it,” Camden Stufflebeam said. “We had to travel further to go to school – going from 5 minutes to a half-hour – and I knew everybody at Tiller.”
Shari Ellis taught the five former Tiller students the first year they arrived in Days Creek. She is still the second-grade teacher.
“It was a sad situation,” said Ellis, a frequent substitute at Tiller. “We tried to keep the Tiller traditions going as much as possible. But we weren’t able to do everything they did.”
Tiller Elementary had a good reputation for its school culture.
“It was like a really big family,” said librarian Wanita Negherbon. “It was a school of excellence up there.”
Negherbon spent 18 years at Tiller and has been the K-12 librarian at Days Creek since the move. She helped move equipment and materials downriver, including books. Part of her job is to cycle out old books as discards as new ones come in.
“There are still a few books from our collection with the Tiller stamp, but fewer and fewer,” Negherbon said.
The memories of Tiller Elementary are faint for the five at Days Creek. But some stick out even 11 years later: The Tiller Olympics, helping at the annual hunter’s breakfast, daily walks around the school’s fitness path, and naps.
“My grammy was the lunchlady, so me and my brother would stay after school,” Harris said. “We’d play this pinball computer game while she finished up.”
Some memories reflect Tiller’s position on the frontier of wilderness.
“We had to go on lockdown because a guy was throwing bottles at aides,” Keegan Stufflebeam said. “We had to go on lockdown because of a cougar on the playground, a fox, a coyote. It butted right next to the forest.”
The town’s remoteness contributed to declining enrollment. When Days Creek consolidated into one school, it began accepting out-of-district students through its charter, increasing its enrollment and help stabilize its finances.
“Not many people live out there anymore,” said Stern, who lived in Canyonville but whose parents sent him to Tiller everyday in kindergarten. “It’s the middle of nowhere and no reason to have stores.”
The school’s closure was just another blow to the town. In 2022, the Umpqua National Forest announced it would move the Tiller Ranger Station to Canyonville.
“Things were going out of business in Tiller all at the same time,” Keegan Stufflebeam said. “It had a domino effect.”
Multiple generations of the Stufflebeam and Harris families went through Tiller before moving up to Days Creek.
“It used to be a big mill community and the forest service was active,” Harris said. “I think that there weren’t as many people living in Tiller. I don’t think they could keep the school going.”
The Tiller Elementary property was sold by the school district to a business entity called Global Shopping Mall, Inc. for $350,000 in 2018, which has yet to do anything to the school. Blackberries creep up walls and windows have been broken. Pine trees have grown up in the beloved playground.
Negherbon can’t bear to go back to the school, preferring to leave the memories be. She has helped build the elementary culture over the past 11 years.
“With the elementary and the middle and high school students together, the younger students get the opportunity to see positive role models when they come down to help,” she said.
Parma Ferguson and Teresa Reed also moved, but have since retired. Third-grade teacher Sarah Hooper was hired by the district in Tiller Elementary’s last days, but ended up starting kindergarten at Days Creek in the fall of 2014.
“It’s sad now that the school is overgrown and not taken care of,” Lynn said. “But at the time it was like a new opportunity and the excitement of seeing a new environment.”
