Bulletin E-Edition:
more photosWheeler County Judge Jeanne Burch leaves the county courthouse for lunch Thursday afternoon in Fossil. The courthouse, built in 1901, had fallen into disrepair by the time Burch took office in the early 1990s. In the last decade, she’s overseen the building’s repair, including the replacement of its original red-and-blue color scheme.
Photos by Anthony Dimaano / The Bulletin
‘A one-woman county’
When Jeanne Burch moved to rural Wheeler County as a child, she thought she'd come to the end of the earth. But in 1977, after living abroad for many years, she returned.
By Erin Golden The Bulletin
Published: May 10. 2008 4:00AM PSTFOSSIL —
There are no neon lights, fast-food drive-throughs or busy highways in this quiet town of about 400 people, the seat of Oregon’s least-populated county.
More than 120 miles northeast from the hustle and bustle of Bend, the little town in the valley is a place where cell phones aren’t an option — the only spot where phones get any kind of reception is several blocks from downtown in a cemetery atop a hill. It’s a place where people stroll down the middle of main street, where children meet at the Fossil Mercantile to buy sodas after school and where life moves a bit slower than most people are used to.
Or so it seems.
Inside the red brick courthouse on Adams Street, a small army of expert multitaskers — the planning director who’s also the justice of the peace, the district attorney who works as an EMT and a deputy county clerk who doubles as a court recorder and secretary for the county’s juvenile department, among others — work at a pace that’s anything but slow, keeping Wheeler County running as quickly and efficiently as counties with staffs more than three times its size.
And overseeing it all is one woman who wears more hats than most: Wheeler County Judge Jeanne Burch, the county’s administrator, chairwoman of the County Court, and probate and juvenile court judge, a local girl who traveled the world and came back to do her part for the rural county she calls home.
In her 12 years in office, Burch has led the charge to restore the county’s once-dilapidated courthouse, helped boost local tourism and business, and gained the respect of both local residents and her fellow government leaders across the state.
“She’s amazing — she’s a one-woman county and everything that passes through that county goes through her capable hands,” said Crook County Judge Scott Cooper. “She handles it all with grace and confidence. ... If I need something, I know I can pick up the phone and call Jeanne, and if she says she’s going to get it done, she gets it done.”
The world traveler
Burch, 70, was a freshman in high school when she moved with her parents and younger sister from Portland to Wheeler County in the early 1950s. Her father, a railroad conductor, was hired to work on the local railway and the family was offered a house in Kinzua, a now-dead mill town about 10 miles west of Fossil. Though Kinzua was very much alive then, with about 1,000 residents, the teenage Burch’s first impressions of the area weren’t exactly positive.
“I thought we’d come to the end of the earth,” she said, laughing.
After a while, however, Burch settled into life as a small-town girl. She caught the bus every day to high school in Fossil and found an after-school job as an office assistant in the same courthouse she’d one day run.
But back then, Burch wasn’t planning to stick around. She ended up in California, where she completed a degree in accounting at the University of California, Berkeley, and met a man from Arkansas named Howard, who worked for oil companies as a drilling supervisor and spent his life traveling the globe for work. The couple married in 1965 and took off for more than a decade of adventure, moving first to Nigeria and then to the Canary Islands, Iran and Greece.
They had two daughters, Belinda and Jennifer, who spent their early years learning new languages and making friends in several countries. But in 1977, the family decided to move back to the U.S. — and back to Wheeler County. Burch said she wanted her daughters to get a taste of the lifestyle that she’d grown up in, but when she came back, living in Fossil was a bit of an adjustment for everyone in the family.
“We moved here from Athens (Greece) over the Thanksgiving holiday,” she said. “So talk about a culture shock.”
In the two decades since Burch had left her hometown behind, much of it had remained the same. But in the same period, the area had gone through some major changes. The timber industry, which had once employed most of Burch’s high school classmates’ parents, was nearly gone, and with it, the town of Kinzua. The population of Fossil had also dipped as residents moved away to growing cities in other parts of Central Oregon.
A tough job
Burch, however, wasn’t going anywhere. After staying home with her daughters for a few years — Howard was still spending much of the year traveling for work — she went to work as Fossil’s city recorder. Marj Sharp, who was then the city librarian and now works for the county as the director of the commission on children and families, said Burch was a natural at working with the public and sorting through a heavy workload with limited resources.
“She’s always been very progressive, with the city and the county,” Sharp said of Burch. “Have there been roadblocks? Oh, yeah. But she’s also been able to see her way around those roadblocks.”
In 1993, the county judge, who was then working as a part-time official, decided to step down. The county needed someone to fill the top seat, and they wanted someone who could do all of the tasks — day-to-day administration, lawmaking and even judicial work — full time. It’s a complicated job description, and a rare one in the state; though many of Oregon’s rural counties once had a single official to oversee the county commission and work as a judge, just seven — Gilliam, Grant, Harney, Malheur, Morrow, Sherman and Wheeler — still use the system.
Nevertheless, Burch decided she was up for the task and moved into a tiny, cramped office under the staircase in the Wheeler County Courthouse, about a half-block from her home. She learned how to be a politician and a leader, and threw herself into studying the law.
As the elected county judge, Burch wasn’t required to have a legal background — and didn’t, other than a short stint as a legal secretary — but was granted the responsibility of putting on a black robe and hearing very real cases from the bench in her building’s courtroom. And as she quickly discovered, being a small-town judge didn’t mean just dealing with small-time problems.
Burch’s judicial caseload runs in streaks — sometimes she’s got a half-dozen cases on the docket and sometimes a few more or a few less. On Thursday afternoon, she was on the bench to hear arguments from four attorneys — one in person and three by phone — in a particularly difficult case involving four boys who conspired to sexually assault a girl. It’s a process that would be difficult for any judge and any community. But this case, Burch said, has been particularly tough in a place so small that people can identify just about every person — even every dog — in town by name.
“We see everything,” Burch said. “I guess people don’t think these things happen, but they do, and it’s hard.”
A community leader
When she takes off the black robe, Burch has to quickly shift back into her other roles.
Throughout her workday, which is usually about 10 hours, but sometimes longer, Burch ducks in and out of different parts of the courthouse. From her small office on the first floor, she’ll go down to the basement, to check in with Sheriff David Rouse, who serves the entire county with just four deputies. She ducks in to check with the assessor, the clerk and the district attorney. Later she heads back up to the second-floor courtroom, where high-tech video conference equipment sits near a 100-year-old leather couch once used by circuit court judges who traveled on horseback to hear cases in Fossil.
Around town, she checks in with merchants like Joe McNeill, who runs the Fossil Mercantile store with his wife, Christina. McNeill said Burch has won fans with her hard work for business and good sense of humor.
“She’s well thought of around town,” McNeill said. “And she always brings a smile to my face when she comes in the store.”
Burch said the McNeills, both in their early 30s, are a perfect example of the kind of people she thinks will keep Fossil alive in the future. As she looks toward the last four years of her six-year term — she doesn’t plan to run again — Burch said she wants to focus on keeping and attracting young people to the community and keeping up with the demands of an increasingly fast-paced world. She’s had some big successes already, including the creation of a bluegrass festival that draws hundreds of visitors every summer, improvements in health and family services, and a major upgrade that will be coming to Fossil in July — the town’s first cell tower.
As she looks toward the future, Burch said she’s looking forward to joining her husband in retirement and spending time with her daughters and three grandchildren. But she doesn’t regret giving up international adventures for one of the toughest jobs in Fossil.
“For me, it’s been perfect,” she said. “It’s the best job I’ve ever had.”
Erin Golden can be reached at 408-2836 or at egolden@bendbulletin.com.
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