Eight years ago, I moved to Eagle Point from Brookings. It was a happy day for me because I have relatives here and ancestors going back to the 1800s.

All my life, first as an Air Force military kid and then as a wife going where my husband’s jobs took him, I was moving. I lived all over the country, even in Japan, far from extended family. It leaves a longing void in your life when you have no roots, and when you see your relatives every few years and they feel like strangers.

My mother, Signa Fischer, who is 90 and lives at Fountain Plaza retirement home in Medford, has ancestors from Eagle Point on her mother’s and father’s side. Over the years, I’ve heard about her beloved maternal grandfather, Wilfred Jack, but never a word about his identical twin brother, Wilbur (Wig) Jacks, who was murdered on Main Street in Eagle Point on Sept. 20, 1921.

“I’d never even heard of him until your father and I moved to Brookings from Alabama and I was in my 50s,” said my mom. “My mother gave me a copy of the original newspaper article about it. Thereafter I referred to them as the good twin and the evil twin.”

First, I’ll tell you about the “good” twin, Wilfred. My mother lived with him and her sweet grandmother Lizzie for about six months when she was 4, and again for two years in Talent when she was 12.

Her kind grandparents, who had already raised six children on the family homestead on Reese Creek Road, gladly took her in. It was necessary for Signa to live with them because her Naval father Ed Hannaford was constantly being shipped out, and when she was 10 her parents divorced.

“Everybody loved my grandpa; he was a wonderful person, a fine man,” said my mom. ”I just loved to be around him. Even during hay harvesting, I’d be standing there watching him, tears streaming down my face from hay fever.”

Now I’ll tell you about Wilfred’s twin brother, “Wig” Jacks. His wife Dolly had left him a couple of years before; she began seeing 23-year-old Raleigh Matthews, grandson of John Mathews, a pioneer credited with naming Eagle Point. Besides that, there had been bad blood between the two men for the last five years. Wig had instigated bloody fist fights, thrown rocks at Raleigh, hounded and threatened to kill him. The day before Wig’s death, he tried to run Raleigh, astride his horse, over with his car, chasing him for eight miles through the Agate desert.

Wig, unlike his brother, had a bad reputation in town; none of those interviewed after his murder had anything good to say about him, even for the defense. A sampling from these was Wig’s father-in-law John Nichols. He stated that the previous spring Wig had shown him an automatic pistol and remarked, “I am going to kill Raleigh Matthews and then I will kill Charley Terrill when he comes to arrest me and then I will kill myself.”

The day Wig was shot, he and Raleigh were having an altercation in front of Lottie Van Scoy’s house on Main Street (which is now Royal Avenue) where Wig was boarding. According to Raleigh, “the damn fool shot at me twice and hit me across the back with a club!” Lottie’s testimony was that Raleigh was astride his horse and Wig was on the sidewalk. Wig was throwing rocks at Raleigh, and one struck him hard on the back of his head.

Raleigh had had enough of the endless threats and attempts on his life, and at that point shot Wig with his pistol. Wig died the next morning at Sacred Heart Hospital in Medford. In summation, Raleigh was ultimately acquitted of the murder.

I admit my great-great uncle Wig was a no-good, foulmouthed scallywag, as my mother and most everybody in town asserted. But when it comes to people, nothing is black and white.

Concerning Raleigh Matthews, in court testimony I noticed a bias with the residents because of his status as John Mathews’s grandson. And, while randomly perusing online 1932 Mail Tribune stories on Eagle Point, I saw that Raleigh was sentenced to two years in the state prison in Salem for possession of a liquor still in the Eagle Point hills. (This was Prohibition.) Much more damning: one of his fellow bootleggers, Everett Dahack, was found dead during the raid, shot in the head; it was never determined in court if it was by one of the bootleggers or a bullet from a raiding officer.

If we dig deep enough, we all have skeletons in our closets. It will always be a mystery to me, though, how identical twin boys raised by the same parents could have turned out so differently.

 

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