Helen Rees: Fairview historian, civil rights marcher dies at 98
By Sharon Nesbit
The Gresham Outlook, Oct 7, 2008
Helen Guyton Rees, author and Fairview historian, died Thursday, Oct. 2, in Gresham at the age of 98.

A memorial service will be at 1 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 11, at St. Aidan’s Episcopal Church, 17405 N.E. Glisan St. Interment will follow at St. Aidan’s.

Rees, a resident of Fairview since 1942, was a postal clerk, homemaker and a Civil Rights marcher in Washington, D.C. She wrote five history books. Her motto, she said in an interview in 2005, was “Write what is true.”

In 1945, when Gresham business leaders organized in an attempt to prevent interned Japanese residents from returning to Gresham, she was the only reader to challenge the idea in a letter to The Outlook saying, “This move is surely against our very constitutional rights. It cannot be called a Christian attitude, nor an American one either.”

She began her work as an author/historian when she was provoked to write a history of Shaniko after reading a dime-novel approach to her hometown in Central Oregon. She later wrote a history, “Fairview, On Duck Lane,” about Fairview’s Dunbar and Heslin families.

Born March 30, 1910, in Kent to William and Ada Guyton, she was raised in the area graduating from Kent High School.

She married William Adelbert Rees on Jan. 4, 1929, on the Guyton ranch near Kent. She and her family moved to Fairview in 1942. Her husband, postmaster at Fairview for more than 20 years, died in 1992.

“Fairview is a good place to live and raise a family,” she Rees wrote in “On Duck Lane.” “It is attested to by the fact that there is seldom a house in town that is for rent; people stay.”

She was a member of St. Aidan’s Episcopal Church, Daughter of the King, Fairview Rockwood Wilkes Historical Society, East County Church Women United, Heifers for Relief and past president of the Gresham Union High Parent Teacher Association.

She volunteered for SERVAS selling fair trade imported articles, as well as Meals on Wheels, and as a 4-H Leader. She sent relief packages to foreign countries during World War II and made quilts for the homeless in addition to reading, gardening, needlework and food preservation.

She is survived by daughter Anna Rosene of Boring; son Charles Rees of Columbia, Md.; nine grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren.

Two sons, William and Richard Rees, preceded her in death.

• Married: 04 JAN 1929

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