As backhoes, bulldozers and dump trucks bustled in the background, Edna Wiese stood in front of the Windermere Realty office and scanned the freshly scraped hill behind it for recognizable landmarks. Finally her eyes came to rest on a familiar clump of vegetation just outside the construction zone.

“That’s my oak tree,” she said, brightening. “I’m glad that tree’s still standing. I feel better.”

Before it was Windermere Realty, the sturdy, two-story wooden structure on Walnut Boulevard was Timberhill Realty, the sales office for residential lots in the 800-acre Timberhill development. Before that it was Wiese’s home, and the hillside now being cleared for offices and condos was her family’s farm.

Now 84, Wiese doesn’t get around as well as she used to — her legs are stiffened and slowed by arthritis — but she propels her walker forward with determination. Her eyes are still bright behind her bifocals, and her mind is a well-stocked but uncluttered storehouse of memory.

Seeing the old oak tree triggers recollections of her childhood.

“I used to play under it,” Wiese said. “My brother would make little baskets out of the acorns, and we used to like to step on the puffballs.”

Edna’s parents, Fred and Annie Cyrus Wiese, moved to the Corvallis area in 1916, swapping their farm near Sisters for 315 acres north of town near the present-day intersection of Walnut and Kings boulevards. Their two older children, Frederick and Doris, came with them; Edna came along a few years later, in 1923.

The property stayed in the family until 1956, eight years after Fred’s death, when Annie sold the place. Two years later it changed hands again, purchased by the Brandis family to become part of the Timberhill subdivision.

Fred Wiese set aside 100 acres for pasture and tilled the rest of his land for crops, mostly wheat, oats and barley, his youngest daughter recalled.

“At first Papa farmed with horses,” Wiese said, “then tractors.”

A great believer in scientific agriculture, Fred Wiese worked closely with Oregon State College faculty, especially Earl Price, frequently — but not always — adopting experimental methods the professors recommended.

“Papa would listen intently,” Edna Wiese recalled. “He would carefully weigh the pros and cons and make up his own mind whether it was good to try.”

In addition to growing crops, the Wieses kept a herd of registered Guernsey dairy cows, selling cream to local creameries.

The farm’s biggest business, however, was raising turkeys for meat markets as far away as Portland.

As a young child in the late 1920s, one of Edna Wiese’s chores was to drive the turkeys out to pasture in the morning and bring them back in the afternoon. She and Frederick would sit under a tree and keep an eye on the birds while they chased grasshoppers or drowsed in the shade.

There might be 500 or 1,000 turkeys in a flock, and they didn’t always do what they were supposed to. If one bird got spooked, herding could quickly turn to chasing.

“You had to watch out with turkeys. When you were driving them, you had to keep them bunched close together,” Wiese remembered. “One turkey would start to soar, and if you let them soar, they would get away from you.”

The Wiese farm also became known for its flowers. In the early 1930s, at the suggestion of a neighbor who taught at the college, Annie Wiese started growing King Alfred daffodils. She imported the bulbs from Holland and sold the fresh-cut flowers, shipping them by train to eager markets in Chicago and New York.

“Mother grew them until World War II started and the bottom dropped out,” Wiese said. “They were just left in the ground.”

The bulbs kept producing, carpeting the slope above the farmhouse each spring with chipper yellow blossoms. Locals nicknamed the spot Daffodil Hill.

“They were up there last year,” Wiese said. “I can’t climb the hill anymore, but I have friends who go up there and pick them.”

Now that tradition, too, may be a thing of the past. The extension of Kings Boulevard and the construction of the Timberhill Meadows condominium complex is churning up Daffodil Hill. The real estate office, the oak tree and the remnants of an old orchard are about all that’s left of the farm Edna Wiese grew up on.

She’s not overly sentimental, but sometimes she has to shake her head at Timberhill’s transformation from rural outpost to bustling suburb.

“My parents would never believe all this going on,” she said. “This whole town has built up so. It’s just hard to believe all this construction.”

Bennett Hall can be reached at 758-9529 or bennett.hall@lee.net.