When Stephen Smeed and his wife arrived by stagecoach in the McKenzie River Valley from Nebraska in 1875, they bought land and planted several hundred acres of hops. Every August for the next twenty-eight years, they hired dozens of locals and First People from Warms Springs Reservation to pick the hops. Once harvested, the hops were dried in this wood-fired kiln, put into burlap bags, and shipped to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to be made into beer. The Smeeds later bought a hotel in Eugene, and sold the hop field in 1903.