Near as anyone in Ashland could tell, they had a queen. While everyone else was busy building the place, she was busy ruling it. Just about everyone sent their children to work at her mansion once they finished up at the schoolhouse.
After all, folks didn't have time to look after them while they were at work, and besides, you'd be hard-pressed to find any household that didn't need the cash.
Those without children may recall the day she opened up her tailor shop, somehow managing to focus both on dressmaking and dollmaking with equal skill. She outfitted the humble and the proud, and every child had a stuffed creature of some kind designed to cater to his or her tastes.
Children were more than eager to take up jobs at the Pink Palace, and who could blame them? None of them begrudged the opportunity to spend their after-school hours in a toy shop run by the most glamorous dame in town, and so generous to them that they universally referred to her as their Other Mother.
Though he lacked this level of devotion to the dame, her groundskeeper, Herman Applegate, was grateful that she'd chosen his remote corner of Oregon to set up shop.
Otherwise, he may not be scrubbing together such a tidy living. A man in his position anywhere else in the country may have been turned down out of hand. After all, the Civil War had only ended twenty years previous.
His stooped old folks were grateful, too, for the modest home Herman had built them in the first year after they moved to Ashland. They did what they could to support Herman in turn, but as he put it, they'd done enough work for a lifetime, it was just luck they got to live long enough to get their back pay.
Part of him thought it odd that such a fine lady was so far from the finer parts of America, despite his gratitude. Why didn't she live in New Orleans, for instance? There were plenty of French folks there to match her accent with if Herman reckoned correctly.
It seemed to him that perhaps if she were in a fine place, surrounded by other fine people, she would seem ordinary. Perhaps they would have outshone her, so instead, she picked somewhere that wouldn't offer her any competition.
After he'd come to this conclusion, Herman paid her less mind than most other folks in town, though he still tipped his hat to her when he met her. Did no good to let a body's employer strike one dumb, but it was also poor thinking to let oneself get dismissed for rudeness.
She was the lesser of her kind, and Herman was somewhere in the middle of his. That had to count for something, so he counted them equals.
When she minced about Ashland, with her dark hair and barely a waist to speak of beneath a parasol as pink and ruffling as her favorite dresses, she usually wore the same self-assured smirk. None of the other ladies could carry themselves with that same air, especially those with plain, pioneer values.
Herman paid her the usual honors, but only stopped if she had some business to discuss with him.
He'd not been working for her for five months when he cracked the code of what she got out of all her generosity, and he respected her reasoning: She was a childless woman who had won the allegiance of a whole town full of them. He was at peace with the thought that anyone motivated by something like that couldn't possibly be all that bad.