LEE VALLEY - The hills of Coos County once teemed with cows.

"Everybody had a cow," said Ann Mast, from inside her warm home on Lee Valley Road. "There were farms everywhere."

Growing up in the Depression, families sold pails of milk to the local cheese factory to help make ends meet.

That's no longer an option for most Coos County families, as the cost of dairy equipment prohibits small operations. But milk sales are one of several sources of income that have kept the Mast family farming the same piece of property in Coos County for more than 135 years.

There was little question for Bill Mast, one of Ann's three children, that once he finished college he would continue the family trade.

"I always wanted to come back," he said.

 Today, he manages some of the same acreage his great-grandfather got in a trade.

The Mast family arrived in Coos County from post-Civil War North Carolina in 1873. Another family had already established a homestead on 160 acres on the north fork of the Coquille River. In exchange for his wagon and its team, William P. Mast took ownership, then named the area Lee Valley, in honor of the Confederate Army's top general, Robert E. Lee.

In 1917, the family divided the farm along the river, splitting it between two brothers. Bill Mast manages the part of the farm on the west side of the river, which has expanded to about 1,200 acres. Most of the expansion came in the 1940s, when timber companies sold logged-over land for an average of $4 an acre.

"They just logged the land and then sold it for not hardly anything," Mast said.

Ann married Bill's father, Hollis, in 1949 and moved to the family farm. Farms were nothing new to Ann, who remembers catching rides to school on the back of milk trucks.

"If we were lucky," she said.

After Bill Mast was born, bus service was shuttling students to school, though that didn't keep him from getting out of chores.

"I was in the way most of the time," he said.

After graduating from high school, he went to college at Oregon State University. By the time he returned home, the farm had been declared a Century Farm, a designation established in the run up to the state's centennial.

Throughout most of those years, the farm included dairy cows, beef cattle and sheep. Bill Mast handled the sheep operations for about 10 years, before taking over management of the entire farm in 1988.

By then, the number of dairy farms in Coos County had dwindled to less than 100. Today, there are about 15.

At one time there had been well over 400, said Ann Mast. It was the conversion to refrigeration that drove many out of the business, and the profit margins keep getting tighter.

"Anyone with less than 12 cows, it didn't make sense anymore," she said.

Although the ranks of dairy farms have thinned, Bill Mast has kept doing what has been his family's occupation for generations. With the arrival of spring, he is working on fences, getting fields ready to plant oats and corn, and, of course, milking his 65 or so cows.

He has some part-time workers on the farm, and his brother and sister occasionally help out, too. Bill Mast doesn't have any children of his own, but he has some nephews going through the Coquille School District. For now, he's not thinking too much about the future other than what he's doing.

"Keep farming, I guess," he said.

There is new equipment, and just a few years ago, Mast had the farm certified organic for dairy, meaning no more herbicides, commercial fertilizers or antibiotics for cows in the herd.

But the road passing through the property is still gravel. And Bill Mast lives in the house that was built the year before his dad was born in 1919.

"Some places you would look at and it wouldn't change in years. Same scenes," he said, gazing out on the green pastures.