Pacific Index

An 85 year old Oregon myth has new life in 2025

Roy, Ore. is a small tight-knit community, 20 minutes North of Forest Grove and Pacific University. The population is almost entirely farmers, and looks like your average small farm town on the outside. However, the seemingly innocent little town holds a dark secret. This 85 year old legend all has to do with Fake Farms, established by Francis S. Fake in 1870. 

The farm, which remains in operation today, faced immense public scrutiny after it was discovered in 1939 that they held possession of a map to two percent of the fortune of John D. Rockefeller, held completely in gold, and including a two foot tall fully gold pumpkin, given as a gift to Rockefeller for Halloween. 

Known to be very stingy with his money, Rockefeller went so far as to hide parts of his fortune in different places around the country. As the Banks Tribune reported, “Citizens were not all too pleased that the Fake family had kept this secret to themselves, and declared the map to be public property.” After the map was made readily available to the public, citizens, puzzle solvers, and codebreakers alike tried to decipher the map. However, the symbols presented on the map were too sophisticated to be deciphered by humans almost a century ago. The treasure was deemed impossible to find, and the map was slowly forgotten.

But maybe now, thanks to Francis S. Fake’s great-great-grandson Thomas Fake, the next clue to the treasure might just be within our reach, and you won’t believe where the next clue leads to.  

“The rumor of Rockefeller’s fortune has been a family legend for the last 100 years, but we never really had any way of figuring out what the locations were, or how to decipher the symbols on the map,” said Fake. However, on October 3^rd this year, all that changed. “I was inspecting our old grain silo to check its structural integrity,” said Fake, when he managed to find a massive piece of the missing puzzle after one of the shingles on the inside of the silo (pictured above) fell off, revealing the final part of the map. 

The missing piece finally completed the first step of the puzzle, but an issue still remained. How to read them? The symbols. Back in the 1930s, no one knew what they meant, and even with our knowledge now, initially nothing was corresponding to the symbols on the map. That all changed though, when Fake got in contact with a friend who connected him with Mallory Madup, an international languages professor at the University of Papua New Guinea. She realized that the symbols on the map weren’t symbols at all; they were actually language. To be more specific, the language of the Mayan people, who inhabited Mexico from the eighth to fifteenth century.

Using Madup’s knowledge on the  ancient  Mayan language, and cross referencing the information on the map with the geographical data of today, the two finally solved the puzzle, and found where the treasure was buried all along: Pacific University! 

The only issue now was finding where on Pacific’s campus the treasure was buried. Fake racked his brain for non-damaging solutions to the problem, and when all options had been exhausted, he resorted to his back-up plan: trial and error. Fake hired ten contract miners to come in and excavate parts of Pacific’s campus in an effort to eliminate all possible options of where the treasure could be buried. After getting surprisingly quick approval from Pacific’s Board of Directors, the hunt began. 

The crew started by drilling through each room on the first floor in the Walter dormitory. They also excavated the bathrooms (which was doing them a favor honestly), and at first it looked like they were going to come up empty handed. Things all changed though when they reached room 123. After drilling around ten feet down, they hit something hard, and eventually were able to pry the object free. Low and behold, right in front of them, was a two foot tall gold pumpkin. 

But more than that, there was a note in its mouth, and when they eventually opened it up , it read “Did you actually believe this whole thing was real?”