Pendarvis family nurtures 'creativity center'

By Kelly Moyer-Wade

The Gresham Outlook, Jul 31, 2006, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Sherry Pendarvis, co-owner of Pendarvis Farm, shows off an innovative stand-up bass — built by her friend Rick Kennedy — with a wheelbarrow body. Kennedy hopes musician Greg Brown, one of the headliners of Pickathon, will play his “dobro-weber” creation, which is a dobro built into a Weber grill.

John Klicker / The Gresham Outlook

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Sure, they’ve got Grammy nominated artists and a sustainability plan that would make Al Gore proud, but the real selling point of the eighth annual Pickathon Roots Music Festival is the location.

Pendarvis Farm sits on 80 acres of meadow and forestland smack in the middle of a burgeoning Pleasant Valley.

The land has been in owner Scott Pendarvis’ family for more than a century. It was once used for hay farming, but Scott and his wife, Sherry Pendarvis, have a different vision for the land.

“We want this to be a creativity center,” says Sherry, an artist who met her husband in the early 1980s, when they both attended Pacific Northwest College of Art.

Sherry grew up in a musical family in southern Oregon. She plays the violin. Scott plays the flute and ukulele. Since taking over Pendarvis Farm in the late ’80s, the couple has befriended a great number of Portland area artists and musicians.

Their property, which is home to whimsical barns made of recycled material and filled with art from the Philippines, where Scott’s parents lived for a while and Ethiopia, where Sherry’s family once resided, has become an epicenter for musicians who want to jam or just sit back and take in the Pendarvis’ view of Mt. Hood.

“People who come here say there’s a real tornado of creative energy coming from here,” Sherry says. “We’ve had weddings out here, concerts and friends out for jam parties … but the Pickathon is the biggest thing we’ve done here. We had to take a month off to get ready for it!”

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