Mr. Howard had spent nearly his whole life on his family’s 68-acre farm in Medford, a small city in southwestern Oregon where he lived alone in a dilapidated Victorian farmhouse with few modern conveniences and no indoor plumbing. He didn’t do much socializing, and many neighbors seem to have assumed that he was barely scraping by.

After his death last March at age 87, many people were astonished to learn not only that Mr. Howard was no pauper, but also that he had directed that his entire estate, worth some $11.35-million, mostly in real estate, be used to convert his farm into a sports park to benefit the community’s young people.

Newspapers in the United States and abroad carried accounts depicting Mr. Howard as a “miser who hated kids” or a “cantankerous loner” who used to fire a shotgun loaded with rock salt to chase off boys who cut through his fields, threw golf balls through his windows, or stole his peaches and watermelons. Interviews with some of those boys, now grown up, reinforced that image.

But others saw a different side of Mr. Howard. Far from being reclusive, they pointed out, he served for more than two decades on the local Citizens Planning Advisory Committee, which monitors land-use and development issues facing the city of Medford.

“He was a great guy,” says John R. Hassen, a Medford lawyer who represents the trustees of Mr. Howard’s estate. “He lived a fairly secluded life, but people would go out and visit with Wes now and again.”

Rosalyn R. Rhinehart, a Medford resident who served with Mr. Howard on the advisory committee from the 1970s into the 1990s, says he was an asset to the panel.

“Wes was a very intelligent, well-informed person about our city streets and our valley in general,” she says. “He always came in a flannel shirt and overalls” and was never loquacious, she said, but he readily shared his observations about the changes that had occurred in Medford during his lifetime.

Grew Up in Great Depression

Until he moved to a nursing home shortly before he died, Mr. Howard did his own cooking — ham hocks with beans, kept simmering on the back of the woodstove, was a reported favorite — and housekeeping, hanging his wash on a line to dry. He had no siblings and never married, and had lived alone since his father’s death in 1972.

The contents of Mr. Howard’s house at the time of his death, which were sold at auction, included brand-new appliances — a juicer, a toaster oven, a microwave — still in their unopened boxes, Mr. Hassen says, as well as cartons of lard, canned vegetables, and other staple goods — the residue, perhaps, of the anxiety he felt growing up during the Great Depression.

“Apparently he never threw anything away,” Ms. Rhinehart observes. “The rooms were stacked floor to ceiling with magazines and newspapers that someday he was going to read,” many dating from the first half of the last century.

Yet Mr. Howard’s eccentricities have been widely misinterpreted, Ms. Rhinehart suggests.

“He was not a hermit, he did not withdraw into his shell,” she says. “He minded his own business, but that’s because he had a lot of work to do. I’m sure life was not easy for him.”

Baseball Fan

Local records are sketchy about how far Mr. Howard progressed in school, and what sports he might have played as a youth. But Mr. Hassen says he understands that Mr. Howard was particularly interested in baseball, so plans for the Howard Memorial Sports Park will include fields for Little League and Babe Ruth League teams. Soccer fields and basketball and volleyball courts are also likely candidates for inclusion, although the formal design phase has not yet started. The city first must annex the property and submit its plans to various regulatory bodies.

Some local residents hope that the farmhouse can be converted into offices for the sports park.

“Everybody would love to see the house restored,” Mr. Hassen says, but he adds that it might not be practical because the building has become so run-down. “Our fear is that will cost more to restore it than to have an architect design one pretty much identical to it and build it new.”

Mr. Howard’s bequest includes the 68-acre farm, worth an estimated $8-million, as well as a separate commercial property in Medford that is now under lease and producing income, and more than $1-million in cash and bonds. His contingent beneficiary, if the sports park could not be developed, was Portland Shriners Hospital, a 40-bed pediatric orthopedic hospital.

“We started working on the project before he died,” Mr. Hassen says. “He wanted to have his family name on the land, thinking especially of his parents, and leave it for the benefit of the youths of the Rogue Valley.”

Even the children and grandchildren of the young rogues who once provoked him to reach for the rock salt.