Capital Taps: Fine Beer in Salem Oregon

Mission Mill to Show Beery History this Summer

2012-01-30T20:00:00.000-08:00

Well, sun of a gun! In the new quarterly from the Historic Landmarks Commission is a sweet teaser about our favorite topic, beer history!

The summer exhibit at the Mill will be "History on Tap"! Or as the marchers say, "We want beer!"

We'll raise a glass to that!

Peter Kopp's History of Hop Fever in Oregon Historical Quarterly

2012-01-25T22:30:00.000-08:00

For the most part our focus is on things in and around Salem, but every once in a while it's nice to step back and look at a little bigger picture.

In the latest issue of Oregon Historical Quarterly, Peter Kopp surveys the history and development of hops as a "specialty crop" in the Willamette Valley.

This is the lingo of trade associations and marketing groups, so it's not surprising that in 2010 at the annual conference of the Agricultural History Society, Kopp presented a paper as a member of a panel titled, "The Falsity of Freedom: A Historical Look at How Agricultural Producers Influence What We Eat":

"The Demands of Domesticity: Why Americans Drank Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice in the 1950s"
"Creating Brand Recognition for Washington Apples in Eastern Markets, 1910-1930”
"Hop Wizard of Corvallis: How Alfred Haunold Changed American Beer"

Haunold is a hop-breeder in Corvallis, and if the word "Cascade" means anything to you, you'll tip your pint! But it also points to what we might say is "a brewery-industrial complex" and the mixing and interconnectedness that takes place at the nodes of that network.

Kopp is particularly interested in analyzing things on a local-global axis, and in this he highlights the role of Ezra Meeker in Washington, who in so many ways was first-in and first-out: In 1869 he secured a deal with Henry Weinhard to supply hops; developed an important supply house, which imported rootstock, sprays, and other vital supplies, and sold them to local farmers; wrote a hops how-to book in 1883; made a fortune; and was out of hops by 1900.

He also talks about Emil Horst, one of the the Horst brothers we have met in the context of Louis Lachmund and the strike of 1933. In 1904 Emil Horst* contracted with Guinness to supply the Irish firm with Willamette Valley hops exclusively and he was one of the largest hop growers in the country.

Along the way Kopp mentions William Wells and Adam Weisner at Buena Vista, whose hop planting of 1867 didn't pan out, but who set the stage locally for hop growers. He also mentions the developing reputation of hops from the Pacific Northwest, and then the overexpansion and glut that depressed prices in the 1890s and early 1900s. With the rise of rail and easy transportation, international growers could source hops from wherever was cheapest, and hops had become a commodity crop, subject to booms and busts.

Kopp also discusses harvest, and highlights that hop picking took a labor force four times that of apples. Consequently, even those growers who desired a "whites only" labor force could not get one, and the hop yard became one of the few distinctly multi-cultural mixing zones in the Northwest.

For beery readers of CT, the international network and reach of local hops will not be a surprise, but perhaps to the greybeard eminences and other readers of OHQ this will be news! We suspect the history of hops don't get no respect - and Kopp aims to change this! Presumably this article is part of his dissertation. We hope it is published as a book.

The piece also suggests that in at least one interesting way, "what old is new again" is also a reversal. In the 19th century, most hopyards were small, 5-25 acres according to Kopp, and the brokers bundled hops and got them to the pre-prohibition breweries across the country and globe. Today's hopyards are much larger (like the Goschie hopyard), and it is the modern micro-brewers that are small and multiple. And the farm-to-pint connection that we see most clearly in the wet- and fresh-hop beers isn't just pre-prohibition, it is positively pre-industrial! So there are distinctly modern twists on the micro-brewing reversion to pre-prohibition patterns.

And it all results in an especially lively ferment. There's never been a better time to be a beer lover than today - more styles and better beers with every year. To which we raise our glass: Prost!

* Check out this film circa 1910 of a Horst Hops Harvest! The Center for Sacramento History suggests it was filmed in California, but since Weister Motion Picture Company is from Portland, there's a chance it was filmed at the Horst Ranch north of Independence. A puzzle!

Here are later, mid-century images from the harvest at Horst Ranch and a sweet memoir about a farm adjacent to the ranch.

Hop picking image from the Oregon State Library

Goschie Farms Hops Featured in Edible Portland Cover Story

2012-01-24T21:00:00.000-08:00

We're a little late getting to this, but last fall EcoTrust's quarterly, Edible Portland, featured a piece on Goschie Farms, located between Silverton and Mt. Angel, and the present-day transition from commodity hop growing to craft beer supplier and farm-to-pint practice.

How great is that!

The story charts the decline of Anheuser-Busch's purchasing after the InBev acquisition and the rise of working more directly with Oregon craft brewers and the new brokers like Indie Hops. As the industry changes, multinational commodity traders are less important. It's also a story of increasing diversity, from industrial monoculture to smaller-batch multiplicity. And finally, it's another one of those "what's old is new again" stories. (Look for an upcoming note on an article about old hop growing!)

Goschie is also working on organic hops, and this past year harvested organic Cascade, Centennial, Fuggle, Liberty, Teamaker, and Willamette hops.

Check it out! You can read it online here, and perhaps find copies locally at E-Z Orchards and Willamette Valley Vineyards. More likely you'll need to find it at a library.

The Salem Flood of 1890 Looks Awfully Familiar from High Street Hill

2012-01-19T19:00:00.000-08:00

Is there anything interesting to say about a flood? Intensely personal and subjective, the experience of ruin and loss is, like grief, a solitary thing. At the same time, floods happen all the time, and the script seems like so many variations on a theme. Neighbors chip in to fill the sandbags and share the larger experience.

The epic flood of 1861 lives on more in myth, in the catastrophe at Champoeg, than in photos or other easy records.

But the flood of 1890 was almost as big, and it was documented. Here are two images that look awfully similar to what we see today around Pringle Creek and Shelton Ditch.

Floods happen regularly here, even today with the dams, and it makes you wonder why the first statesmen kept the City and Capitol at the confluence of Pringle Creek, Mill Creek, and the Willamette River.

Hopefully you are in a safe place and have plenty of good drink at hand. Venti's Taphouse still has round 3 of the Winter Ale taste-off:

21st Amendment Fireside Chat
Fort George North V
Anchor Our Special Ale
Oakshire Ill tempered Gnome

That might be as good a tipple as any for a bloody, floody day. Call a taxi and drink well.

Jan 20th: Updated with Headlines

The waters started rising at the very end of January, and the first week or so of February was in full flood. On February 4th, Portland learned the Salem bridge was wiped out.

By Valentine's Day, the papers were toting up the damage. And on Feb 19th, a writer judged the flood of 1890 more like that of 1881 than 1861:

From all obtainable information we think it may be accepted as certain that the volume of the flood of '61 was considerably greater than that of the recent one....

Most of the rainfall that produced the flood of 1861 came in the space of about three days, while the rainfall that produced the flood of 1890 was extended over the space of nearly fifteen. Probably there was more precipitation during the storm of 1890 than during that of 1861, but it was extended over much more time. Consequently there was not the same sudden rush of waters, and the flood did not reach an equal height. Some of the tributaries of the Willamette may have been as high as in 1861, or even higher...but taken as a whole the volume of the Willamette at the utmost swell of the recent flood was beyond question considerably less than its volume at the height of 1861.

Images from Salem Public Library Historic Photograph Collections:
High Street looking north
High Street looking northeast
Click on either image to enlarge.

This one, showing the Courthouse and the First Methodist steeple, is also good.

Updates from the Oregonian, 4 Feb 1890 and 19 Feb 1890.

Salem Airport is a Circus - Really!

2012-01-17T22:00:00.000-08:00

Though you might think the hullaballoo around the airport is something of a circus, what with the control tower, runway extension, and Delta-Seaport fiasco, you might be surprised to learn the relation between the airport and carnival rides is very tight indeed.

Lee Eyerly, the man behind Salem's airport was also a manufacturer of carnival rides.

It all started back in the 1930s when Lee U. Eyerly, an oldtime flier, became aware of the amusement possibilities of a captive plane he had designed for training flying students. He converted this device into a ride and he and his two sons, Harry and Jack, have been developing exciting apparatus ever since.

The story started a few years earlier. In November 1927, the Oregonian carried an announcement about the Salem airport. Pacific Airways filed articles of incorporation, with a capital stock of $25,000, and started construction.

By 1930, he'd persuaded the City to float a $50,000 bond and several members of the Chamber of Commerce to sit on the Airport Commission. His flying school had 45 students and reputedly his repair shop did most of the mechanical and maintenance work on the planes.

The next year, he hired a hostess.

Ann Bohrer had been the Secretary of the Eyerly Aircraft Corporation and Mayor Gregory named her the

official hostess for the Salem Municipal Airport... Her duties will include checking all airplanes arriving at and departing from the field, assisting visiting pilots and passengers and serving as an official greeter for the city. She will wear a special uniform.

As with the early Lord & Schryver work, all this took place during the Great Depression!

It seems likely that Eyerly and others were successful in leveraging public investment for private profit and perks, benefits that did not distribute very widely across those who lived in Salem.

This may continue today. Crony capitalism is too strong a word, but the benefits of the airport seem spread rather thinly. The airport then and now was more about boosterism and a municipal "Napoleon Complex" than a critical cog in the local economy.

In a comment on the Statesman article, Claudia Howells, a retired ODOT administrator, observed:

Here is an example of yet another government subsidy that benefits a very few. Salem Airport is primarily a "general aviation" facility, meaning that most of the users are small private planes. Perhaps the city should consider raising landing fees if it wants to pay for staffing the tower. Given the current budget situations and cuts that have been made already in essential city services, I would hope the Council would think twice before back filling the federal money from the city's general fund.

The Carnival ride company went bankrupt in 1990 after a death in Florida on a ride, but in 2008 an Eyerly descendent still worked for Funtastic Rides.

More on the history of the airport here.

Historic articles from the Oregonian.
March 4th, 1948
November 29, 1927
August 17, 1930
December 27, 1931

Decorations Displace Historical Marker at Conference Center - and Snow!

2012-01-15T22:30:00.000-08:00

Remember the historical marker and interpretive panel on the stair landing in the Salem Conference Center, overlooking the intersection of Ferry and Commercial?

It commemorated the Holman and Nesmith Buildings, currently where the parking garage and Umpqua Bank are. The Territorial and early State governments met in the Holman and Nesmith buildings, and you can see the heading "Statehood began here" at the top of the panel.

But the panel is gone, replaced by glittery holiday decorations!

We wonder what happened. We'll let you know if we find out!

The snow and glitter makes us think of this picture: Joseph Holman's house is also gone, leveled or burned in the early 1900s for Max Buren's house (and here).

The Holman and Buren houses were located on Court Street, between Cottage and Winter, where now is a surface parking lot for First Presbyterian Church. Virginia Green has a series of slides on the houses in the Piety Hill neighborhood moved or demolished for State office buildings in the Capitol Mall. The first slide in the series talks about First Presbyterian's move from where the Labor building is now, and the houses the Sanctuary's new location displaced.

And since snow is also top of mind, here's two skating scenes from 1911 and 1914.

Can you imagine a sustained cold spell long enough to freeze over the river and slough?! It's getting warmer here for sure.

Historic images from Salem Public Library Historic Photograph Collections:
Joseph Holman House
Skaters 1911
Skaters 1914

For more on Joseph Holman, a pioneer of 1839, see the Peoria Party, and biographies in the Oregon Historical Quarterly and the Salem Pioneer Cemetery, where he is buried.

Avoid Flat Beer; Make Sure your Pint is Sharp and True on Wednesday

2012-01-09T22:00:00.000-08:00

Though the liquor sellers might want to you have a circle of fifths, a round of pints is so much friendlier!

U Think, Willamette University's successor to Science Pub, returns to Brown's Towne Lounge this Wednesday at 6:30pm.

The topic is "The Musical Brain."

“We’ll explore how we evolved the ability to perceive music, art and beauty. This short talk will consider the physics of sound, the mechanism of hearing, the process of cognition, the building blocks of music and the way they work together to move us to tears or elevate us to ecstasy,” said Grant Linsell, director of the university’s Wind and Percussion Program.

Widmer and Gilgamesh at Ventis

Don't like music? No problem. Also on Wednesday, starting at 6pm is a Widmer party at Venti's.

Two of the main attractions will be the W12 series Dark Saison and Brrrbon, the Imperial Barrel Aged Brrr. Yum, yum!

(On the 23rd is also a beer dinner with Gilgamesh - menu here.)

Yerba Mate for Prohibition and Apocalypse: What Hath Hippies Wrought?

2012-01-07T22:00:00.000-08:00

We guess it's a thing, Yerba Mate beer.

This month, as part of their 12 Beers of the Apocalypse, Elysian will release Nibiru, a Yerba Mate Tripel.

In a year-long run-up to the end of all time (according to the Mayan calendar), Elysian Brewing Company and Fantagraphics Books, both of Seattle, are planning a series of twelve beers, issued on the 21st of each month in 2012 and featuring the label artwork of Charles Burns. Taken from Burns’s weirdly apocalyptic work “Black Hole,” the labels will adorn Elysian’s “Twelve Beers of the Apocalypse,” featuring the creativity and unusual ingredients for which its brewing team is known. What twelve beers would you brew (and drink) if you knew they would be your last?

First up in January is NIBIRU, named for the mysterious planet X supposedly on a collision course toward Earth. The Elysian / Fantagraphics Nibiru will be a Belgian-style Tripel flavored with an infusion of yerba maté. Combining the tasty esters of Belgian yeast and the compelling tea-like flavors of the South American herb mixture, the beer will weigh in at around 7.6% alcohol by volume. A mixture of German Northern Brewer, Czech Saaz and American Amarillo hops round out the uniqueness of this first beer of the Apocalypse. Oddly enough there’s another apocalyptic-themed Nibiru out there: a super volcano currently burbling most dangerously beneath Yellowstone National Park. It too is scheduled to end life as we know it very very soon.

Cumberland Brewery in Kentucky and MateVeza in San Francisco also brew Yerba Mate beers.

We think of Yerba Mate as a modern, hippie or new agey beverage. Curiously, the wikipedia entry on the history of Yerba Mate doesn't discuss its adoption in America.

But it turns out to have an older pedigree, implicated in fact in the temperance movement leading up to Prohibition.

It seems to have been introduced commercially to the US in 1899 or 1900 by the Yerba Mate Tea Company in Philadelphia. They printed a booklet about it.

By 1904, articles promoting Yerba Mate were being seeded as features in local papers. Here's one in the Capital Journal.

REFORMERS HAVE FOUND A PERFECT BEVERAGE

A Powerful Stimulant That Contains no Alcohol, That Is Therefore Not Intoxicating, and That Takes the Place Equally Well of Beer, Coffee, Tea or Even Stronger Drinks.

A beverage has been found that threatens to take the place of beer among the hard-working classes and to do away with tea, coffee, and other brain stimulants used by students, brain workers, nurses, and other persons who are required to remain alert and active during long periods.

This beverage is highly stimulatlng, non-alcoholic, non-intoxicating, and a nerve builder and nerve strengthener, instead of a destroyer as is the case with tea, alcohol, and coffee. It has already been introduced into England and will find its way to America as soon as its great merits become popularly known.

Dream of Reformers Realized.

A drink such as this has been long been the dream of temperance reformers for the reason that it encourages itself owing to Its great stimulating and refreshing powers, and because the consumer quickly acquires tho "habit" and becomes to attached to the drink that he will prefer it to more substantial food and often go without his meals for the sake of it.

"Yerbe mate," or simply "mate" is the name for this wonderful drink and it has been used in one of its forms for some time In Paragua and Argentina. The beverage Is brewed from the dried leaves of the ilex, and can be prepared and sold In bottles to suit the particular taste of the consumer, or made at home like tea or coffee....
Plain mate is quite bitter, and, like beer, it is an acquired taste. The first sip gives a distinctly bitter taste, and the drinker sets down his glass with a wry face. Presently, as soon as the bitter effect wears off, the imbiber has a pleasant recollection of the sensation. By this time the powerful stimulating property of the drink has begun to work, and the drinker feels like taking another sip. Mate makes the user of it "feel good," makes him look with a brighter eye on the dark side of life, makes him forgot troubles for the moment, and, best of all, unlike beer, it makes him feel like working or doing something with his brain or hands instead of loafing or gossiping.

No Horrible Awakening.

Chemists who have carefully analyzed mate say that it is perfectly harmless. It has only the smallest percentage caffeine and volatile oils, and it never leaves a bad after effect. Even when the drinker has a disordered stomach or bad nerves the consumption of mate is not followed by unpleasant feelings.

When the mate habit is acquired the drinker is apt to indulge himself freely, even when there is no need of stimulation. Like the alcohol drinker, he takes the beverage "for the effect." Sometimes he gets to be a regular mate drunkard, but wonderful to say, this beneficent drug has no strings, its only effect being of making the "drunkard" a busy, industrious and hopeful man, who gets more out of life for himself and his fellows than the ordinary man who depends on his own body for stimulation.

In a word mate cannot be "abused" any more than water, and there are few who take it in large quantities for the mere sake of the stimulation....

And on it drones enthusiastically, worthy of purity advocates like the Kelloggs (Will Keith and John Harvey) or Sylvester Graham.

(h/t for Nibiru to The New School)

Beer Poetry: Eckerlen's Bad Santa and Auden on the Post-Christmas Lull

2011-12-29T22:00:00.000-08:00

Was your Santa, like this one in an ad from 1903, an ol' booze hound?

It's hard to imagine today seeing an image of Santa like that, except in a "bad Santa" meme. (But we know about Santa's little helper.)

Hopefully you drank well and often over the holidays!

And now the pause.

In "For the Time Being," a Christmas Oratorio, written but too long for Benjamin Britten to set to music, W.H. Auden captures the hung-over flavor of the post-holiday lull:

Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,
Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes --
Some have got broken -- and carrying them up to the attic.
The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,
And the children got ready for school. There are enough
Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week --
Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,
Stayed up so late, attempted -- quite unsuccessfully --
To love all of our relatives, and in general
Grossly overestimated our powers. Once again
As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed
To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,
Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,
The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.
The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off....

...In the meantime
There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair,
Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem
From insignificance.

(Santa from a 1903 Eckerlen Saloon and liquors ad)

State Street's Bayne Block Built with Hops, Shows Knighton Charm

2011-12-25T12:01:00.000-08:00

Ever the promoter, Mary Lou Zeek has started a holiday blog for the commercial microdistrict on State Street. Does it need it? Perhaps because State Street is one-way and out-bound here, it's in the shadow of the Reed Opera House and the corner of Liberty and Court just one block away and served by in-bound Court Street. Whatever the reason, State Street does seem sleepier than it should be.

State street has, we think, the most interesting procession of buildings between Front and 12th. They run from the very earliest brick structures from the late 1860s and 1870s through all the phases of style and commercial development. Down the street, for example, next to the Beaux-Arts Carnegie Library of George Post is the modernist YWCA building* of Pietro Belluschi. It's not just the businesses that deserve fame!

Recently the Historic Preservation League of Oregon was in town, and they checked out the Farrar building of Fred Legg (its corner is on the right in the photo) and the excellent alley between Liberty and Commercial. Another shot of the alley at night made the rounds on twitter.

On the west side of the alley (left) is the Bayne block, housing Zeek's own gallery and William Bragg's photo studio. It could be argued this is the creative center of Salem - at the very least, it's a notable hotspot!

The Bayne building is understated, yet it is surely one of the more charming of the modest brick commercial buildings downtown. The brick detailing and the upper windows show a real harmony. (The lower storefront windows have almost certainly been modernized and don't show the same charm.)

It is, in fact, an early design by William C. Knighton, designer of Deepwood, the Supreme Court Building, and a contributor to the 1892 remodel of the Capital National Bank building.

Hops funded the building and upon completion it housed several hop brokers. Bids were opened on March 24th, 1902, and in September construction was complete.

In the Journal of Tuesday, September 9th, 1902 a notice ran:

MODERN NEW BRICK BLOCK
Geo. Bayne's Creditable Business Property is Occupied

The fine new brick block, recently constructed on State street near Commercial for George Bayne, is completed and occupied. It is one of the most creditable business blocks of the city and not only bespeaks the enterprise of its owner but reflects credit upon those who were identified with its construction.

It is a modern two-story brick building, with pressed brick front, of a substantial character and is equipped with all conveniences. On the ground floor there are two large airy and well-lighted store-rooms while the second floor has been provided with four suites of elegant offices, every one of which opens on a large hall. One of the large store-rooms will be jointly occupied by L. E. Gardner, the umbrella and bicycle repair man, and C. E. Bunce, the barber. The other room on the main floor has been rented, also, but the tenants do not desire to disclose their name and the character of their business until they are ready to open up which will be in the near future. Three of the office suites on the second floor are occupied. John Bayne, the lawyer and a brother of the owner of the building, has removed his law office to one of the front suites. Another will be occupied by B. O. Shucking and a third by S. Ramsey & Co., of Seattle, hop merchants.

The architect who prepared the plans and specifications for the block and who personally superintended the work of construction, is W. C. Knighton, a former resident of Salem who is now located in Portland where he is enjoying a large patronage. Mr. Knighton is a conscientious and fair-dealing man and to place your business in his hands insures the return of a full worth of the investment. R. N. Ely, of this city, is the contractor who constructed the building. Mr. Ely is one of Salem's largest contractors and the building is substantial evidence, in itself, of his thorough workmanship. This new block is a distinct credit to that part of the business district in which it is located.

Here's Bayne's biography in Gaston's Centennial History of Oregon, 1811-1912, Volume 4:

GEORGE BAYNE, starting out in life as a farm hand, became in the course of years a successful agriculturist and at the time of his death in 1911 owned a valuable farm property in Multnomah county. He was born in Scotland, on the 1st of February, 1869, a son of Mr. and Mrs. John Bayne, also natives of Scotland. The parents left their native land and settled in America in 1871, locating first in Iowa, where the father's death occurred. Subsequently the mother removed to Oregon but later went to Georgia, where she passed away. They were the parents of ten children, five of whom survive.

George Bayne acquired his education in the common schools and at the same time laid the foundation for his agricultural career by assisting on the home farm until he started out independently. He ever showed the salient characteristics of his Scotch ancestry by his energy, industry and thrift. At the "time of his death he owned one hundred and sixty acres of land near Burlington, which he had cultivated earlier in life and which is still the property of his widow although they never resided upon it. By careful and judicious management his property proved so highly productive and profitable, that later in life he was able to purchase considerable real estate, including a valuable business block and a substantial home in Salem. Until 1909 he made his home upon a farm of fifty-three acres, located four miles east of Salem, and engaged most successfully in hop growing.

On the 20th of April, 1902, Mr. Bayne was married to Miss Mary Smith, whose birth occurred in Marion county and who is a daughter of James and Isabelle (Low) Smith, both of whom are also natives of Scotland. They came to America in 1874 and located in Marion county, upon the farm where they resided until their removal to Polk county, where they are still living. To them four children were born, namely: Mrs. Bayne, James, Albert and Isabelle. To Mr. and Mrs. Bayne one son was born, Albert Edward, whose birth occurred on the 11th of March, 1903. Mrs. Bayne is now residing in Salem, having retained her home there since her husband's death.

Mr. Bayne was always interested in matters relating to the civic welfare and never neglected the duties of citizenship, although he neither sought nor desired office. He always kept well informed on the issues of the day and gave his support to the measures which he thought would be most influential in producing good government. He was devoted to his family, was a good neighbor and a faithful friend. He was sociable by nature and enjoyed the companionship of those of congenial tastes and interests. He readily recognized the good in others and was loved by all who knew him. He left a comfortable competence to his family and also an untarnished name, a valued inheritance even more to be cherished than riches.

Sometime we'll write more about the procession of buildings and fashion on State Street. It may, more than any other street in Salem, tell the City's story.

* Here's the house demolished for the Belluschi Y. Perhaps we'll return to this topic, but we aren't sure we miss the house all that much. It's too bad the house couldn't be moved, but it's possible the Y is a more interesting building. We find it meaningfully middle: Solid and interesting, it's better than pedestrian Belluschi - much better than the courthouse and the bank on Chemeketa and Liberty - but not the best Belluschi. Hopefully it will be loved and used again - though perhaps the interior offers issues that make this more difficult. At any rate, this is an instance of demolition that doesn't make us howl in outrage and loss: The new building offers verve in the procession of buildings along the block, and it's hard to argue that institutions like the Y don't deserve to modernize.

What upsets us most, as you will have doubtless seen, is replacement of a building by an empty lot. That's the death of a city.

Christmas Toasts for Ben Maxwell and Al Jones

2011-12-24T12:01:00.000-08:00

On Christmas it has become our custom to toast Ben Maxwell, on whose work nearly all local history depends in some way.

This spring, area historians, professional and amateur, lost Al Jones - who also happened to write about Ben Maxwell upon his death.

A generous toast to the memory of each!

Ben Maxwell

The obituary writers called him "the sage of Polk County" and "the bard of Eola Hills." Ben Maxwell died 44 years ago tomorrow. He was born on the 25th of February, 1898 and died on the 25th of December, 1967.

Maxwell was a raconteur and journalist. He loved stories. His articles and notes are the essential starting point for any research in Salem area history, though as a story-teller Maxwell's taste for flavor and color sometimes caused him to overseason the facts. He is unfailingly reliable for the big picture, but in the fine detail he cannot always be confirmed.

While this more than occasionally vexes Capital Taps, we also acknowledge our debt. And with our holiday tipple, we raise our glass. Prost!

Maxwell wrote for the Capitol Journal, the periodicals of the Marion County Historical Society, as well as for national magazines.

He was also a great collector of photos and clippings, and he donated over 5000 photos to the Salem Public Library. They constitute the Ben Maxwell Collection, images from which regular readers will often see here.

His obituary said:

Ben Maxwell - "the sage of Polk County"; "the bard of Eola Hills" - is gone. Living on, in the wake in life he created, is his memorial to the past he loved so well. Maxwell died of a liver ailment on Christmas in a Salem hospital, 68 years and 10 months from the day he was born into a pioneer family.

He was generally recognized as the Mid-Willamette Valley’s chief historian, particularly for Salem and Polk County. He said once, "The historical inclination grew on me like any other disease." Later, explaining why he continued his research and gathering of printed and photographic memories of history, Maxwell said: "It’s more comfortable to live in the past than in the present, because you can eliminate what you don’t like about the past. You have to live with what you have in the present."

Yet Maxwell lived in the present, too, and became well-known not only because he was a walking history book but for his colorful turn of speech. He described one politician as "nothing whittled down to a fine point." And he said of another that he "could hang a gate and daub mud on the inside of a chimney, but he never will write poetry."

Another of Oregon’s noted historians, state archivist David Duniway, called Maxwell "A great figure in the historical world. His work has been tremendous. He knew more of the history of Salem and Polk County than any other member of the community, and he expressed himself tersely and effectively in describing. it."

About his writing, Al Jones said

Ben's vocabulary added flavor to facts without loss of accuracy. He might refer to a certain politician as being “whittled down to a fine point” or to another early character as one who “could hang a gate or daub mud on the inside of a chimney, but could never write poetry." In describing early Salem hotels, he said: “In pioneer times, most so-called hotels were little more than flop-houses without facilities. The flea bag who scratched when he applied for a room was just as welcome as a dignified citizen who wore a plug hat and squirted tobacco juice through his whiskers."

The slight variations on the favorite phrases are amusing - and characteristic.

According to Jones, he also said:

I’ve always regarded Salem as a good place to be born, a nice place to die in, but a dull place to live.

(originally posted December 25th, 2009)

Al Jones

We never met Al Jones, but we run across his work constantly.

Many historic photos show his research or were preserved by him. Here's a link to 349 images from a search on his name, for example. (These two from the Grand Theater NRHP nomination images and form.)

According to the Statesman, he died Sunday at the age of 90. He was an old-time newspaper man, and we're sure the SJ will run a complete story. We look forward to learning more about him.

A tip of the pint. Godspeed.

(Capi Lynn's obituary has disappeared into the archives, but this feature from the early 2000s, and reposted in March of this year, is still live.)

(Reposted from this spring.)

A Solstice Toast with Salem Beer and a Poem by Campion

2011-12-21T22:30:00.000-08:00

Salem Beer sure seems to help Santa with the ladies - at least that's the suggestion. The scene looks rather pagan and the Santa more than a little creepy!

CHRISTMAS CHEER
And Salem beer are one and inseparable. Try a case this Christmas and you will find it the finest flavored, purest beverage you ever tasted. It is bottled by the Capital City Brewing Co., who supply it promptly to all who order.
Capital City Brewery and Ice Works, Mrs. M. Beck, Proprietress

Here's a winter poem by Thomas Campion:

Now Winter Nights Enlarge

Now winter nights enlarge
This number of their hours;
And clouds their storms discharge
Upon the airy towers.
Let now the chimneys blaze
And cups o'erflow with wine,
Let well-tuned words amaze
With harmony divine.
Now yellow waxen lights
Shall wait on honey love
While youthful revels, masques, and courtly sights
Sleep's leaden spells remove.

This time doth well dispense
With lovers' long discourse;
Much speech hath some defense,
Though beauty no remorse.
All do not all things well:
Some measures comely tread,
Some knotted riddles tell,
Some poems smoothly read.
The summer hath his joys,
And winter his delights;
Though love and all his pleasures are but toys
They shorten tedious nights.

Here's to the turning season and longer days again. Prost!

Salem Beer for Christmas Cheer - Saloon Loon Anderson - Xmas Dinner at Hotel Willamette

2011-12-15T20:00:00.000-08:00

Here are some snapshots from Christmas in the years a little before and a little after 1900.

In 1903 the imagined role of bright beer for holiday cheer is especially winning! We also like the idea of toning the system with beer. A beer tonic anyone?

Our Beer Promotes Christmas Cheer
Families who like to have a case of bright, sparkling, beer at home, which will give a zest to their food and tone to their system, will have a case of ours now. It is a fine beer. Call up phone 2131.
Salem Brewery Association

You might think of SantaCon as a distinctly modern and naughty take on Christmas. But even a century ago, there were Congresses of Santas!

Gilgamesh is hosting a more sedate form of it on Saturday:

When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday
Where: Gilgamesh's Winter Ale House, #106 in the Reed Opera House
Cost: Free, but everyone is encouraged to bring an unwrapped toy for Toys for Tots, in which case they will get half-price draft beers

Bill Anderson was Salem's near-sociopathic saloon-keeper. We hope to have a longer story for you sometime. You may recall his prank with a cadaver's skull at a "free lunch" promotion. Here he is in 1898 trying to scare the bejesus out of his Christmas customers! Well, it looks like Someone may had his patrons' backs instead...

Hand Badly Injured.

W. R. Anderson, the proprietor of the Elk Head saloon, met with an accident Saturday evening which may cost him his right hand. While at his place of business he thought to startle his customers a little for a Christmas joke, and procured a large Chinese bomb, which he intended to explode in the middle of the floor, but scarcely had he applied the match to the fuse when it went off in his right hand, shattering that member In a ghastly manner. The hand was torn asunder between the third and fourth finger from the base of the fingers almost to the wrist. The palm of the hand and the Inside of the lingers were badly lacerated. Mr. Anderson was taken to a doctor's office and the injury dressed it requiring 20 stitches to close the wound. It is thought that the hand can be saved.

Finally, here's the menu from the Hotel Willamette for Christmas dinner, just a decade earlier than the Thanksgiving menu we saw. There's no "Chateaubriand of Moose" or "Saddle of Alaska Antelope" this time. The menu is much more conservative and straight-forward. Oranges and bananas are the exotica. Oysters have to come from the east - or at least say they do. The Sauterne and Claret are almost certainly from California rather than France.

Big Christmas Dinner.

Following is the bill of fare at Hotel Willamette for Christmas day. 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., price 50 cents:
Fresh Eastern Oysters Raw
Consomme
Fried Salmon, Julian Potatoes
Chicken Salads
French Olives
Sweet Cucumbers and Dill Pickles
Sugar Corn French Peas Cauliflower
Baked Sweet Potatoes
Mashed and Steamed Potatoes
Roast Turkey Dressing Cranberry Sauce

Roast Duck Roast Chicken and Dressing
Boiled Ham Cold Tongue
Oyster Patties
Banana Fritters with Wine Sauce
Apple Mince Strawberry Pies
English Plum Pudding with Hard Sauce
Fruit Marble and Sponge Cakes
Star Kisses Crescents Chocolate Eclairs
Lady Fingers
Naval Oranges Apples Bananas
Pineapples
Fancy French Mixed Candy
Assorted Nuts and Raisins
Sauterne and Claret Wine Vintage 1891

The Hotel Willamette, aka Hotel Marion and Hotel Chemeketa, was located on the corner of Ferry and Commercial, where the Conference Center is today, just next door and north of the Capital Brewery, located where the sculpture garden is at Commercial and Trade. The photo here, from the Salem Public Library Historic Photograph Collections, is from around 1870 and is an old Cronise image. If you click through the link it will enlarge to show tremendous detail!

Lost Glories: Old City Hall - Knighton Perfects, Pugh Struggles with Concrete

2011-12-12T22:00:00.000-08:00

With news about the Police Station's growth and the seismic instability of New City Hall, maybe it's time to revisit Old City Hall.

Sue Bell writes:

Nothing remains now to mark its presence but a stone shaft and plaque on the southwest corner of Chemeketa and High Streets. Erected in 1989, the monument was installed 17 years after demolition of the original City Hall building when the Civic Center Complex was completed in 1972....

The remaining salvageable material was carted off by wrecking contractor E.S. Ritter to dispose of as he saw fit.

Though the property is now bank parking lot, in a corner which stands the easily overlooked stone shaft commemorating Old City Hall, there are still bits and pieces of the venerable municipal structure scattered throughout the City. In these traces, the memory lives on.

It's a little lonely here.

Not long after it was built it looked like this. Chemeketa is not yet paved here.

Bell continues:

On the 19th of January, 1893, Mayor Gatch and the City Council received recommendations from the Committee on Fire and Water to begin the process of acquiring new City Hall property in order to consolidate all the municipal offices in one central area. An amendment to the City Charter was called for to allow bonding to float a $10,000 indebtedness to the City, which would be added to the $20,000 proceeds from sales of current City property. By April, the Building Committee had completed specifications on the City Hall and were ready to entertain bids on the new construction.

The plans for a "High Victorian Gothic" edifice submitted by Walter D. Pugh were accepted by the Council on April 20th. Pugh's compensation was to be 4% of the contract price for the construction. However, one change in the specifications was recommended at the Council meeting: the clock tower would be 136 feet high, rather than the 156 feet in Pugh's plan.

Here's a much larger image from more recent times, complete with parking meters - be sure to click to enlarge!

One detail that seems have been lost to history is the role William C. Knighton had in the design. According to an article from 1894, just before he was finishing up the Deepwood project (though it didn't get that name until well into the 20th century), Knighton's

first work was to perfect a set for plans for the Salem City hall now under construction.

It would be interesting to know just what this "perfecting" involved! Was it detail work a draftsman might undertake? Was it structural engineering, perhaps for the tower? Was it what we'd today call "value engineering"?

In February 1895, a list of warrants shows that Knighton was still working with C. S. McNally and that Charles Burggraf also had his fingers in the cookie jar!

In any case, in the same report as the list of warrants there was apparent confusion in authority between the superintending architect Pugh and construction superintendent Harrild, and within a few months it had blossomed into a full reprimand over - wait for it! - concrete and masonry:

The report listed several problems with structural concrete, masonry, and iron, and concluded

Architect Pugh has exceeded his authority and has violated the spirit of his contract with the city and laid himself open to just criticism and reprimand by the council.

Maybe it's no wonder the tower on the Grand Theater collapsed in a snow storm! (A correspondent has mentioned another problem tower associated with Pugh, but we couldn't find the reference - we'll update if we can.)

Today the early 70s brutalism of New City Hall probably looks ugly and useless in the same way the chunky Romanesque Gothic of Old City Hall looked in 1972. So that's a cautionary tale about the vagaries of fashion and about probable folly in rushing to vacate and demolish the Civic Center. It's also a little alarming that Salem seems to have a problem with public buildings and their concrete!

But more than anything, it's sad that nothing better than a parking lot has replaced the Old City Hall. That's real ugliness.

(Images: Old City Hall late 1890s and Old City Hall with Parking Meters from Salem Public Library Historic Photograph Collection. It has lots of other images in the collection.)

Holiday Shopping and the Empty Lots - Argo Hotel, Busick Market, Eldridge Block

2011-12-08T23:30:00.000-08:00

Since big box shopping season is upon us, along with the crazy hunt for a parking spot, here are a couple of lost buildings - and the big box car parking that replaced them. The lost aren't necessarily "glories," especially the Busick Market, but you have to admit they're more attractive than what is currently there. (The angles and scales on the modern shots are pretty close to those of the old.)

(Argo Hotel, Salem Public Library Oregon Historic Photo Collection)

This isn't exactly an empty lot - we'll call it a series of stacked lots over a retail cavern - but it's not put to very good use, either. On the north side of Chemeketa street between Liberty and Commercial you can see the corner of the alley in each photo. On the alley today are Carl's Cuisine, the elevator, and J.C. Penny. Presumably the Argo was demolished when the parking garage went up (but we haven't confirmed this).

On the south side of Chemeketa, the parking garage wiped out the Eldridge Block. The very south-most portion remains today as the home of Greenbaum's, but before the garage the block was three times as big, and extended to the corner where the shoe shop is today. You can see it here and here. And here is one a little later in 1954 that shows the whole Eldridge block with Greenbaum's.

(Eldridge Block, Salem Public Library Oregon Historic Photo Collection)

Another of the empty lots is the one behind TJ Maxx and Rite-Aid downtown. Next to TJ Maxx is a curious building, a gabled garage with two mostly parabolic-y arches on the side facing Marion Street. You can just see it behind the man's head in the first image.

(Orignal photo, badly identified, Salem Public Library Oregon Historic Photo Collection)

There's not a whole lot written and easily accessible on the Busick Market in this location, but the name remains in the Busick Court restaurant on Court Street. There was more than one Busick Market location, and we don't know the relation between them all.

So here are three ways the old downtown used to have a lot more character. We drink a toast to lost charm and buildings lost!

Ventis Taphouse Hosts Holiday Seasonal Taste-Off

2011-12-05T21:00:00.000-08:00

Last summer you might remember the Best of the West IPA Bowl. It seemed unwieldy to us, and we didn't make much of a brew-ha-ha about it. And indeed it went on waaaay too long.

But Venti's executed a course-correction, and v2 looks great!

The Brew-Ho-Ho is a four round set of four beers. The same 16 beer draw, but half the number of rounds and twice the beer in each round. Win!

It's also much more interesting to get away from the IPA, same-ol', same-ol' thing.

Nicely turned!

At Venti's Downtown

Meanwhile, at the other Venti outpost, on Wednesday,

Venti’s Basement Bar at the Cafe and New Belgium Beer Ranger Mat Robertson will be hosting a New Belgium Brewing Party December 7th from 6PM to close featuring six rare New Belgium Beers: New Belgium Lips of Faith Fresh Hop IPA, Lips of Faith Super Cru Belgian Strong, Lips of Faith Prickly Passion Saison, Snow Day Winter CDA, Lips of Faith “La Fleur Misseur?” Belgian Pale Ale and Abbey Dubbel.

That's a solid beer week in Salem!

UPDATED: Repeal Day

Fiddlesticks! Almost forgot about Repeal Day.

Toast the 78th anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition! Today is Repeal Day, December 5th, the date in 1933 the states and nation formally ratified the 21st Amendment.

Smallpox Epidemic Wipes out Pratum Family in 1910

2011-12-03T11:00:00.000-08:00

Today's news about vaccination compliance is worrisome. We think of the diseases as "gone," but it's not difficult to imagine some of them returning. Just a century ago smallpox occasionally burned through families and places. While smallpox is officially "eradicated," other diseases yet linger.

In her research, SOME SMALL CEMETERIES and MISCELLANEOUS BURIALS, Bernita Jones Sharp writes about the Herr family:

The Daily Oregon Statesman, 10 December 1910, on page 2, has a bold headline: BIG EPIDEMIC OF SMALLPOX. The article goes on to say a report had been received from Pratum that a smallpox epidemic was raging there and the Herr family had fallen victims of the disease, with more than a dozen families having been exposed and many houses quarantined, including Howell School. The county health officer reported the first death occurred on Saturday, Mr. Herr, the father of the family being the unfortunate one. The mother, daughter, son and his wife were also ill.

On 11 December 1910, page 3 of the Daily Oregon Statesman, another bold headline proclaims: WILL SUBDUE BIG EPIDEMIC. This article, under a Silverton dateline, tells "of perhaps the most virulent type of hemorrhagic smallpox that has ever been known on the Pacific coast". It goes on to say that Mr. Herr, a wealthy citizen of Ohio, in company with his wife, had been visiting his son, Simm Herr, and while here but a few days, Mrs. Herr of Ohio, broke out with the disease in a mild form. This rapidly spread to the remaining members of the family resulting in the death of Simm Herr, Mr. Herr of Ohio and Mr. Herr's sister. Mrs. Sim (sic) Herr and little son Clarence were "suffering greatly" but there was hopes of their recovery.

WHOLE FAMILY IS WIPED OUT, emblazons page 2 of the Daily Oregon Statesman on 13 December 1910 and tells that another victim has been added to the death list in the Pratum smallpox epidemic. Mrs. Sen (sic) Herr died "yesterday"; and tells us that her husband died on Saturday. Mr. Herr & his wife, from Ohio, visiting their son, Sen (sic) Herr, were the first afflicted and it was doubtful the son of the Sinn Herrs would recover. Mrs. Herr, of Ohio, was slightly improved and her recovery was looked for.

The Silverton Appeal, on 11 Jan 1911 pg 5 provides a little more information on the Herr family when it is reported that "Mr. Herr" from Bluffton, Iowa had arrived to assist in arranging his father's business affairs [after) "his father and sister died of smallpox a few weeks ago".

On 20 January 1911, pg 6 of the Silverton Appeal is a Card of Thanks from Mr. & Mrs. Peter Herr & the Lichty family and refers to the, "terrible illness and death of Mr. Christ and Sim Herr".

The Oregon Death Index provides the following information:

HERR, Christian, died 03 December 1910

HERR, Fanny M., died 08 December 1910

HERR, Sem (sic) S., died 08 Dec 1910

HERR, Matilda Sarah, died 11 December 1910

Christian Herr was the father from Ohio.

Fanny M. & Sem S. Herr were the daughter & son of Christian and his (unnamed) wife.

Matilda Sarah "Tillie" was the wife of Sem S. Her maiden name was, reportedly, Lichty. The 1895 Census does include a Lichty family with a daughter Matilda, aged between 10 & 18.

The 1910 Census tells us that Sim S. Herr was 36 years of age, born in Ohio, and had been married 4 years. His wife, Tillie S., was 27, born in Oregon, she had had one child and one child was living. Their son, Clarence, age 3, was also born in Oregon. [Clarence Herr did survive the epidemic.]

Peter Herr was apparently another son of Christian Herr. For more on Peter & his family see the reference to them in the section on Mt. Hope Cemetery, in this volume.

In none of the above referred to articles is there any mention of the disposal of the bodies of these victims of smallpox. Reportedly, those who died from communicable diseases were not allowed to be buried in public cemeteries, so burial usually took place on the victims own land and that may have been the case with this family. No obituaries were located for any of the victims.

(Headline from the Oregonian, December 11th, 1910)

The Beer Goddess to Read at Willamette U Bookstore Thursday

2011-11-27T21:00:00.000-08:00

Need some bibulous bibliographic bliss?

Join the Beer Goddess for a reading at Willamette University Bookstore on Thursday, December 1st, at 3:30pm!

From the release:

Lisa M. Morrison
Craft Beers of the Pacific Northwest: A Beer Lover’s Guide to Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia
3:30pm-5:15pm

The Beer Goddess, a.k.a. Lisa Morrison, is a Portland-based beer writer, author, and host of Beer O’Clock, a radio program on Newsradio 101 FM KXL. Each week, Beer O’Clock connects beer lovers in Beervana (Portland, Ore.) and around the world to the best in great beer through exclusive interviews, brews news, event listings, and tasting notes and a lot more. Unlike most radio programs, Morrison personally buys the air time for Beer O’Clock and uses sponsorship to pay for it.

Morrison also is the executive director of Barley’s Angels, a nonprofit organization focused on helping women learn more about craft beer and brewing so they can chart their own course of beer discovery.

About the Book:

Craft Beers of the Pacific Northwest is the first book in more than a decade that brings beer lovers the very best insider information on the best places to source Northwest beer. This book is a suds-soaked adventure through the northwest, with 18 mapped-out pub crawls, listings, labels, photos and details on more than 115 different places to have a great beer, and a great beer-experience in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia.

The New School has a nice interview with her here.

(Image of Morrison from the interview.)

LifeSource adds Beer Steward and Expanded Selection

2011-11-26T22:00:00.000-08:00

If you don't shop at LifeSource, here are three excellent reasons to check out the store: A beer steward, an expanded beer case, and a weekly blog update with the new beers!

They have a special focus on single bottles and encourage sampling. With the cool storage, you are more likely to have a pristine bottle. Win all around!

This weekend's update includes, for example, a couple of bottles from Portland favorite Upright.

This is great to see! Thanks, Liam and LifeSource!

A Fancy Salem Thanksgiving a Century Ago in 1911

2011-11-23T21:00:00.000-08:00

Chateaubriand of Moose or Saddle of Alaska Antelope? Here's what your Thanksgiving might have looked like at the Hotel Marion in 1911.*

(click for larger menu)

Holy Cow, that's a lot of meat!**

Any culinary historians out there? Perhaps you can mine it better for bons mots or discern curious habits. This was not, needless to say, a proletarian plate. Even so, New York or San Francisco could bury it in excess. So this was Thanksgiving for the Salem gentry and their visitors, such as they were.

For an assortment of historic images of the Hotel Marion, see here. It was located where the Conference Center is today. A history here.

*Reposted from a year ago.

**No wonder Syrup of Figs, Fletcher's Castoria, Paine's Celery Compound, and a ton of other patent medicines attended to the needs of the constipated, who must have been many, judging by the frequency and number of ads and mentions of digestion.

A Sumerian Saloon: Gilgamesh to Pop-up in Reed Opera House

2011-11-22T21:00:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow your options for holiday respite and relief will get a little bit better in downtown Salem!

From the facebook:

Gilgamesh Brewing Co. will open a pop-up shop on the Court Street side of the Reed Opera House on November 23. The shop will sell Gilgamesh brand merchandise, including new holiday packs. We will release seasonal brews (including a new winter ale), fill growlers, and welcome those who want to escape the holiday shopping and come in for a pint. The shop will be open through the holiday season.

In the 8 taps, they'll also have some new beers:

the Blitzn-Prancer, a winter ale made with molasses, nutmeg, cinnamon, and clove, and limited-release ABandon Brew, a brew aged in pinot noir wine barrels for more than a year.

Hours are 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday
10 a.m. to midnight Friday and Saturday
noon to 5 p.m. Sunday

It's been a while since there was a regular saloon in the Reed! Here's one from back in the day. You'll recognize the location on Court street next to the alley. Note how the storefront system has changed from the narrow brick arched windows to large picture windows.

(The Bureau, F.P. Talkington, in the Reed, 1890s,
Salem Public Library Historic Photo Collection)

Turkey Day Beverage Delight: Abyss Vertical and Wine Country

2011-11-20T23:00:00.000-08:00

Last year at New Years Venti's basement bar had the 2010 Abyss, and it looked to us like the best toast in town.

This year, a little earlier, they're doubling down: Perhaps in a new Salem institution, much like the mythic and epic annual verticals at the Woodstock Wine and Deli, Venti's is squirreling away kegs of Abyss and cellaring them for holiday tastings. At the Taphouse on

Monday, November 21st at 4pm... [the 2010 and 2011] beers will be available, side by side only, two six oz. pours, until the kegs are gone. What’s more, in subsequent years you may look forward to a two year vertical tasting again in 2012 and a TRIPLE VERTICAL in 2013!

A big tip of the pint!

Wine Country Thanksgiving

Beer is great and all, but if you have read CT, you'll also know that we recommend taking the holiday weekend to go wine tasting.

Vineyard managers and winemakers just finished the latest harvest in Oregon wine history, and a mostly dry October meant that many of the wines look like they will be elegant and especially lithe and lovely. You won't be able to taste from the 2011 vintage, but wines from 2010 were also late and show some of the same possibilities.

Don't miss our amazing proximity to wine country!

So mix it up, and try to take a day to head into the hills.

Corvallis looks to hit another Home Run

2011-11-17T22:00:00.000-08:00

Though Les Caves in Corvallis been softly open for a while now, the grand opening is this weekend. The menu and beer list for the new restaurant associated with Block 15 founder and brewer Nick Arzner looks tremendous!

Here's the taplist:

We will begin Saturday morning with the first listed beers and them move on to the “on deck” as kegs empty.

Block 15-2009 Pappy’s Dark
Cantillon- Vigneronne 2009
St. Bernardus- 2010 Christmas Ale
Cascade- 2009 The Vine
Banhof- Berliner Style Weisse, Brettanomyces Lambicus Special Edition
Upright- Barrel Aged Four with tangelo & organge peel and rose petals
Hair of the Dog- Cherry Fred from the Wood
Ninkasi- 2010 Conventionale (Imperiale)
Oakshire- Bourbon Badger (Nitro)
Harviestoun- Bitter and Twisted Zymatore (Gin Barrel Aged)
3 Fools- Cider matured with Brettanomyces Lambicus
Great Divide- 2010 Chocolate Oak Aged

On Deck:
De Struise- St. Amatus
Great Divide- Yeti 2009 Oak Aged Yeti
Boneyard- Femme Fatale
Flat Tail- Double Dry-Hopped English IPA
Jolly Pumpkin- 2010 La Parcela

And here's the opening tasting menu. This is some serious food-n-beer matching!

Available November 19 & 20th 4pm-10pm
$45 with Beer, $35 food only

House Charcuterie
Venison salami, rabbit pate, apple butter, pickled beets, torn bread
~Upright Brewing Pinot Noir barrel matured Four

Moroccan Vegetable soup
Candied lemon
~St. Bernardus 2010 Christmas Ale

Seared Breast of Duck
With Pumpkin and goat cheese ravioli and browned butter
~Cherry Fred from the Wood, Hair of the Dog Brewing

Belgian Chocolate Terrine
Hazelnut, Framboise sauce
~2009 Pappy’s Dark, Block 15 Brewing

The menu proudly features local goods from: Gathering Together Farms, My Pharm, Freddy Guys, Denisons, & Evergreen Creek Farms.

The New School had an October preview.

If you're looking for something out of town, head south!

The Second Oregon Returns from the Spanish American War

2011-11-10T21:00:00.000-08:00

Veterans Day didn't exist in 1899 when the Oregon Volunteers came home from the Spanish-American War.

Here's Charles A. Murphy. (Image from the Oregon State Library.) He was born in Salem, survived the war, was warden of the Penitentiary during World War I, and died in 1945. He is buried in the Pioneer Cemetery. When he died, one of his nephews was a POW held by the Japanese.

The Second Oregon was the first regiment to return to the US, in July of 1899. From San Francisco on August 9th they took the train north. Here are two images of their return to Salem, on August 10th. The images must be taken from what is now the Tokyo International University. They are of course from before the 1918 Beaux Arts depot, and may show the old wood freight depot.

(Second Oregon, returning from Spanish American War, August 10th, 1899.
Salem Public Library Historic Photograph Collections)

(Second Oregod, returning from Spanish American War, August 10th, 1899.
Salem Public Library Historic Photograph Collections)

Here's the area around the depot in a 1905 birdseye map. You can see the field where the camera must have been located. Mill street doesn't go through. The woolen mill is to the left, and there are canneries where the Willamette soccer field is now. 14th Street no longer aligns with the railroad, but has been realigned to meet what is here 15th. Yew Park School is at Mission and 14th - and Mission Street has been very much changed.

The returning veterans even had a song, "Hail to the Second Oregon."

Salem basically shut down for the train.

SALEM RECEPTION
It Proves to be a Pleasant and Patriotic Occasion
Crowds Are Large, Good Natured, and Joyous Over the Second Oregon's Return

Showers laid the dust. The clouds cooled off the day. The sun burst out at last. Old nature made the greeting perfect.

All day people rolled and rode in to the city from all directions. Early the streets and walks were crowded. Thousands of bicycles were on the streets. It was indeed a public holiday. Carriages fluttered with flags and many business places were decorated. At 10:30 the Salem Military band, heading a procession of the Grand Army marched up State street to the depot, playing military airs and the column took a position east of the track.

THE FIRST SECTION pulled into the station at 10:40 and immediately the gun-powder began to boom. The Southern Pacific train gave the double toot and all the whistles and bells in town began to blow. There were eight coaches and out of each window stuck a flag. The depot grounds from the water tank to the bridge was a solid mass of rejoicing people. The train had not stopped when the boys in brown uniforms began to pile out and greet friends.

At 11 a.m. the Salem National Guard company with roses stuck in their muskets countermarched past the first section and joined the Salem Grand Army escort that headed by the Salem military band formed the special escort of honor for the occasion.

At 11:30 the guard of honor of Union veterans led off with their corps flag, the Relief Corps banner of silk and the tattered battle flag of the Second Oregon at the front, followed by the first battalion of the regiment.

The second seciton pulled in at 11:20 and was soon followed by the third, containing the Salem company when the cheering was renewed with further explosions of bombs and fire works. This was the climax of the whole occaions.

The Second Oregon are a fine appearing body of men physically, but few showing the effects of their hard campaign. Their only careworn look was occasioned by the loss of sleep and continual feasting since landing in Oregon.

[The story continues with the usual kisses between soldiers and sweethearts, with swooning "Salem belles," and with politicians and pageantry.]

For a different take on return, here's Captain Timothy Kudo, writing as part of an ongoing series in the New York Times, Home Fires, which features "the writing of men and women who have returned from wartime service in the United States military."

Only the dead have seen the end of war. This is a maxim that has been used to illuminate humanity’s propensity for war, but it is also an accurate reflection of many veterans’ experiences. The war not only came back with us, it was here the entire time, experienced by orphans and widows. It was experienced by the widows from my unit who were unable to cook a single meal for their kids since their husband’s death. During a memorial a few weeks after our return, families of the dead collapsed grief-stricken in front of their loved ones’ pictures as a thousand Marines solemnly bore witness. When an officer went to the house to check on one family, the littlest one told him matter-of-factly, “My daddy is dead.”
...
After coming home, our commanders told us we earned glory for our unit, but I know it’s more complicated than that. War has little to do with glory and everything to do with hard work and survival. It’s about keeping your goodness amid the evil. But no matter what happens, you never work hard enough, people die and evil touches everyone. Our lives will go on but the war will never go away. That’s why it’s not simply good to be back. I thought my war was over, but it followed me. It followed all of us. We returned only to find that it was waiting here the entire time and will always be with us.

Here are the Official Records of the Second Oregon and an oral history from 1939. For more, see the PBS Series "Crucible of Empire," Wikipedia on the Spanish-American War and the Philippine-American War, and the Library of Congress on the Spanish-American War. The headlines from the war in the Philippine Islands (going to 1902) sometimes seem an awful lot like the headlines from the past decade.

U Think Wednesday on the Invention of Jesus

2011-11-07T21:00:00.000-08:00

Who would want to be limited to a single beer, brewed to the specifications of 3000 BCE, 1300 CE, or whatever model you might choose for the Ur-Beer?+

Nope, we celebrate the fecund excess of styles and variations today! There's never been a better time for beer.

In religion it's often the opposite: We mourn the loss of unity, worry about all the denominational variation, and long for a return to a moment of pristine origins when everybody was presumably on the same page.* The Truth is supposed to be one.

On Wednesday at Brown's Towne Lounge U Think features "the Sage of Galilee" and the latest scholarship on His foundational role in Christian origins.

It's timely since the presidential campaign of 2012 has put the origins of religion in the spotlight. How to explain this movement called Christianity and some of its descendents? And how should these movements inform contemporary politics?

Digging for the Truth

In a fabulous bit of cross-linguistic word play, the discovery of a Christian relic was called in Latin the invention of a relic. In-venio means to come upon, to find or discover. For us moderns the word "invention" points up the anxious matter of authenticity. Debates over golden plates and spectacles are far from new.

Here's the way one of the illuminators** of the Milan-Turin Hours envisions the discovery of the True Cross by Helena, Constantine's mother. She really found that cross. It may not be modern archaeology but the idea of digging was understood to lead to truth.

Nowadays digging also operates as a metaphor for textual interpretation. In post-Reformation Christianity, the text of the Bible, and not a relic or ritual, is the guarantor of authenticity. Scholars dig through layers of textual tradition in the Bible, in hopes of finding the foundation layer of Christian origins. The origin is assumed to be normative, the most authentic layer and commanding our assent. This leads from the Christ of Dogma to the Jesus of History.

About this, Albert Schweitzer wrote in The Quest of the Historical Jesus:

There is no historical task which so reveals a man's true self as the writing of a Life of Jesus. No vital force comes into the figure unless a man breathes into it all the hate or all the love of which he is capable. The stronger the love, or the stronger the hate, the more life-like is the figure which is produced. For hate as well as love can write a Life of Jesus, and the greatest of them are written with hate : that of Reimarus, the Wolfenbuttel Fragmentist, and that of David Friedrich Strauss. It was not so much hate of the Person of Jesus as of the supernatural nimbus with which it was so easy to surround Him, and with which He had in fact been surrounded. They were eager to picture Him as truly and purely human, to strip from Him the robes of splendour with which He had been apparelled, and clothe Him once more with the coarse garments in which He had walked in Galilee.

Though it's a totally different kind of passion than Jesus', the feelings behind Jesus research have been passionate indeed.

The torch-bearer of the modern quest is the Jesus Seminar.*** The Westar Institute runs the seminar's meetings, and just a few years ago they relocated to Salem, on the edge of the Willamette campus.

U Think catches up with the latest Jesus research on Wednesday!

Willamette University’s U Think series will feature Stephen Patterson, professor and historian who specializes in the origins of Christianity. He will present “The Historian’s Jesus: What scholars say about the sage from Galilee" on Nov. 9 at 6:30 p.m. in Brown’s Towne Lounge.

“Long before Jesus became the Christian savior he was a Jewish sage who provoked the masses and drew a crowd,” says Patterson. “Beggars loved him, and Romans feared him. In the end, he was executed for sedition. Historians now think they know why.”

Patterson is the George H. Atkinson Professor of Religious and Ethical Studies at Willamette University. He is the director of the Westar Institute, where he chairs the Jesus Seminar on Christian Origins. Patterson’s many books and essays address various aspects of the historical Jesus and Gospel of Thomas, among other biblical scholarship.

+ Or maybe like Pilsner Urquell. Biblical scholarship also has its Quelle, the Q-source.

* It's the old chestnut of the One and Many. The difference between hedgehogs, who know one thing, and foxes, who know many things. Or the difference between Athenian and Mancunian science, the difference between the physicist's search for a unified field theory and the biologist's search for new species.

** If you're into art history, many scholars have conjectured that this image is by Jan van Eyck.

*** Here's the Jesus Seminar Drinking Game™:

In the past, the Jesus Seminar voted on the sayings of Jesus, trying to determine whether they were authentic, similar to something Jesus said, inauthentic but related to something He really said, or totally inauthentic and from a later tradition. They used red, pink, grey, and black beads.

U Think can turn this into the best parlor game ever! If U Think the saying is real, you must finish your beer! If U Think it's similar, you have to drink half your beer. If U Think it's inauthentic but related, you have to take a sip. And if it's fake, you don't have to sip.

You will know the skeptics by their sobriety! And the enthusiasts will be rolling wholly on the floor.

Beer for Halloween

2011-10-31T17:00:00.000-07:00

Whether you call it Halloween, All Saints and Souls Days, Samhain, or Día de los Muertos - it's a strange amalgam of carnival and loss. Take a moment to toast the good times and the dead and haunted in the next couple of days. Life is fragile and fleeting.

Here's a Halloween poem.

All Souls' Night, 1917
by Hortense King Flexner

You heap the logs and try to fill
The little room with words and cheer,
But silent feet are on the hill,
Across the window veiled eyes peer.
The hosts of lovers, young in death,
Go seeking down the world to-night,
Remembering faces, warmth and breath—
And they shall seek till it is light.
Then let the white-flaked logs burn low,
Lest those who drift before the storm
See gladness on our hearth and know
There is no flame can make them warm.

For the fun, don't let your Halloween Hangover stop you. Toast the Day of the Dead with an Abominable Winter Ale at the Taphouse.

The Hopworks Urban Brewery (HUB) party is coming to the Taphouse November 1st with special guest brewer Jaime Rodriguez. This party will be staring later in the evening than previous parties and will run 7:30 to close.

We’ll have HUB swag to give away. A six HUB beer taster tray for $7. We’ll be running happy hour prices on all HUB draft beers through closing. Free HUB glass with your first HUB purchase while supplies last, one per customer please.

Draft beers will be: Batch 1000 ESB Anniversary Ale, HUB Lager, Abominable Winter Ale and Seven Grain Stout. HUB focuses on Organic beers that are produced in their environmentally friendly brewery in Portland.

And since it's not all fun-and-games, think about the lost, especially those lost deep in the institutions of Salem.

As the Prison and Courts grapple with a Capital Case even today, consider all those executed, some of them quite possibly innocent. But whether guilty or not, there's a long, long trail of loss and sadness.

And consider those alone who, without family by their side in dying, and without family after death, still endure the lonely cannister.

AIA Oregon Top 25 List Omits Salem Landmarks

2011-10-29T10:00:00.000-07:00

Over at Portland Architecture and Southwest Oregon Architect, folks are talking about the Oregon chapter of the American Institute of Architecture's 100 favorite buildings.

Neither top 10 list has anything from Salem. Nor does the top 25 list on the AIA website. In truth, Salem probably doesn't have any top 10 architecture - but you know, the Capitol has to be on the top 100 list. Maybe the Supreme Court building? First Methodist? What do you think? What are the most architecturally distinguished buildings in Salem?

Here's the top 10:

Timberline Lodge, Mount Hood (1937)
William I. “Tim” Turner, Gilbert Stanley Underwood

Mount Angel Library, Mount Angel Abbey (1970)
Alvar Alto

Commonwealth Building, Portland (1948)
Pietro Belluschi

US Bancorp Tower, Portland (1983)
Skidmore Owings and Merrill and Pietro Belluschi

Pioneer Courthouse Square, Portland (1984)
William Martin

Portland Central Library, Portland (1913)
A.E. Doyle

Gordon House, Silverton (1964)
Frank Lloyd Wright

Memorial Coliseum, Portland (1960)
Skidmore Owings and Merrill

The Watzek House, Portland (1937)
John Yeon

Crown Point Vista, Corbett (1918)
Edgar Lazarus

What's the top Salem building?

(And where are the Salem architects in the conversation!?)

Also, on architecture, it's nice to see Waterplace merited LEED Platinum certification. It'll be really interesting to see how the building is viewed over time!

Downtown Welcome Maps' Amuse-Bouche: History on the Flip Side

2011-10-22T14:00:00.000-07:00

You may have noticed a bunch of the new signs have gone up. Naturally, we thought a review of the historic part was in order!

Somewhere we think we read there are eight signs, but we've found only seven. On one side they have a stylized map of downtown. On the other side is a little history lesson with historic photos and captions. The frames are brightly colored and topped with a whimsical icon.

The first thing we noticed is the history's always on the same side, the north-facing side. This means sometimes you can't flip back-n-forth easily between a modern view and an historic view. We wanted the ability to rhyme in time with our eye!

It wasn't long before we realized the city installed the historic photos away from the sun so that part fades more slowly than the map, which presumably will be easier to replace.

But this also means that you might have to squint into the sun to look at them. The maps, of course, are easy to see with your back to the sun. Since they're the main course, and the history the amuse-bouche or dessert, the priority is probably right.

Still, protecting the historic images in this way makes for some goofy views. If they win the pragmatic and preservation test, sometimes they lose the information test.

We'll do one batch today and another batch some other time.*

The General Layout and Plan

The top half of each sign tends to be a large historic photo and caption. This gets varied: the image is sometimes printed full bleed, past the edges; other times the image enjoys generous margins. The bottom half gets broken up in different ways, some more regularly ordered in columns, some a little more random across the "page." Each sheet seems to have a footer. The overall plan is flexible.

The photos vary unevenly. Some are wonderfully detailed at the enlargement. Some are obviously reproduced from newsprint half-tones. Still others are badly jaggy from being enlarged too much. One on the sign at the Reed Opera House is particularly awful.

The idea seems to have been to select historic trivia, much of it related to the location of the sign - though as we will see, this breaks down. There's not an overall interpretation of Salem history or a narrative that links sign to sign. The lack of a master interpretation is ok, but something to pull the viewer and visitor to the next sign might have been nice - a teaser, to create interest. Maybe a sort of scavenger or easter egg hunt?

Strangely, there's nothing about the walking tour on the signs. You'd think the signs would encourage people to stop at Travel Salem or other places for a walking tour brochure. That seems like an unfortunate omission or lack of coordination.

It's not clear, in fact, that the sign placement consistently thinks through the logic of pedestrians, whether walking downtown or driving downtown and then walking. There is, then, a basic tension between places important in 19th century Salem, and places a 21st century Salemite is likely to walk. The signs don't always synchronize the two.

Typography

Since the design is flexible, the most consistent element might be the type. Somebody likes the smart fonts of emigre! They're a terrific choice for something intended to bridge old and new, and meant to offer little tastes of amusement, delight, and learning.

The main text font is an excellent choice. Though it looks vaguely antique, it's not antiquarian. But neither is it contemporary.

Indeed, it looks like Mrs Eaves from emigre fonts, a modernized revival of Baskerville. It's a modern update of a classic font from the 18th century, and a lively choice for historical signage. Nothing stuffy here!

Fairplex, also from emigre, appears in the footers and a few middle headlines. Its slightly angled serifs are also terrific. As with Mrs. Eaves, Fairplex suggests an older face, this time a 19th century face, like something on a "wanted" poster in the Wild West - but with that modern twist, again.

Less successful are the upper headers. The ones in Engravers don't quite work for us.

If the Mrs Eaves has a nice vintage air, the Engravers puts on airs. It's fusty and stuffy, monocled and bankerly. Not a good match for the martini olives, dog, eye, hand and other icons.

We wonder if a non-serifed font might have made for a better contrast with the text face and also been somewhat more legible than the Engravers. At the very least something less rigid and more inviting. That's the great thing about Mrs. Eaves: It has this human whimsy and fineness without also being fussy. She wears funny plaids and hats sometimes!

In the pictures you may have also noticed that the "B" in "Buildings that Move" is different from the "H" in "Historic Waterways." The initial capitals vary from sign to sign, and some of the typographic elements don't seem to have been used much in other signs. There was maybe a missed opportunity for a tighter theme-and-variations approach.

In the end it's clear the history trivia is a bit of a throw-away, an ode to serendipity rather than part of a vision or program. It's tasty, but it's only an amuse-bouche to whet your appetite for more.

Here are four signs, and observations nit-picky and not.

Church and Center

For history, of the four this was our favorite. The site of the old high school isn't much known, and this commemorates it nicely. Though when you look at the sign, you are looking across the street at the wrong block. You should be turned around and looking at the Meier & Frank/Macy's parking garage!

(1905 Salem High School, Salem Library Historic Photo Collection)

The other part about the sign's location that might be a little odd is that it's next to the entry to a parking garage and ugly chain link fencing. At the corner are a couple of banks and the shabby Greyhound station is just up the street.

It's not adjacent to a high-traffic pedestrian location, but instead is adjacent to a high traffic auto location! If it is intended to lure people out of their cars, it's too far from the driveway - and to the east, away from major destinations. If it is intended to be seen by people walking around, locating it next to the main Macy's entry on High and Center might have been better. Since there aren't many storefronts on Church in this area - the record store a block away looks like it's closing - and since Center street is busy with cars, the logic of site placement for pedestrians is not clear here.

Church and Ferry

Highlighting the old mills and the significance of the waterways was neat - but the stream of mystery was missing from a map purporting to show the waterways in the 1880s!

On this detail from the 1895 Sanborn map, you can see the mystery waterway along Mill Street, the the northmost arm of a trident at Church Street, where the Pringle, Shelton, and mystery creeks converge.

The map on the sign shows the confluence only of Pringle and Shelton creeks.

It's also directly across the street from First Methodist, surely on the shortlist for most important historic buildings in Salem. It is odd that a sign in this location doesn't acknowledge that in any way.

Still, the placement here, at a sort of gateway from Willamette, the Parkway, and the Bush Park/Gaiety Hill neighborhood makes some sense. People are likely to be walking here.

High and State

Here's where the sign orientation gets tricky. To look at this sign you look south down High Street, but the view in the photo is west down State Street, so you have to turn 90 degrees to the right.

Look closely and you'll see the mystery "bathroom vents" on the old Courthouse grounds! (This photo looks like it's from later in the 1930s, so it muddles rather than clarifies the question of date. Strangely, it's from Mission Mill, and one wonders why they didn't reproduce it on their own blog post, since it's much higher quality than the photo they used.)

And though the headline talks about the theatres, the theatres are to the south. They aren't in the photo!

There's a pretty significant disconnect between text, image, view, and site placement here.

At the same time, by the Courthouse and across from the nascent "restaurant row," it is a good high-traffic walking location. The apparent mandate to orient the photos on the north side does interfere with good information design, however.

Liberty and Commercial

Though the information on this sign is nice, the location is lousy. This is a total location fail!

When you look at the photo, you also look south down Liberty. But the photo shows Commercial! Why didn't they align the location with the photo, either both on Liberty or both on Commercial? Moreover, the view is north up Commercial from the corner at State, rather than an equal view down south from the Corner at Chemeketa. That's complicated: Your orientation is turned around 180 degrees and displaced two blocks south and one block west. It's a knight's move in chess! This sign is too random and general, insufficiently responsive to site.

This matters because right at the mall entry, this is a very good walking location. This is a good site with a mismatched sign.

The brick, reading "Convict Made, 1912, O.S.P." from the Oregon State Penitentiary is a nice detail, though. That's one of our favorite bits, and something completely new to us.

So do you have a favorite sign or observation about them?

* Or maybe not. It's possible another round would just be otiose. If you're curious, they're at the Grand Hotel, Riverfront Park, and the Reed Opera House. So where's that eighth one?

Indie Rock, but no Beer, at the Library

2011-10-18T21:00:00.000-07:00

Too bad you can't drink beer in the library!

Tomorrow night the reading series at Willamette will have a new wrinkle: Indie Rock.

Al James of Dolorean will talk and even perform a little in the Hatfield Room at the Willamette library. Presumably he'll perform some from his recent record, The Unfazed, released earlier this year.

James is a WU grad and the talk's at 7:30pm.

Sometimes U Think, Sometimes U Don't: Willamette U Brainpower on Tap

2011-10-10T21:00:00.000-07:00

Two events, one past and one upcoming, show mental function and malfunction at work at Willamette University.

U Think

The monthly U Think lecture shows off fruitful collaborations between academics and ordinary citizens.

This month David Craig returns to talk about Citizen Science and Squirrels. You may recall him from his lecture on crows almost exactly a year ago.

This lecture, titled "Bright-eyed and Bushy-tailed about Citizen Science," takes place on Wednesday,

Oct. 12 at 6:30 p.m. in Brown’s Towne Lounge. Craig, whose research was featured in the PBS documentary “A Murder of Crows,” will discuss the Western Gray Squirrel, a North American species now threatened across most of the West Coast by an introduced species.

Craig will talk about squirrel behavior and why the Western Gray Squirrel population is declining. Also, he’ll discuss the development of citizen science and how you can participate.

“Nature photographers and backyard wildlife enthusiasts can contribute to scientific efforts to preserve our native, declining squirrel species,” says Craig. “There’s a citizen science project for almost every passion. At U Think, I’ll talk about squirrel behavior and how people can participate in related work, but there are ways to contribute to research just by lending your gaming system’s processing power when you are not using it.”

(Squirrel Taxidermy from Mac's Taxidermy)

U Think?

While we may not always be sober here at Capital Taps, we try not to be too snarky. But this particular keg blew.

At an alumni event on the Willamette campus recently we spied a mini-burma shave series.

Most of the signs were banal boosterism - but one leaped out!

This sign read:

Did you know?

During the University's first half-century, its land holdings were gradually sold to meet other needs, so much of the present downtown Salem is built on former University land.

It was good to read the correct use of it's/its, but there was a problem...

Wouldn't it be great to have Whole Foods, Henry's 12th Street Tavern, and the Brewery Blocks in downtown Salem?!

Who chose the photo? How could someone in Salem who works at Willamette possibly mistake a shot of downtown Portland for a shot of Salem? Did the alumni department outsource the sign project out of town or even overseas? Is this a prank? What's going on???

Pie in your Pint? The Colonial Roots of Pumpkin Ales (and the Origins of an STD)

2011-10-02T11:00:00.000-07:00

We've almost always thought of Pumpkin Ales as stunt beers, gimmicky confections aiming to put pie in your pint.

It's true that some beers are more confectionary than others. Pouring at the Taphouse right now, Elysian Night Owl lands in the middle. It has the full compliment of spice, with "with ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and allspice," but it's not super sweet, thankfully. It's one of the best examples, in fact.

But the roots of pumpkin ale are much older and less sweet than this! With the weather turning, it's time to think seriously about fall beers.

Back in the good old days of the Colonial era and early Republic, malted barley wasn't always easy to get, and fermentable sugars might come in many other forms. An important source of them was pumpkin, the squash native to the Americas.

In this herbal and medical treatise from 1801, Samuel Stearns writes about the nourishing, strengthening, and yes, sometimes gassy, properties of early beers.

He says:

Beer, Cerevisia

Common malt beer is made of water, malt and hops. Porter and ale is also made of the same ingredients. - There are likewise other kinds of beer, as pumpkin beer, bran beer, spruce beer, etc.

Malt liquors, when good, are called nourishing and strengthening, but when they have grown sour, they are apt to produce a dysury, or a gonorrhoea; to remedy which, give a little brandy. When malt liquors have become tart, they should be drawn off, as they are used, into a jug, and to every pint of the liquor, a drachm of powdered chalk ought to be added, which railes a new ferment, and destroys the acidity.

Ale sometimes produces flatulences, cholics, and the cholera morbus; but not calcarious diseases, as has been asserted. A constant use of ale, keeps up a constant fever, and is therefore injurious.

Porter agrees with some constitutions, but not with others; and the same may be said of other malt liquors. It cured a young women in Connecticut of the palpitations of the heart when other remedies were tried in vain.

Happily, today we have a better sense for what might cause dysuria or gonorrhea!

For more on the history of pumpkin beers, see this note on serious eats.

And don't forget about Ken Burn's Prohibition! For old-media types, it starts tonight on TV. For new-media types, you can get a prohibition name and Facebook avatar, or watch vice on your iDevice. Either way, we'll thumb our noses and toast the vast wrongness of it all.

La Cap offers Francophonic, Polyglottal Oktoberfest

2011-09-26T22:30:00.000-07:00

La Capitale isn't enough of a pure beer play to get much time here at CT. It's not essentially a bar or pub, even though we find the bar quite attractive, much more so in fact than the dining room.

But they do have some good taps - and right now looks like an especially good time to visit for beer!

They're doing Oktoberfest in a very nice way, with "garlic sausage, braised apples and cabbage, frites, and three mustards." Yum!

Even better: Yummy German beers! Spaten Optimator, Weihenstephaner Weissbier, and the extra-special house brew, the Capitulator.* Too bad the weather turned, 'cuz Weissbiers are glorious in the heat.

Optimator's a Doppelbock, a sturdier brew, for dark and cold and Lent, but it's also owned by inBev, the parent of Bud, and perhaps not quite so interesting as other Doppelbocks.

Weihenstephan is a classic, on the other hand, and from a brewery of great antiquity. So the beer selection and food together is a cut above what you might find in Mt. Angel!

If you wanted to check out some German beers, submitting to the curatorial guidance of the crew at La Cap looks like an excellent way to go.

Prost!

* OK, we made that up. But like the Ventilator, Salem needs a Capitulator.

Think Independence for the Hops and Heritage Festival

2011-09-23T23:00:00.000-07:00

Back in the 1930s and 40s there was a Hops Fiesta in Independence. It died out, but with the resurgence of craft brewing and a growing demand for local hops, it's been revived.

The Hops and Heritage Festival takes place this weekend. Don't miss out on the best fair around!

(Here's the preview in the Statesman if you missed it.)

("Happy man on main street, Independence,
Polk County," 1939, by Dorothea Lange)

Earlier this month on a trip out to the bottom land near Indy, the CT Expeditionary Forces saw workers harvesting the hops, and the air was heavy with grassy citrus and pine resin. Sticky, sticky hops.

If you go, be sure to stick your nose in some hops! Try some hop tea if they have it. Sample some fresh hop ale.

And admire some of the old buildings.

Here are three historic views of downtown Indy from the intersection of C and Main Street. A lot of these buildings are still around.

The building with a tower here and the single-story crenelated bank building on the other corner (below) were both built by James. S. Cooper:

J. S . Cooper was born in Missouri in 1841 and came to Oregon in 1863 and became a very prominent businessperson in Independence, establishing himself in the banking business. But in 1900 he gave up the banking business in favor of hop growing. Cooper was very politically active and was a delegate to the national Republican convention in 1888. In 1905 he represented Polk and Lincoln Counties in the legislature....J.S. Cooper died in Portland on July 5, 1921.

You may remember the Pink House Cafe. Cooper lived there from 1883 - 1913 and so the house is called the "James and Jennie Cooper House" in its very own National Register listing.

Pretty much you can't not run into an historic building in Indy!

And here's a view from across the river, looking to the site of present day Riverview Park and the amphitheater, and where the old ferry landing used to be located.

On the far left, you can also see the tower of the Independence National Bank, designed by Walter D. Pugh. The tower in the center is the Cooper block's. Both towers are also visible in the upper two photos.

As we mentioned, we think the Hops and Heritage Festival might be the ideal fair, the right mix of old and new, agriculture and city, entertainment and history. Go check it out.

If you can't stand the thought of hops history or of Rogue, the title sponsor for the festival, Seven Brides is also holding Septoberfest, a fresh hop festival. There's no obvious list of beers or breweries, so you'll know why we think Indy might be more interesting. But it's an option, too.

For more on historic Independence, see the National Register nominating forms and photos for the downtown historic district. (Both are big pdfs.) The four vintage images of downtown Indy are from the nominations. For more on Rogue's revival of Wigrich Ranch, see here and here.

Hops Fund Catlin and Linn, Build Salem's First Dedicated Car Garage in 1910

2011-09-20T21:00:00.000-07:00

You never know what you'll see walking around Salem. Earlier this summer we saw this 1929 Ford Model A for sale on a front lawn just off the sidewalk.

We tend to flatten out the history of "old cars." Maybe you do too. But 1929 is two decades after the Model T was introduced. Think about cel phones and computers circa 1991. A lot changes in 20 years.

Between Netflix, Borders, and the US Postal Service, Schumpeterian destruction, industrial transformation, and technological change are all on our mind.

We were thinking about the Fashion Stables. On March 31st, 1910, the paper ran a note about the sale of the Stables and their conversion to a car garage.

Also that spring, at the very same time, just two blocks down State street, the building we think was the first erected specifically to house and service autos was being built.

(Catlin and Linn building circa 1914, Oregon State Library.)

1910 was a real transitional year in Salem.

Russell Catlin and James R. Linn were significant hop growers and dealers around 1900. Catlin came to Salem in 1896 after growing hops near Seattle. Linn also came that year. Catlin and Linn formed a partnership and had two hops ranches, one near Independence, the other near Dallas. Catlin also had a dairy farm near the prison. Linn was the president of the Marion Hotel Company for many years.

They purchased the Gray Block in 1900 and were already prosperous. Here in January 1903 the paper announced a large purchase after the market had been down for a while.

They continued to do well and by 1909 they were buying and driving automobiles, which were not cheap. In this ad from 1909 Catlin endorsed the Maxwell, but it was just a prelude to bigger things.

By the spring of 1910 Catlin and Linn had gone into business with J.F. Priehs and were constructing the Catlin and Linn building, on the south side of State Street across from Cascade Baking Company, for the expanding Salem Auto Garage, which Priehs operated. It was not the first auto garage in Salem, but we believe it is the first building in Salem erected specifically to house a car garage. It was designed by Louis Hazeltine.

This ad (below) from July 30th, 1910, run just after the building was completed and moved into, may be the first ad for it in the new building.

They also sold Columbia electric cars. What's old is new again!

There weren't actually very many cars in Salem. They were very much a luxury item, and people were using horses and wagons well into the 1920s. A reader shared a traffic count from 1916 on the bridge across the Willamette River: Less than half of the bridge traffic that year was automobiles, and a quarter of it was still horse-drawn wagons or carriages. Streetcars and bicycles also remained important conveyances. Habitually we overstate the speed with which automobiles prevailed. Their adoption took a full generation. (See this detailed view of Court Street circa 1912.)

But it seems that 1910 was a tipping point. Here in Salem the Fashion Stables closed, and converted to an auto garage, at the same time as the Catlin and Linn building was constructed. Entrepreneurial merchants saw the future. The quantity of cars was small, but the money and margins were big! Plus, they were shiny and new. The landscape shifted.

Catlin went on to chair the committee for the Carnegie Library (designed by George Post), was a member of the Salem Hospital Board, and was a charter Cherrian. He died in 1924.

(Catlin biographical info from Robert Carlton Clark's History of the Willamette Valley Oregon. Linn biographical info from Charles Henry Carey's History of Oregon. For more on Salem in 1910 see Virginia Green's note. Dates of the building have been uncertain: the downtown historic district National Register nomination lists circa 1909, the downtown walking tour lists 1908, but we believe newspaper articles and ads securely date it to 1910. )

Memory and Loss: Abandoned Memorials

2011-09-17T15:00:00.000-07:00

As with most folks, memorials have been our mind of late.

Salem has lots of memorials. Some are big and obvious or even a little famous. We've mentioned several times, for example, the Doughboy memorial to those who died in World War I. Others are small, just a plaque on a park bench.

Unfortunately, there are a number of memorials in Salem that are a little neglected - maybe a lot neglected and are themselves lost - and we'd like to remember them a little better, in hopes that someone else will know more and perhaps add a comment and even generate interest in restoring the memorials as befits their original intent.

And some of them are just kinda neat, even.

On an urban exploration in Salem with RC, the CT Expeditionary Forces came across this abandoned fountain.

A plaque is set on top of it.

The inscription reads:

This area is dedicated to the memory of
Bertha Amy Gamer
First Grade Teacher at Grant School 1920-48
Donna Wolfard Aldrich
Benefactor of Public Parks for Boys and Girls
Both Shared a Deep Concern for Children

The fountain is cast-concrete, made to look like alphabet blocks from a child's toy set. Seats form a fairy ring of stylized toad stools. Like the Mill Race park at Pringle Plaza, and Peace Plaza between the Library and Civic Center, it has that 60s and early 70s look of Salem's first wave of urban renewal. The blocky whimsy is no longer fashionable, but it's still kinda cute, isn't it?

This utopian impulse has since proven overoptimistic, with too much high-flying theory and not enough attention to ground-level ways people actually use space and congregate in place. Second and third-wave urban renewal efforts have sometimes worked better. Here, the fountain's plumbing may not have been durable enough to withstand vandals. The cluster didn't attract other amenities, and the rest of the playground structure is on the opposite side of the school and park grounds. The memorial is now orphaned, a solitary island stranded from the archipelago of play.

Plain forgetting also is a factor. It takes work to remember things. The slender lineage of so many medieval manuscripts, with some classics depending on a single monk's handiwork in a scriptorium somewhere, reminds us that each generation has to recite the facts it deems important. Urban legends spawn in ease, and important facts struggle to stay fresh. Maintenance budgets are never big enough.

There doesn't seem to be information about Bertha Gamer online or in the Marion County Historical Society's "School Days" issues, but the Salem Foundation administers the Donna W. Aldrich trust, which also helped to fund Aldrich Park, which now adjoins the new site of Bush School. We suppose she might be related to former Mayor Kent Aldrich.

Does anyone know more? And do you have a favorite memorial, especially one that is hidden or neglected and does not commemorate someone close to you?

Think Corvallis rather than Mt. Angel for Beer this Weekend

2011-09-16T12:30:00.000-07:00

Everybody knows about the Oktoberfest in Mt. Angel.

More interesting by a large margin is the Corvallis Beer Week, which wraps up this weekend, and Septembeerfest on Saturday.

Septembeerfest is at the Benton County Fairgrounds from 2pm to 10pm. Ninkasi, Block 15, Calapooia and Flat Tail headline. Admission is $10 and includes a pint glass and two drink tickets, additional drink tickets are $1.

If you really want German beer, Venti's TapHouse has a number of German and German-styled beers that are much more interesting than the usual suspects in Mt. Angel.

And for next weekend, remember the Independence Hop and Heritage Festival!

If you saw our note about the State Fair, this is much closer to what we think a modern fair should be!

Prost!

Homes for the Lost and the Living: Mid-Century Funeral Architecture

2011-09-12T21:00:00.000-07:00

Walking around town you'll doubtless have seen the mural of Theda Bara as Cleopatra.

It was painted in 1984 by Jim Mattingly. Perhaps for naive and sentimental reasons, we find ourselves drawn to his landscapes more than his portrait busts. At least two of them are on essentially permanent display around town.

One of them, Stump's View, was given to Willamette by Elisabeth Walton Potter, who was in the news recently, in memory of Henry and Ellen Fawk, who built the lovely house in the Fairmount neighborhood.

Another, Airlie Autumn, is in the Salem Conference Center's permanent collection, purchased as the winner in the Oregon Artist Series, Mayor's Invitational 2008.

The paintings are conventionally pretty, and they might not show absolutely distinctive landscape features like Mt. Hood or the Three Sisters - and yet they show the there there. A genius loci presides over them and Mattingly's act of painting.

While thinking about St. Mark's, walking around downtown, and staring at Cleopatra, we realized that Salem has some other interesting mid-century buildings. They aren't fancy or even perhaps all that lovely, we're not talking grand architecture, but in an unobtrusive, even subtle, way they are odd and interesting. They have some charm, an element of minor beauty. And they don't seem to be tiring as quickly as some moderne or googie buildings.

Maybe you pass by them and don't really see them? Because of the businesses they house, almost certainly they are by design a little quiet.

(So we read these buildings as expressing a quiet taste. But how did contemporaries read them? Were they regarded as dull and boring when built? Or did they represent leading and innovative architectural fashion for Salem? Our speculation may be ahistorical and off-base!)

The Barrick Funeral home is a hatbox. It has the most amazing basketweave wrap on its brow - like a lid a hatbox! Or bangs on a face. Otherwise it's just a square box - with a sagging roof on an older parking structure.

The building is so quiet - even sleepy - but the basketweave makes it texturally alive. That one detail elevates it.

The Barricks you may recognize from North High's baseball field and the historic photo cards.

Across the street from the library is the Virgil T. Golden Funeral Home.

Its massing looks like it's built of legos or building blocks! But then you see that many of the corners are rounded and filled with translucent glass! So there's this dynamic interplay of square and round, and opaque and translucent. And then there's the green oak tree, growing up and out over the horizontal and beige mass of the building. It's a large sphere over the rectangular blocks. The essential vocabulary is simple, very basic, but it might actually be one of the most dynamic buildings in the city, shimmering with these subtle contrasts, all the more expressive because of its simplicity.

The funeral homes might wish to be wallflowers, inconspicuous in the urban fabric. Death is pretty much always an unwelcome guest. In the face of that, these buildings offer unexpected charm. We don't want to overstate their brilliance, but at the same time, they are lively and odd and interesting - lovely in their own way.

What do U Think about the Founders? and Venti's Geekery

2011-09-09T19:00:00.000-07:00

Whether you want to learn about beer or The Founders, there's two great beer-ducation opportunities in the next few days!

U Think on the Founders

One of the things we think about is stamps when we think of the Founders.

The postal service has been in the news - and not in a good way. We don't write many letters, but as a fan of the 19th century, we value them. And sometimes, for certain things, no amount of email, video, twitter, no amount of e-mediated word will do. Pen must strike paper and record a gesture. The hand written letter offers intimacy and immediacy - even with the time delay of delivery! - the other media cannot match.

Just consider the Burggraf letters from the Civil War.

Ben Franklin has appeared on lots of stamps, including the very first US stamp from 1847, which was denominated five cents. Ben Franklin was, of course, the first Postmaster General.

This one is the 1851 one cent issue. As the Smithsonian notes,

America’s first 1-cent stamp was issued...to pre-pay certain categories of mail, including circulars, which today might be called 'junk mail'.

Although there are certainly economies of scale in mass mailings, it's also the case that we use first class mail - the good stuff - to subsidize crap. Why should a 44 cent letter of condolence or congratulation or love subsidize the coupon circular that mails for a fraction of that? It's all backwards. Big sigh.

With fall U Think, the multi-disciplinary successor to Science Pub, moves to a new day.

On Wednesday, September 14th,

History professor Seth Cotlar will discuss the historical accuracy of Tea Party claims about America’s founders.

While the Tea Party tends to favor state over federal power, “the men who wrote the Constitution were the centralizers of their day, and almost all of them distrusted the states,” says Cotlar. “James Madison, the ‘father of the Constitution,’ went so far as to suggest that the federal government should have the right to veto any state law it found unacceptable.

“This talk will suggest some new ways to think about what the founding era can – and cannot – teach us about contemporary politics,” says Cotlar.

Cotlar probably won't talk much about Ben Franklin, and will spend more time on the authors of the Federalist Papers.

But when you think about privatising the mails, when you think about the proper scope for the Federal government, think about how great it was to have a single entity that could reliably deliver a letter anywhere in the country.

The post office today is manifestly unsustainable, and must change. But boy is this a loss we will mourn.

U Think is 6:30pm at Brown's Towne.

Beer Geekery 101

Tomorrow at 12:30pm, the Taphouse starts a new beer education and tasting series!

Don't know much about it, but there's sure to be lively conversation, a tutorial with the Beer Czar, and direct tasting! Go check it out.

Lost Cider Houses: An Apple a Day Can't Keep Time Away

2011-09-04T23:00:00.000-07:00

Buried under the Pringle Parkway and the tennis courts at Willamette University you might find traces of the early cider industry in Salem.

Unlike many historical places in Salem, though, the cider house sites themselves are also among the most intensely redeveloped in Salem and show almost no signs of the past.

Emily's terrific note in the SJ (and the follow-up) about the revival of cider making Salem made us think of the early days naturally enough. As with so many things, what's old is new!

It is possible that the first fruit processing plant in Salem made cider, and so it's no coincidence that the Salem History entry on canneries starts with a note about cider.

Still, there's not much history written on apples and apple-growing in Salem. Most of the attention has gone to cherries and prunes. The development of the Salem neighborhoods and the city limits is in many ways a history of prune orchards, especially in south Salem. Salem badly needs a history of its fruit and fruit processing facilities - especially the canneries. (Naturally, we think breweries count as "fruit processing facilities"! - wineries, too. Sometimes fruit comes to market in bottles instead of baskets!)

One of the things that was interesting about Emily's note was the comparison it brought to mind between the St. Innocent winery and Wandering Aengus cider house. St. Innocent used to be located in the industrial park near the Kroc Center. A few years ago they moved to a new winery located in the middle of the vineyards in the Eola Hills.

Wandering Aengus has wandered in the opposite direction, moving into Salem from a facility in the Eola Hills near Bethel Heights not far from St. Innocent's new site. The new cider house will be in an industrial park near I-5.

Why is this? We suspect it has something to do with fruit sourcing and logistics: How much of the cider apple harvest comes from Hood River? If it's a significant proportion, locating in the industrial park and with access to the Interstate makes all kinds of sense. It's also true that the City of Salem offered incentives for this local business.

The center of gravity for food processing used to be near the rail station and Willamette University. The rails were the interstates for the 19th and early 20th centuries, the millrace and turbines or waterwheels their power grid.

Gideon Stolz and the Early Cider Houses

In 1879, a few years after the first rails arrived, and a year after Asahel Bush finished his house, Gideon Stoltz (photographed in 1924) built the first cider house in Salem. Like the early breweries, the cider house made a beverage much safer to drink than the creek and river water so often tainted by sewage and infected with cholera and typhoid. In 1886 the cider house incorporated as the Pacific Vinegar & Pickle Company.

This clip from an 1895 Sanborn map (click on most images to enlarge!) shows the location of the cider house. The amount of change in a little over a century is staggering - or at least we are staggered.

At the top is trade street, part of the Pringle Parkway now. You see a double line down it, representing a rail line. There are also three waterways - from the top, the Mill Race, a "stream of mystery," and what we now call Shelton Ditch, just before it merges with Pringle Creek at the Church Street Bridge.

The end of the stream of mystery can be seen behind a City of Salem pump house at the corner of Bellevue and Church. Over it is a little wooden bridge, and at the confluence of it and Shelton Ditch is a seat, a boulder set in a concrete round. We've puzzled over the boulder often, and whether the designers intended it as such, we think it's a fine memorial to mystery! The stream is gone, paved over and perhaps culverted now. (Image from Pringle Creek Urban Renewal report.)

You'll also notice on the map that Shelton Ditch isn't yet ditched, and it meanders all over. The east-west streets have also been realigned and Cottage street totally disappeared in the Parkway. You can also see houses and a good bit of open space. It's not quite rural, but towards the edge of the city.

Though this photo shows Salem a little west of the spot, it will give you a feel for the density of development in the early 1890s. Liberty for example doesn't go through between Ferry and Trade, and it's just a fenced field. In the middle ground, you can see the intersection of Trade and High. In the distance, hardly discernable, is the first cider house. The foreground is the area that today has the downtown Fire Station and Pringle Plaza. Trade street isn't very wide, just a dirt track - and it meanders near Church street!

Here's the modern view of the first cider house and stream of mystery sites.

In 1891 Stolz moved the company to Portland, but he cashed out in 1894 and started the Gideon Stolz Company in 1897.

The second Stoltz Cider House (image here, also at top taken from the opposite side of the building) was built at Bellevue and Summer. Willamette purchased the property in the 60s or 70s and today there are tennis courts.

Stolz was also on City Council. In his 1927 History Robert Carlton Clark writes:

In 1901 [Stolz] became a member of the city council, serving as chairman of the committees on health and police; was reelected and served two terms as chairman of the committee on streets and public property, being also a member of the accounts and current expense committee and the fire and water committee. His most important service for the city was rendered during the administration of Mayor Rogers, when he fought courageously and persistently for the paving of the streets, none of which had been done prior to that time. He was also a strong advocate of better sewerage facilities and the development of the city water system in fact, he is known as the father of good paving in this city and in every possible way has worked for a betterment in local conditions, realizing that the future growth of the city depended largely upon its improvements.

(See Gaston also.) Stolz died in 1938 and is buried in the Pioneer Cemetery.

Curiously, the Gideon Stolz company became a beer distributor, and now the Oregon Department of Transportation Traffic Signals group uses the office!

Salem Apple Growing

We would like to know more about how Stolz sourced his apples. By 1900 it seems the apple industry was already entrenched around Medford and Hood River. There must have been enough smaller apple orchards nearby in Salem, though, to supply the cider operation.

Here's an excerpt from a January 2nd, 1902 overview of the apple industry in the Oregonian.

The reason why the Willamette Valley is not a large producer of apples for export comes down from a former generation. Farmers of the Valley have not yet learned, or, perhaps, have not directed their efforts toward growing apples on a large scale. This same disposition is seen in other methods of husbandry, and will be recognized by any one who reflects on it. It pays to pack and ship apples to an outside market only when they are grown on a large scale. There are many varieties of apples in the Valley, of excellent quality, but the growers who produce a given kind in large enough measure for export are less than the number of fingers on one hand.

When the pioneers came to the Willamette Valley they planted just enough trees for family needs, or for the economic conditions of the time. Their sons have inherited this habit. The old orchards are preserved as heirlooms as if with religious devotion. They have become asylums for apple pests, and all the ills that the fruit is heir to. When they have been uprooted and renewed, they have been replaced mostly on the same plan of old Oregon. The tourist sees this even from the car window, exemplified in crooked, scraggy, gnarled trees, bent with the burden of years, clinging to the remnants of life like old men past their day.

But although little or no Valley apples go to the Eastern States or Europe, it is believed that the quality of fruit, of which this district is capable of yielding, will cope with the fastidiousness of the export trade. The problem is to produce the half dozen best varieties in sufficient quantity for shipment. Of course, this problem includes preservation of the apples from the pests which afflict it, the destruction of the orchards which now breed these pests, and the study of how to care for and mature and pack the fruit. In each of these respects Valley farmers are woefully deficient.

Influence of Climate.

It is contended by some experts that the Valley is not adapted to the production of the best apples, such as come from Hood River, and the Medford district. Its damp climate and low elevation is cited against apple culture. Foothills are said to be the most congenial environment of the fruit. Where the climate is more rigorous than in the Valley it imparts hardiness to the apples, making them more solid, more enduring and more tasteful. Experts agree that the humidity of the Valley is very deteriorating on the fruit. A merchant said, several days ago, that the very best apples on earth, packed in the most preserving manner if kept In his store one month, would sell only at third or fourth-grade prices.

Union County has a reputation for high-grade apples, and many carloads have gone East from there. It is believed that Wallowa County, when transportation facilities shall be more available, will also enter prominently into the production of apples. Elsewhere In the Northwest Northern Idaho and the Palouse country yield excellent fruit. In many places of the Northwest the codling moth has not yet made Its appearance. It is going around fast, however, and is catching up with the virgin districts.

We have an inquiry into Wandering Aengus about heritage apple orchards around Salem, but they have been busy, and we have not heard back. We hope readers might know more about old apple orchards nearby.

And to finish, here's an apple poem from 1909, given at the 3rd annual Albany Apple and Fruit Exposition. Who knows whether the problem of relabeling was real or local hype...but it's fun to imagine the "strapping fellows" singing!

THE VALLEY FRUIT-GROWERS' BATTLE CRY
The Stalwart quartet of Salem was a great hit at the Albany apple show and were called back time and again. They had to change their program in some respects and it included one original song that sets the Willamette valley fruitgrowers wild when it is presented by four big, strapping fellows, weighing upwards of 200 pounds each, and themselves fine products of the rich soil and mild climate.

Here's the ditty composed for the occasion:

Southern Oregon raises very fine melons,
This we all know very well:
But for all othei kind of farm produce
We've got 'em all skilled to hall-elujah!

Chorus -
Hall-elujah! Hall-elujah!
For apples, peaches and pears,
You bet your life we're there,
With hops and prunes to spare.

Hood River is a lovely place,
Everyone knows full well;
But when it comes to raising delicious apples
We've got 'em all beat to hall-elujah!

Chorus -

California buys Oregon fruit,
This we all know full well;
And they brand California on the end of the box,
Now isn't that meaner than all-elujah!

Chorus -

A Modern Fair Needs more Beer

2011-09-01T20:00:00.000-07:00

What stands at the center of the wacky crossroads we call a modern Fair? Beer, that's what!

And if there's an image that ought to express the essence of the Fair, it would be hard to do better than this smiling couple.

A man with hops and his ladyfriend, and everybody's smiling. It's like he just won a crown of hops!

Alas, it's actually from Portland. Journalist John Foyston captured the Governor at the party for the Lucky Lab's neighborly brew, "The Mutt." The Mutt is a fresh hop ale made with backyard hops of uncertain and various provenance brought by friends and neighbors - no purebred, it's all mutt!

The Governor happened to be there, and he smiled. You may recall a note from a couple years back in which we thought he needed a beer. The confirmation couldn't be more gratifying.

There's something timeless about the image. Sure, the Governor doesn't need to pick hops for an income, but maybe there's something intensely regional, local, about our relation to hops and the pleasure we derive from them. (Picking hops, 1930s, Oregon State Library)

As for the Fair, we were talking with friends about the nature of the Fair. What is the proper role for a Fair in the 21st century? Does it have one? Is it too much a vestige of the 19th century?

Management shows the changing role of the fair. From the Oregon Agricultural Society in the 1860s to the State Board of Agriculture in 1891 to Oregon Parks and Recreation in 2006, there's a clear shift from farming to fun. But is it too much an amusement park sideshow today?

Happy people with hops points the way: Maybe beer and wine are the quintessential modern agricultural products! And they bridge so much: bringing together old and new, urban and rural, large and small, entertainment and farming in a way perhaps no other agricultural products do. The drinking, of course, is supremely convivial and sociable!

Can berries, tree fruit, root vegetables, leafy greens, beef, lamb, or pork do all that? A modern agricultural icon has to be something everybody wants to celebrate. Even places out east, like Joseph, Hermiston, and Burns, might have barley nearby. Everywhere in Oregon people toast and drink beer and wine, we're sure of it! Beer is the crossroads drink.

And it turns out there is a small history of beer at the fair.

The official history says that in 1952

The newly created State Fair Commission approved the sale of beer at the State Fair. The order was rescinded a few days later following protests by church groups who didn't like the idea of liquor at an event that attracted so many young people. Beer did not make a comeback until 1971.

In 1958 Lillie Ward, who became Director of the Fair in the 70s, shows the award for "Champion Malting Barley."

But well before that, Salem Beer has a long history at the fair. (The first ad at top from September 1, 1906, the second from September 18th, 1902.)

More recently, last year Rogue was at the Roof Top Pub, but they don't seem to be there this year, and the publicity for the pub stinks.

It's good that the homebrew contest made it back after the Legislature corrected an OLCC mess. But they oughta have a demonstration hopyard and vineyard, a pilot winery and brewery, and a bigger family-friendly pub - they could to tell a history of Oregon and of farming through beer and wine. That sounds like a proper fair for the 21st century!

Seeking Relief: Horse manure and Humanure at the Courthouse

2011-08-30T21:00:00.000-07:00

What is that column on the corner of State and High?

Over at the Mission Mill blog, folks from the archives and library have posted something of a mystery.

We've dropped some comments, but because they have links, the comments seem to get stuck in the spam queue, and it seems easier to answer over here.

The mysterious column is also visible here and here, but not here, here or here. Those with a better knowledge of automobile models and fashion might be able to date it more securely through these additional images, small as they are. We guess right around 1920, and it had disappeared well before the 1940s.*

At the Mill, speculation and recollection suggested it was a ventilation tower for an underground toilet. But what about the water table and flooding? Were there really toilets below ground. Is it possible the tower was an early traffic signal instead?

The identity of the column is a fascinating mystery, and hopefully more documentation will surface!

In the same discussion they posted another photo and identified it as showing excavation (bottom left, not bottom right as their notes suggest!) for the Masonic Building.

Here's a better reproduction of the image that started the inquiry. Between the caption, the wagons, and the fencing, we think it's a paddock associated with the Fashion Stables, visible in this image, and operating at this location from 1903 to 1910, and not excavation for the Masonic building circa 1911.

It's great to see the Mill starting to share bits of history online and hopefully conversation will grow more and more lively!

* The dating in the Mill's note is a little garbled, and it's not clear what they mean:

Also, they weren’t sure when it was built, but the the general concensus was that it was after WWII, maybe even as early as a Great Depression WPA project, and it was filled in probably in the late 1940s.

Pliny or a Stoic: It's Beer-tiquity Time

2011-08-28T19:30:00.000-07:00

The sun goes down too early now. We aren't ready for fall!

Fall beers are here and the beery meme of classical antiquity just seems to get more and more traction. Right now you have your choice of Pliny the Elder at Venti's downtown for Fifth Monday, or you can go for The Stoic by Deschutes at the Taphouse. It's an "American Quad,"

mingling the four virtues of compelling ingredients, nuanced flavor, sound body, and a composed harmony. The Stoic requires discovery of the truth of the matter.

Our brewers describe a simple recipe ironically hard to brew. The classic malt bill is all Pilsner malt. Hallartau, Czech Saaz, and Northern Brewer hops sustain a deftly understated flavor. Belgian candy sugars add impact and the smooth body required of any Belgian-style brew worth quaffing. A healthy portion of pomegranate molasses casts an opulent, tangy twist, while a vintage Belgian yeast strain provides a solid reference point. Pinot Noir and Rye Whiskey barrel-aging suggest notes of spice, citrus, pepper, vanilla, and toasted caramel like offerings to the ancients.

Like the ancients, we employ reason to live well. Reason demands truth. Truth invites experience. Unraveling the intricacies of The Stoic reveals a determined pursuit of that spirited endeavor. Ergo…it is very reasonable to live well when experiencing The Stoic.

We love the label - but it's definitely more medieval monk than Roman empire. (The New School has a nice photo of it on the bottle.) And we aren't exactly confident the Stoics would have endorsed imbibing much of a pleasantly intoxicating beverage.

But whatever. There's some fine beer out there right now. Go drink up!

(And if big beers aren't your thing - or if you protest, as we do, "but it's still summer!" - hopefully some of the pours from the Mighty Mites festival will make it here. In the meantime, Pike's Dry Wit may still be on tap!)

Murders and the Man of Mystery at the Waldo House

2011-08-24T21:00:00.000-07:00

Murders! Hangings! Lost burial grounds! Ruins! Wine!

You probably saw Cara Pallone's story in the Statesman about the Waldo House and Cemetery. Or maybe you heard the story on OPB a couple of weeks earlier.

Naturally, we were curious, and this past weekend the CT Expeditionary Forces with Aide-de-camp RC trekked out to the Waldo Hills in search.

The press focused on the great story of the cemetery's discovery, but in the process flattened out some of the history. As is so often the case with real history, the legacy is complicated, and it turns out the homestead may be more interesting as a crucible of 19th century race relations and religiosity here than as a pioneer land claim or a forgotten burial ground. Daniel Waldo was, the Dictionary of Oregon History says, "a man of forceful but liberal views, independent, but sometimes critical and acid in opinion," and it's a shame there isn't more published history about him and those around him. He's something of a mystery.

Top Photo: Cara Pallone, Statesman Journal

Pioneer in the Waldo Hills

The house was not difficult to find, but it is right in the middle of a new vineyard. The slender vines held grapes very small and green, the vines likely in third or fourth leaf. The road was gated and we stood outside. A few of the gentle eminences looked like candidates for the cemetery.

The house, it turns out, has been abandoned for well over 60 years. The library's photo collection dates this Ben Maxwell photo from 1947.* Even then the house looks abandoned, and there is scaffolding on entry and on the right.

42 years before that, it seemed to be in ok shape. After a visit in 1905, T.T. Geer, Governor of Oregon from 1899-1903, said the house was "still in a splendid state of preservation." Geer dated the house to 1856, but a few years later in 1911 Geer said that the house was built in 1853. In any event, it replaced a log cabin finished about a year after Waldo had first claimed his land in the fall of 1843.

Geer also said:

Dan Waldo was a member of the last Legislative Committee which met before the organization of the provisional government. It held its sessions “at the house of Mr. Hathaway,” in Oregon City, in June, and again in December, 1844. Among his seven colleagues were numbered Peter H. Burnett, M. M. McCarver, A. L. Lovejoy and Robert Newell — all men of sterling character, in whose integrity no man failed to place the fullest confidence, and fitted by nature as well as by experience to accomplish great things.

Mr. Waldo at an early day engaged in many branches of business which had for their object not only his own financial gain, but the development of the country. Chief among them was the Willamette Woolen Mills Company which, established at Salem in 1857, was the first business of its kind in the Northwest. The last few years of his life were spent in Salem, where he died about 1880, after a painful and lingering illness. He lives in the memory of Oregonians as one of the best and most enterprising of her early pioneers a splendid type of the frontiersman.

Though he was a pioneer of 1843, he furnished loans for the Cayuse War and the Willamette Woolen Mills, and Geer observed Waldo "was in affluent circumstances from the start."

Still, Waldo doesn't seem to have merited much biography - the usual places, like Gaston's Centennial History of Oregon (4 vols) are silent. Even Oregon Historical Quarterly doesn't have much. In an Oregonian obituary from September 11th, 1880, James Nesmith said

Mr. Waldo possessed a remarkable vigorous mind, and he was well read in history. The amusing and immortal satires of an older civilization, as presented by Miguel Cervantes in "Don Quixote", he knew by heart. They were adapted to a practical mind like his, which had no patience with cant, shams, pretenses, hypocrisy or hum bugs.

It seems we are dealing a complicated and independent, perhaps even eccentric and difficult, character, one whose love of satire might not always have endeared him to his neighbors and even to his friends.

* Another photo is dated from 1945, but it looks more recent, as the front entry is denuded. So the dating here is not certain.

Map detail from 1861 General Land Office Survey

Portrait of Daniel Waldo from the Oregon State Library.

The Waldo Bogle Wedding

Daniel Waldo's direct involvement in Salem's first marriage of African-Americans is unclear. But on January 1, 1863, the Reverend Obed Dickinson performed the marriage of Richard Bogle and America Waldo.

Writing in The Skanner, Abe Proctor says America "was the free daughter of Daniel Waldo...and one of his female slaves." One family descendent summarizes the argument against America being the daughter of Daniel Waldo, but suggests she was more likely a niece. Still, the contradictions and ambiguity here capture the mixed up nature of so many slave-holding households. Certainty may not be possible. (The household of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings might be the most famous example of such a complicated family, but we cannot forget that we are also dealing with slavery, with people held as property, not some bohemian notion of polygamy.)

The marriage scandalized many. On January 13th, and writing privately about the wedding to Judge Matthew Deady, Asahel Bush observed

They had a feast and Jo [Watt] presided at the table. At it were the whites named and six niggers - three bucks and three wenches. "Am I not a man and a brother?" It was negro equality sentiment mixed up with a little snob-aristocracy. The "first circle" character of the whites was expected to give eclat to the affair and bar all remarks. But it has caused a good deal of gossip and generally [is] regarded as shameful by the community.

On January 31st, a writer in the Oregonian noted

It appears that some ladies and gentlemen attended the marriage of a colored girl who had long been a servant and a great favorite in a family at Salem. This circumstance induced an anonymous blackguard to rush into print about the danger of negro equality.

With or without Daniel Waldo's patronage or support, the Bogles did not stay around Salem for very long.

Photo of America Waldo and Richard Bogle is from the Oregon Historical Society, OrHi 12649, and obviously dates from much later than 1863.

The Bush letter and Oregonian citation from "Obed Dickinson and the 'Negro Question' in Salem," Egbert S. Oliver, Oregon Historical Quarterly, Vol. 92, No. 1 (Spring, 1991), pp. 4-40.

The Delaney Murder

Just two years later, in 1865 Daniel Delaney was murdered. Race was also at the center of it. Virginia Green and Katherine Wallig summarized the crime:

Despite being a former slaveholder, Daniel Delaney had a reputation of being friendly with blacks. In 1865, after a dispute about some cattle, some of Delaney’s neighbors took advantage of this; they blackened their faces and went to kill Delaney, hoping that the authorities would pin the crime on blacks.

George Beale and George Baker were arrested. In 1945 about the trial and execution Ben Maxwell wrote:

Marion county grand jury indicted Beale and Baker for murder in the first degree. Their trial opened March 20, 1865. Judge Ruben P. Boise presided. [Richard] Williams and [Rufus] Mallory were the prosecutors. David Logan, assisted by Caton and Curl of Salem defended. It was a battle of the giants in early Oregon pleading. Reputations were enhanced. Williams soon entered congress. Mallory later....

Beale and Baker stood upon the scaffold facing a multitude. If they were repenant they did not show It. Mrs. Josie Delany LaFore, then a child of 12 and a granddaughter of old man Delaney, recalled that one of them, just before swinging into eternity, tried to spit upon William Delaney, one of the old men's sons.

Hawker's cries interrupted the last thoughts of Beale and Baker. A few days before the execution both confessed and tried to fix the blame on one another. Frederick G. Schwatka a printer, seized upon the confession as a business opportunity and was selling his documents to the crowd as a souvenir....

In death Beale and Baker had small interest for the spectators, who silently slipped halters and drove away. A few remained to arrange disposal of the bodies. No church warden was anxious to receive them within the sacred precincts of their cemetery. Baker's relatives, some commentators relate, claimed his remains and removed them to a family plot.

Beale's body remained unclaimed. His family did not desire it. Then Daniel Waldo, for whom the Waldo Hills were named, said that he, because he did not profess to be a Christian like those present, would provide decent burial for Beale’s body.

Waldo loaded the box into his wagon and drove to his home in the Waldo Hills. There he buried Beale on a hillside and built a rail fence around the grave. Now the fence has fallen away but inquiring persons who travel southward on the highway between MaCleay and Shaw may still see the old, thorny unkempt white rose that seasonally blooms on the grave of George Beale.

It's not clear from this and other accounts whether Waldo self-identified as an atheist, an other unbeliever, or perhaps, wishing to point out religious hypocrisy, even thought of himself more authentically Christian than conventional church-goers. In any event, if his relation to slavery was complicated, it seems his relation to Christianity was also complicated.

One detail that seems to have gone unremarked upon is that David Logan, lawyer for the defendants, was married to Mary Porter Waldo, daughter of Daniel Waldo. This tie might have also suggested the burial arrangements.

Photo of David Logan from Wikipedia

The Ben Maxwell piece and several others about the 1865 hanging are transcribed here. Unfortunately, Maxwell doesn't cite his sources, and it is not possible to know how secure are the details. Some, it is possible, may be narrative embellishments.

An Innocent Executed in Salem?

In Some Small Cemeteries and Miscellaneous Burials, Bernita Jones Sharp noted that "It has also been reported that, in 1894, a colored man by the name of DRAKE, who was also hanged at Salem, was interred in the Waldo Cemetery." One immediately thinks of lynching.

Newspapers don't seem to have anything for 1894, but the Willamette Farmer of May 9th, 1884 contains a story about the murder of David Swartz.

A TERRIBLE TRAGEDY NEAR SALEM
The people of Marion county are excited over a murder trial of unusual interest, because it occurs near Salem and involves the death of an old pioneer and well-known citizen, though he has been accused of great cruelty and unkindness to his family. David Swartz has lived in Howell Prairie, some seven miles east of Salem, and was shot when returning from Bass' saw mill. The wife and son and two neighbors named Joe Drake and William Henry were implicated, and Henry seems to have turned State's evidence and told the facts before Justice Coffey, of Salem, who has held the preliminary examination. Henry's story is that Mrs. Swartz told him and Drake that her husband would kill them on sight, and a favorable chance to kill him would be as he came home from Bass' mill. They went to waylay him, and when he came by Drake fired a shot gun and revolver at him, when he fell from the wagon. They then mounted their horses and went home. Swartz lived until the next day, but made no statement, not gaining consciousness. The tragedy was deliberately planned and executed. It remains to be shown what excuse there was for the unholy deed. Swartz was a very unkind man in his family and was disliked by many. His wife complains that he abused his little boy as well as herself, and it is notorious that while he was well off he did not provide his family with comforts and clothes that were needed for decent appearance.

The story disappears for a bit, but it resurfaces in this piece from March 20th, 1885, in the Daily Astorian:

Joseph Drake, the colored man who aided in the murder of old man Schwartz last summer, is to be hanged at Salem this afternoon. A strong appeal has been made to the governor for a commutation of the death sentence to life imprisonment. The petition is signed by most of the trial jury, and by the supreme judges. The murder of Schwartz was one of the most cold-blooded and unprovoked that is in the history of crime in Oregon. The old man was ambushed at night, when he little thought of death. The aim of the assassins was unerring and the victim was killed instantly. One of the murderers, Henry, turned states evidence and is now in the pententiary [sic] for life. Drake was tried by a jury in the circuit court and condemned to death. The supreme court reviewed the case and confirmed the judgment of the circuit court.

And on the 22nd, the Astorian has a piece about the execution:

Joseph Drake, one of the murderers of David Schwartz, was hanged at Salem yesterday, at 1 p. m., by sheriff Minto. The execution was accomplished without any mishap, and Drake's neck was broken by the fall. The scaffold was erected at the northeast corner of the court house, and only a few spectators were admitted, though Drake could be seen from the outside until the trap was sprung. The body was cut down in twenty minutes and given to his friends for burial. He went to his doom with a firm step and without assistance, and on the "brink of the grave" protested his innocence to the last.

If members of the trial jury had signed a petition for commutation, it seems all-too-likely that Henry purchased his life at the cost of another's, and on the surface there is good reason to think Drake indeed might have been innocent. While Drake does not appear to have been killed by mob lynching, his trial it seems was likely not fair, and race was unquestionably a factor. There are also large questions about the role of Mrs. Schwartz in the murder. Finally, it is possible that David Schwartz was Jewish, and this could indicate other ethnic or racial tensions.

Without more documentation and evidence, we cannot be certain that Drake himself is buried on the Waldo property. But in light of the events of 1863 and 1865, it is quite plausible. Whether Waldo embraced the outcast and marginal in life we may not know, but it seems he made a place for them after their deaths.

Vineyards and the Return of Wheat

Interesting in the historical NOW is the return of wheat-growing to the hillsides. Resident farmers have remarked on the softening of the market for grass seed and a return to wheat. A source we could not verify suggested that Waldo himself was the first to grow wheat here in 1844.

Also interesting were the vineyards, planted on hillside land planted from something like 400 to 700 feet in elevation, about the same as elevations in the more celebrated west side vineyard areas, like the Eola Hills and Chehalem Mountains. Like those hills, here some of the slopes were gentle, some more steep. Even though the vineyards have clustered on the west side of the Willamette River, in Polk, Yamhill, and Washington County, east side land may be the new undervalued resource in the market.

This is the seal for the Provisional Government in the 1840s. It shows salmon and grain. It is much more attractive, we think, than the current seal of Oregon, and salmon is surely a much more powerful icon, one that remains intensely relevant today, than is the covered wagon. The land that feeds us - the suggestion of stewardship - over the land grab by ship and by wagon is an image worth dwelling on.

It will be interesting to see if the Waldo property could become as significant as the Joel Palmer House, each now part of a new regional wine-making legacy. It seems the house may be left to rot or even demolished straight-up, but if the ruins could be stabilized the house could provide a focus and icon for this nascent wine-growing region. The cemetery will also provide this in a lesser way, but its stories are more complicated and it wouldn't make for a very good - or perhaps even appropriate - icon and image. But you can imagine the house on a wine label or brand. And if that helped preserve the house...who could consider that crass commercialism?

The trip out to the Waldo House was terrific and moving. A 150 year history was visible in so many ways, the past and present intermingling in a stew rich and savory and often sad. Daniel Waldo was an interesting and complicated man, and the stories of those buried on his property are equally interesting. We hope the discovery of the cemetery will yield more research and publication.

Is St. Mark's the Most Beautiful Church in Town?

2011-08-14T23:00:00.000-07:00

Generally we worship at the pub and bar counter. We have an altar and celebrant, libations too.

But what about actual churches? What is the most beautiful church in Salem?

We propose St. Mark's Lutheran on the corner of Marion and Winter. Its Belluschi+Wright blend of modernism and prairie school strike us as the most lovely church building in town. Its rhythm, proportion, and harmony are a most pleasant balance of old and new, of jaunty and peaceful. The brick is warm without being at all severe, the windows and massing shape the space in lively ways, and the gothicky bas-relief of Jesus stresses the Good Shepherd and not the Crucifix. And it still has energy, refusing to be tired or dowdy or dated, from which some mid-century design now suffers. Indeed, it has just past the 50 year threshold for listing on the National Register, and we wonder if it might meet the other criteria for significance.

The congregation is almost 100 years old. In 1957 construction started on a new building and in 1958 it was dedicated. Harold E. Wagoner of Philadelphia designed it.

According to the Philadelphia Architects and Buildings database:

Harold E. Wagoner was born in Pittsburgh, PA, and received most of his architectural education at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (B. Arch. 1926), with a return to architectural education in 1933 when he enrolled at the American Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Fountainebleau, France. Immediately after graduation from Carnegie he was employed by the Methodist Bureau of Architecture (1926-1933; Sundt & Wenner), and this experience inclined his mature career toward ecclesiastical design, an area in which he became a specialist. Writing in 1983, Wagoner declared: "My firm is one of the few, perhaps the only one in the U.S. which has devoted all its efforts to Religious Architecture. We have had commissions in 36 states. . . . We have designed over 500 religious buildings."

During the years in Philadelphia working for the Bureau Wagoner was associated with the office of Thomas & Martin (1936-40), followed by a stint of work with Wenner & Chance. His connection to Walter Thomas would be cemented in the 1940s when Wagoner became Thomas's partner in Thomas & Wagoner (1944-1948), after serving as Chief of the Camouflage Unit, U.S. Army Engineers during World War II (1942-1944). In 1948, however, he organized his own independent office and continued in operation well into the 1980s. During this period, he was also associated with William C. Chance. Wagoner's office was succeeded by Henry Jung.

Prominent in the field of Protestant church design, Wagoner contributed a number of articles to Faith & Form. He also received several awards, including in 1958 an Award of Merit from Carnegie Institute of Technology. Within the awards granted by the Church Architecture Guild of America, Wagoner dominated in the 1950s and 1960s.

Wagoner was also active in the Philadelphia Chapter of the AIA, serving on the board of directors from 1959 to 1961 and as vice-president from 1961-1962. He gained Emeritus status with the AIA in 1976. He also served as Chairman of the Commission on Architecture, Lutheran Society of Music, Worship and the Arts and President of the Church Architectural Guild of America.

Though this doesn't list it, in 1968 he also became a Fellow of the AIA. His AIA membership file contains a long list of publications, addresses, and church designs. Clearly he was a big deal in church architecture. The google suggests he worked in a broad range of styles, from neo-Gothic to modernist, and it seems he took special pride in designing from and following each congregation's sensibility and theology rather than imposing his own style.

So that's our candidate. What's your choice for the most beautiful church in Salem?

Burggraf Civil War Letters Online: Father of Salem Architect Writes his Family

2011-08-11T21:00:00.000-07:00

It difficult to say just how supremely cool and wonderful and sad and touching are the Civil War letters of John G. Burggraf and the fact they are available online now. The Willamette University archives has just released them digitally.

As background, the archives note that

John G. Burggraf was born in Baden Baden, Germany in 1825. His family moved to the United States in 1835 and settled near Columbus, Ohio. In 1851 Burggraf married Eliza Cox. In 1856 they moved to Centralia, Illinois where they lived until 1883. The Burggraf family moved to Salem, Oregon in 1891.

Burggraf volunteered soon after the Civil War began, joining the United States Army on October 19, 1861 in Salem, Illinois. He served in the 49th Illinois Infantry from December, 1861, when the unit was mustered in, until it was mustered out on September 9, 1865. During his time in the military he served as a carpenter, a mechanic and secretary to Col. Phineas Pease.

John's son Charles (born in 1866) was active as an architect in the mid-Valley, though few of his houses remain in Salem. The Burggraf-Webster house from 1895 stands on 13th just south of Mission and the Ashby-Durbin house from 1892 in the Court-Chemeketa Historic District. Other significant buildings are preserved especially in Albany and Corvallis. The National Register nomination for the Sherman County Courthouse contains more on Charles and his work.

Here's a letter from just after the battle at Ft. Donelson, an important early engagement for Ulysses S. Grant.

Presumably, English was Burggraf's second language and he frequently retains a German t where English uses d in cognate words. He did not appear here to use much punctuation - capitalization is infrequent, and we could see no commas, periods, or paragraphs. Spelling, too, is sometimes more phonetic than dictionary-approved. He was writing just after a battle and exposure to cold, and orthography was much more fluid then, than today (though chatspeak and textmessaging have reintroduced fluidity, and perhaps we are returning to historical norms of variety). "Sesesh" refers to Secessionists.

This is a tentative transcription only, and cannot pretend to be at all certain or final. (Hopefully we have not introduced our own scribal errors.)

Fort Donnelson Feb 21st 1862
Dear Eliza and Children
This is the first oppertunity I have to write to you since we came here I can say after all the exposure we had in the last week I am well and I hope this may find you the same we had a very hard time of it in the last week lying out in the woods for 4 days and 3 nights without any Shelter in rain and snow and mud up to our knees no one can disscribe the horrers of this battle field withe the pen The dead and woonted lying around for 6 or 7 miles by hunderts I went thrue the Town of Dover [?] is in the fort day before yesterday and went in some 20 or 30 houses and found in every one of them Dead or wounted and legs and arms lying round in the streets and dogs knoing on them The sesesh are very sory thay have bin caut in this snap I have heard a good many say that thay would join us if we wood let them I think the next time you will here from me we will be [?] where alec for thair will be a forward movement somewhere in a day or too but where I know not I am writing this letter on a fine desk I captured in Town and I brout it to our tent for the Col Pease to write when we want any thing I can find it all we have to doo is to take it it aught to be a terrer to the sesesh to see us come but I hop we will not have to go much further before thair will be a settlement made I will send a knife home which I captured of wich thay most all have to cary to kill us with but thay dit them not much good You can get more information from Mrs Pease of the battle from Col Peases letters and from Logan when I first saw him I had just got up in the morning to get breakfast and he eat breakfast with us you may beleafe me I was glad to see him here I don't know nothing more to write at present only my prayer is that if it the will of God we may all meet in that social family circle once mor and praise him for his kind care offer us and that we may life more for him then before and tell the children that thay must obay you and be good and obedient
no more at present your
Affectionate Husband
J.G. Burggraf

Go read them - and check out the other digital content! A big tip of the pint to the Archives!

New Walking Tour Brochure Features Adolph Block

2011-08-10T19:00:00.000-07:00

Back in May 2010 folks released the first iteration of the Historic Downtown Walking Tour. We criticized the choice of cover image and hoped that a second printing would choose something more lively and inviting.

Success! We were at the library recently and a flash of color below a gaudy LED display actually got our attention. It was the polychromed facade of the Adolph Block, and it turned out to be the cover of the Walking Tour.

That's a big serving of win!

Here's the old one and our complaint:

It's interesting that the first-floor storefronts, the sidewalk zone, are all dark and obscured, and that the cars are more visible than the pedestrian amenities. For something premised on the wonders of walking, its cover image doesn't sell those wonders very strongly.

And why not pick a more iconic downtown building rather than a pair of lesser buildings? (We suppose that two of the more iconic ones are owned by the same person, and that a politics of even-handedness might have played a role in this.) We aren't a fan of the canvas and watercolor treatment, either. History is way more interesting and exciting than this gauzy view! Is this a pamphlet that will stand out among all the others in Travel Salem? It just doesn't have shelf appeal in our opinion.

In the new one? First-floor storefronts and sidewalk zone are front and center. Iconic building. Historic business. Colorful shelf-presence (not that you can see this in bw, sadly). All check!

The backside shows a restaurant. It's, well, appetizing.

Nicely done.

(For more notes on the Adolph Block go here!)

Lectures on Tap Tuesday and Wednesday

2011-08-08T19:00:00.000-07:00

Two lectures, one on modern history and wet, another on early Salem history and dry, are coming up this week.

U Think on Tuesday

U Think returns on Tuesday to Brown's Towne. But this wet one's too dry! This is the first of the lectures that seems like it might be too serious.

Willamette University's U Think series will explore the meanings of various political ideologies, such as socialism and Marxism, by considering policies implemented by the Obama administration in historical context.

Willamette history professor and socialism expert Bill Smaldone will deliver the talk...Smaldone is the author of "Confronting Hitler: German Social Democrats in Defense of the Weimar Republic, 1929-1933," and he is currently writing a textbook on socialism.

Maybe beer is the solvent for tea...? We suspect Smaldone will conclude Obama is far from a socialist, significantly to the right of FDR, and indeed in another era could be counted as a centrist, moderate Republican. In fact, we suspect Mark Hatfield and Obama would have got along splendidly.

We wish Smaldone might talk instead about the way capitalists co-opt socialist imagery in popular marketing!

How about talk, Poseurs and Poses: Branding and Socialist Iconography.

Jewish Pioneers on Wednesday

As part of the Sendakorama, "In a Nutshell: The Worlds of Maurice Sendak," at the library John Ritter presents a talk, "Fur Traders, Blanket Peddlers, Tinsmiths, Iron Mongers: Jewish Pioneers of Old Salem" at
7:00 p.m. in Loucks Auditorium.

Local historian John Ritter will explore the rich diversity of the first Jewish Pioneers to the city of Salem, their occupations, where they lived and traded, and the community they built.

His presentation will focus on the early Jewish business owners in Salem from the 1900s-1950s and the people with whom they traded: Native Americans, Hudson's Bay Engages, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Hawaiians, Germans and other Salem residents. Jewish pioneers helped build downtown Salem and make it a thriving commercial area.

No beer for this one, however. We're also not sure about the dates, wondering if the pioneers should refer to 1800s-1850s rather than the 20th century.

We hope Sam Adolph and his early brewery will get a shout out.

Jews in early Salem are not well known, and this is a terrific topic for research and a lecture.

Tip the Pint to Mark Hatfield, RIP

2011-08-07T22:00:00.000-07:00

One of the most interesting, complicated, and important politicians in Oregon has died. A former Governor and US Senator, Mark Hatfield passed away today at 89. Obituaries in the Oregonian, Willamette Week, and the Washington Post testify to his significance. More will follow. (Go read them if you're wondering about the fuss! As they say, he was kindof a big deal!) The library at Willamette is named in his honor.

We drink a toast tonight to the memory of Mark Hatfield.

(Photo: In Newberg with former President Herbert Hoover, 1955.)

Gilgamesh Fortifies Couch Racers at Bush Park

2011-08-06T09:30:00.000-07:00

The folks at Gilgamesh are having a busy weekend! Last night they hosted the afterparty for the Great Idea at the Enchanted Forest, and today they'll be at Bush Park for the Capitol City Couch Race.

Not sure where the beer garden will be, but there will be lots of chills, spills, and fun!

Racing starts at noon, finals around 7pm.

Go team, go!

Inaugural Taphouse Taplist!

2011-08-05T15:45:00.000-07:00

Here's the first 22 taps! 15 minutes to opening...

Deschutes Inversion IPA
Ninkasi Tricerahops
Seven Brides Kili's Kolsch
Leavenworth Friesian Pilsner
Fort George Sunrise Oatmeal Pale Ale
Trade Route Mango Weizen
New Belgium Mothership Wit
Bridgeport KingPin Double Red
Mac and Jack African Amber
North Coast Old Rasputin
Lucky Lab Stumptown Porter
Young's Double Chocolate Stout
Oskar Blues Old Chub Nitro
Ninkasi Radiant Summer Ale
Wandering Aengus Anthem Cherry Cider
Brasserie Dupont Saison
Lindemans Framboise
Elysian Bete Blanche Abbey Ale
Sierra Nevada Giddorah Double IPA
10 Barrel India Session Ale
Nectar IPA

+ 2 more TBA

Drink Up, Salem - That's 24 Taps!

2011-07-31T21:00:00.000-07:00

Forget barn-raising, we've got a bar-raising! The Venti's Taphouse opens later this week. The construction is wrapping up and they are elevating the standard - for themselves and for everybody else.

There's no better summer news for Salemites who love beer.

And to celebrate? We repeat a suggestion from a little over a year ago:

Brewers, someone should brew an homage to Salem beer! Beck's Bock, Adolph Doppelbock, or Klinger Kolsch beckon! Salem Beer would make a great brand, too!

Another homage that should happen: Someone should brew a doppelbock for Venti's! They're Italian, the Paulaner monks were from Italy, there are tons of puns available to them on "bock."

Even better, the German naming convention uses the suffix -ator, like Celebrator, Salvator, Optimator...so it's obvious: Salem needs a Ventilator beer!

Waiter, I need a Ventilator, stat!

So, you know...how about a Ventilator?

With Summer, Beer's on Tap

2011-07-23T15:00:00.000-07:00

Now maybe we have some summer on tap! The beeriverse in Salem is getting bigger, and we're happy to note others have blogged about these events already. So hopefully this is old news to many.

Rhythm at the Mill

In a very pleasant way, Sundays bring together two of our favorite things: Beer and history! The Rhythm at the Mill concert series at Mission Mill offers mostly blues - with a few other acts - on the green. Take a chair or blanket. No outside food or drink. But they have beer! Pale Horse pours.

July 24, 31; August 7, 28; September 11.

Deschutes Release Party

On Thursday, July 28, Deschutes teams up with Venti's in a release party for their collaboration with Boulevard Brewing out of Kansas City! Portland and Bend will taste on Tuesday the 26th, and Salem's next in line!

Be one of the first people in Salem to try our newest collaboration series brew called Conflux No. 2. This White I.P.A. dreamed up by Boulevard Brewmaster, Steven Pauwels, and Deschutes Brewery Brewmaster, Larry Sidor is a hoppy wheat ale of sorts and the combination is exquisite! Not only did we use wheat, hops and a Belgian yeast for this brew, we also added lemongrass, whole leaf sage, spicy coriander and sweet orange peel to give it a tongue pleasing twist....Chad Travertini, from Deschutes Brewery, is bringing Conflux 2, Cascade Ale, and keg of Conflux also a collaboration of Boulevard + Deschutes.

How great is this!

Party starts at 4pm in the Basement Bar!

Bite and Brew

The Bite and Brew is coming up on the 29th, and there will surely be beer - but wow, do they ever have a lousy website. No useful info about beer and the event's only a week away.

Digging in the Depression: Lord and Schryver's New Deal

2011-07-17T23:45:00.000-07:00

For local history buffs the most interesting summer topic will surely be the reconsideration of the private garden and public park work of Elizabeth Lord and Edith Schryver.

A while ago over at On the Way, Bonnie Hull offered a fascinating preview of the Lord & Schryver show at Hallie Ford, which she co-curated with Sharon Rose, and more recently a note about a garden tour.

Based on these previews, though, more than the gardens it's the watercolors and graphic design that look eye-opening. They look terrific, and the preview hints at a show of minor revelation - maybe more. There's the prospect for some Wow! That's pretty cool.

But the dates Lord & Schryver were active pose another question.

From On the Way, here's the watercolor plan for the Jarman House* right by the library on Gaiety Hill. It's lovely. Its date is also 1929.

The Deepwood commission followed shortly in 1930.

And what else started in 1929?

As we all struggle ourselves with the Great Recession, isn't it interesting that so much of the Lord & Schryver legacy apparently took root during the Great Depression?

In the spring of 1932 as Herbert Hoover's term in office was winding down, and unemployment was around 25% (so three times the 9% we have now!), Lord & Schryver wrote a series of articles for the Oregonian on improvements for an "average-sized city dwelling."

Right.

Who in 1932 could afford significant replanting, let alone professional landscape architecture services?** In some ways this "average-sized" lot represents a shift from the large suburban estate for Lord & Schryver, but it's average only in name.

We look forward to learning more about the "cultural landscape" Lord & Schryver did so much to influence. But we also have to ask, just how narrow a slice of culture are we actually talking about?

In his book Architecture: The Natural and the Man Made, Vincent Scully has written of the relationship between gardens and forts in 17th century Europe. He says that "the idea that the arts of fortification and of landscape architecture were almost the same was quite a logical one in the seventeenth century." And he observed that "the resurrection of the garden" in the early 1900s was also a rehabilitation of Louis XIV.

Surely it is no coincidence that Lord and Schryver met on a tour of European gardens!

(Vauban's fortification at Huningue, from Wikipedia)

To say the Lord & Schryver gardens are the products of wealth, indeed emblems of conspicuous consumption, in the middle of the Depression is not to deny their beauty. Nor is it to deny value - the creation of living, beautiful systems is a genuine act of creativity in so many ways. But we should remember they weren't victory gardens defending against the Depression, either.

We hope also that social history is not neglected in the recovery of Lord & Schryver's legacy.

* We think of it, of course, as the second Lachmund House!

** Harry Stein (in his pictorial history of Salem) suggests that with a diverse economy, Salem "endured the national Depression better than did many small cities," but it difficult to see this as much more than local pride and boosterism. He observes that Fred Meyer and Sears added stores in Salem early in the 30s, and that Salem added more people than did Portland at the same time.

Between 1930 and 1940, Salem's population increased by 18% from 26,266 to 30,908. Calling Salem a "small city" seems generous, and it's hard to know what an increase of 4,642 means. Portland was 10x larger, about 300,000.

In any case, WPA projects like the new State Capitol building, the State Library, the State Forestry Building, and the Portland Road rail overpass would certainly have a multiplier effect in the economy. But that's a government stimulus!

Three-Legged Man Picks Hops, Dies

2011-07-15T21:00:00.000-07:00

There's a full moon tonight. So here's a sad, odd story.

Circus freak George Lippert died in Salem in July 1906. He had gone to Aurora to pick hops, caught a cold, and died.

He is said to have been buried in the "Catholic Cemetery," but modern inventories of St. Barbara's Cemetery haven't turned up a headstone or plot for Lippert, and it's possible he was disinterred and reburied elsewhere, perhaps with family in Bavaria.

From the July 23, 1906 Capital Journal.

THREE LEGGED FREAK

George Lippert Had Two Hearts, Three Legs and Sixteen Toes

George Lippert, the three-legged, two-hearted and sixteen-toed man, who had spent most of the 62 years of his life in dime museums and side shows, was buried Saturday in the Catholic Cemetery in this city.

Lippert was a native of Bavaria, and was born with three fully developed legs, one of them being smaller than the other two. He also had two separate hearts, one on the right and the other on the left side of his body. It is said that the heart on the left side stopped beating two weeks before Lippert died.

The freak walked on all three of his legs until he was injured in a train wreck in France, near Paris, at the time Barnum's show was wrecked. At that time Mr. Lippert was dangerously injured, and was not dug out of the debris for 12 hours.

After he partially recovered, he went with various shows, and at one time or another in his life was on exhibition in nearly all the traveling aggregations in the country.

Six years ago he was with a small show that was stranded in Medford. He went to work in a green house owned by a man named Riggs, and continued in his employ until Mr. Riggs died. About a year ago Mrs. Mary A. Riggs came to Salem, and brought the three-legged man with her. He went out to Aurora to pick hops, caught a cold, which finally resulted in his death last Saturday at the home of Mrs. Riggs, at 1121 Fir Street in South Salem.

Lippert is said to have been survived by wealthy relatives in Bavaria, but had no relatives in America.

The expenses of his funeral were met by his benefactor, Mrs. Riggs, who has, as curios, Lippert's three-legged trousers, the shoe for his third foot and his books and documents.

For more on Lippert's card (detail shown above), see here, here, and here. The Riggs house at 1121 Fir doesn't appear to remain, and something was built there in the late 1930s. Lippert's extra limb and heart was likely a vestigial or parasitic twin.

Historic Newspapers Database

Microfilm's a pain! But research is getting easier and a chunk of local newspapers have been digitized and made available online. (We turned up Lippert's story while researching other stories.)

Next Tuesday a talk at the library will show off the site.

7 p.m., July 19, Anderson Room B

Jason Stone of the University of Oregon will visit Salem as part of the launch of the University of Oregon Historic Oregon Newspapers website. With the power of this new Internet resource, the public now has unprecedented access to “first draft” historical materials originally published by Oregon journalists between 1846 and 1922. The website includes more than 180,000 pages of digital content drawn from historic newspapers that include the Salem Capital Journal and the Portland Oregonian.

In this presentation, Stone will provide information on how the project was done, and how to best use the website.

This event is free and open to the public. More information is available from the Information/Reference desk at 503-588-6052.

All kinds of community and do-it-yourself history will get easier. There are vast swaths of Salem history that's been forgot - so find your own slice and get after it!

Two More Events for Beer Month!

2011-07-10T20:30:00.000-07:00

Beer month brings a couple more events, a tasting party at Venti's on Thursday and a "meet the brewer" pub crawl on Saturday.

(And don't forget about the Lady Gaga talk on Tuesday for U Think!)

From Venti's:

Join us at Venti’s Basement Bar Thursday, July 14th starting at 4 PM as Mark Carver from 10 Barrel Brewing Company helps Venti’s celebrate OCBM with a brewery party featuring Bend based 10 Barrel Brewing Company Beers.

These guys have been brewing it up out in Central Oregon with some innovative beers including the new ISA India Session Ale a 5% ABV session IPA that still packed with lots of flavor and aroma hops and the S1nist0r Black Ale (Gold Medal 2011 Wold Beer Championships), a German style Schwarzbier brewed with ale yeast. Both of these are quite tasty. There should also be some cool brewery swag giveaways.

This weekend

The Salem Creative Network celebrates the second anniversary of the Creative Pub Crawl on Saturday, July 16 with a "Meet the Brewer" Pub Crawl.

The schedule appears to be:

4pm Copperjohn's (Gilgamesh Brewing)
5pm Magoo's (Calapooia)
6pm Pete's (7 Brides)

First There was Science Pub, Now U Think Ponders Lady Gaga Tuesday!

2011-07-08T18:57:00.000-07:00

Check it out! You heard rumors of a "Humanities Pub"...well, here it is. From the release (no time for more):

Willamette University will kick off its U Think pub series on Tuesday night at Brown's Towne Lounge with a talk about Lady Gaga. Beginning at 6:30 p.m. each second Tuesday, the monthly series will feature topics from the sciences and humanities.

“Science Pub has been a fun way to share Willamette faculty expertise with the community, and OMSI has been a fantastic partner,” says spokesperson Adam Torgerson. "Given all of the interesting work our professors do across the university, U Think provides an opportunity to bring a more diverse series to Salem.”

On July 12, U Think will feature Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Media Studies Amber Davisson. She will discuss the strategies Lady Gaga uses to craft her image and will consider the message underlying Lady Gaga's precipitously high heels.

“While many celebrities today make the news for drug abuse or relationship problems, Lady Gaga has shown an impressive ability to manage her image and stay on the front page,” says Davisson. “In the past few years, she has boasted more Twitter followers than the president and has found a place on Forbes’ and Time’s lists of most influential people.”

Nicely done Willamette and Brown's Towne!

Beer Archaeologist in August Smithsonian

2011-07-05T21:00:00.000-07:00

Remember the talk last spring, "Uncorking the Past"?

Dr. Patrick McGovern is in the August Smithsonian!

McGovern, in fact, believes that booze helped make us human. Yes, plenty of other creatures get drunk. Bingeing on fermented fruits, inebriated elephants go on trampling sprees and wasted birds plummet from their perches. Unlike distillation, which human beings actually invented (in China, around the first century A.D., McGovern suspects), fermentation is a natural process....Almost certainly, humanity’s first nip was a stumbled-upon, short-lived elixir of this sort, which McGovern likes to call a “Stone Age Beaujolais nouveau.”

But at some point the hunter-gatherers learned to maintain the buzz, a major breakthrough....

With a supply of mind-blowing beverages on hand, human civilization was off and running. In what might be called the “beer before bread” hypothesis, the desire for drink may have prompted the domestication of key crops, which led to permanent human settlements....

Maybe even more important than their impact on early agriculture and settlement patterns, though, is how prehistoric potions “opened our minds to other possibilities” and helped foster new symbolic ways of thinking that helped make humankind unique, McGovern says. “Fermented beverages are at the center of religions all around the world. [Alcohol] makes us who we are in a lot of ways.” He contends that the altered state of mind that comes with intoxication could have helped fuel cave drawings, shamanistic medicine, dance rituals and other advancements.

Read the whole thing!

July is Craft Beer Month

2011-06-30T17:00:00.000-07:00

July is Oregon Craft Beer Month! Do your duty and drink Oregon!

Here's the schedule for our area.

Local brewers and pubs are perhaps missing out on opportunities: The Ram and Widmer seem to be the only ones with events scheduled.

Addenda: Salem School Architecture and the Legacy of the Pughs

2011-06-26T15:00:00.000-07:00

One of the small mysteries in Salem architecture is the identity of the "old Salem High School" attributed separately to Fred Legg and to Walter D. Pugh towards the end of their lives.

The mystery is small because, well, it's really probably not all that important. But the accounts are more than a little unclear, and the curious want to know! Our conclusion is that Legg designed no high school and the 1905 old high school is Pugh's. (This is also an especially baggy and meandering note, so be warned.)

Portland School Buildings in the Early 1900s

Over at Portland Architecture, Brian Libby has been running these terrific profiles of the Portland school buildings. Two of them, ones on Grant and Roosevelt, help point the way to filling in details on Salem's school history.

About Grant, Libby quotes from the Portland Public Schools own architectural history:

Beginning with the construction of the main building and a gymnasium in 1923 and closely followed by an additional auditorium unit and two wings between 1925 and 1927 Grant High School was part of a dramatic building program begun by the Portland Public Schools in the early 1900s. Two of the most influential district architects during this period included Floyd Naramore and George Jones, who designed a majority of the schools from 1908 to 1932. Due to the large number of projects conducted by the district in the early 1920s, however, the school board hired Knighton & Howell, a Portland architectural firm to create the designs for Grant High School.

Grant's design doesn't concern us directly, but a more-or-less concurrent design does. About the same time, in 1922, George Jones,

reused most of the architectural drawings from Franklin High School to lay out the plans for Roosevelt.

A decade earlier Naramore had designed Franklin. In 1919 he moved to Seattle, but before doing so Naramore designed 16 Portland schools, including the Kennedy School, whose single story layout was a response to fire safety.

North High, Parrish and Leslie

It turns out that what we might think of as a Portland "pattern book" for schools was useful here in Salem.

William C. Knighton is known in Salem for some really lovely buildings, perhaps the most elegant in Salem: the Richardsonian Romanesque Capital National Bank, Deepwood, the Bayne building, and the Supreme Court building - historic drawing here. (There are many others, and a full list would be useful!)

A tip from reader RC pointed us to his school designs, a group of more utilitarian works. The contracts for Parrish and North were substantial, if not especially stylish, commissions. He was also involved in the design of Leslie.

RC shared an image of North, on the left in the composite, from the October, 1940 issue of Architect and Engineer, in an article "Current Trends in Oregon Architecture." And you can clearly see the common Colonial Revival pattern in North and Roosevelt. If Jones patterned Roosevelt on Naramore's Franklin, it seems likely that Knighton modeled North on Roosevelt. It wouldn't be at all surprising to learn that the internal plans are similar - though the Depression-era WPA contract for North yielded a plainer facade than the more ornamented one of Roosevelt from the roaring twenties.

Parrish is also by Knighton and Howell - Robert West had noted this and it wasn't much in doubt, but it was something we could have confirmed easily, simply by walking by the front door and looking at the building dedication plate!

Finally, there's Leslie. It was never identified as a "high school," but we wanted to make sure Legg or Pugh wasn't involved. Its architectural pedigree is a little odd. There's no obvious cornerstone outside, but perhaps it was swallowed up by South High's theater and music wing that wraps around the northwest corner of Leslie. The Statesman of July 14th, 1926 has an article on the selection process: With a headline "BOARD DIVIDED ON ARCHITECTS," it continues "Knighton & Howell, Freeman & Struble Asked to Collaborate." Neither Legg nor Pugh had submitted a proposal. It seems that Knighton & Howell hadn't either, but the school board liked the Parrish work well enough that they didn't want to leave the commission solely in the hands of the Salem firm of Freeman & Struble. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that the school board needed for political reasons to carve out room in the commission for a local firm. Either way, the building may be something of a red-headed stepchild, a design no one wished to claim.

The 1905 Old School is a Pugh

So the only "high school" buildings left for Pugh or Legg are the 1905 Salem High School and the 1887/1893 East or Washington School (at least two dates are attested).

The paper gives a clear trail on the 1905 and confirms it is Pugh's!*

On February 27th, 1905, the Capital Journal ran a piece about the school board awarding the school design contract to Pugh. At that meeting, and in the paper throughout March, there is much grousing about the potential for graft in a no-bid contract. In the March 20th paper, the school board formally accepted the plans, with Dr. Byrd first taking exception to the inclusion of a gymnasium and shower rooms. These were struck from the plans. No Physical Education for the good doctor! The plans did, however, retain separate "bicycle rooms" for the boys and girls.

Construction bids would be accepted at Pugh's offices and opened on April 1st, the building to be completed by September 30th. Pugh estimated a wood building would cost $34,000 and a pressed brick $41,500.

By summer, Fred Legg had joined Pugh's practice. On August 29th a notice appears announcing "bids will be recieved at the office of Pugh & Legg" for a "one-story frame school building to be erected in school district No. 61, Polk County." District 61 was in Airlie, and this two-story school building in Airlie (courtesy of Oregon Hoops History) could be it, though of course it's got an extra story (and solving this mystery is another story itself! and may be out of the CT purview).

So it seems pretty clear that Pugh drew up the designs for the Salem High School, and it was likely that Legg was involved in supervising the school's construction. It should not surprise us, then, that memories were fuzzy at the end of Legg's life, and that some or all of the credit for the school might go to him. But Pugh is very clearly the designer.

The school was dedicated on January 1, 1906. Welch and Mourer were the builders, and they also built the "Klinger and Schreiber Block."

This saloon ad from August 1904 references the Klinger block on the alley, between the Schreiber building and the Bligh. Another reference from about the same time mentions old, decayed wood, so it's not clear that at this time in 1904 there's a brick building there. More mystery!

East/Washington School

Back to the schools, the main remaining question is the 1887/93 school (at top).

Pugh's father, David Hall Pugh, is buried in the Pioneer Cemetery, and the biography they cite there is helpful.

Mr. Pugh became one of Salem's foremost contractors and builders and left many beautiful monuments to his handicraft.

He built the E. N. Cook mansion**, that has graced Court Street for over half a century. He also built the old Cumberland Presbyterian and the Presbyterian churches, besides many other public buildings and good residences of the early capital city. Always his work was of the best and he was heard often to remark that he was not afraid when his work was inspected.

It also notes that he

was a member of the immigrant train of 1845 that brought his father, David Pugh, Sr., his mother Jeanette and brothers William, John, Andy, Silas and sister Mandy Anne and a little sister to Oregon.*** The brother William was captain of the train, and other families in the caravan were Alva Smith, Commodore Rose, whose wife died on the plains and whose children, Commodore, Jr., Sarah and Nancy, went to live in the Pugh family.

Walter's uncle, William, appears in school history as the original superintendent of District 24J.

So it seems likely that Walter's father, David Pugh, Jr., was involved in the design and construction of East School. The Cooke mansion looks like a finer, more delicate version of the school, even! But we are not sure to what extent this reflects stylistic patterns common to the era and to what extent it might express a personal style of the Pughs. The Piper/Boothby Courthouse looks similar, too. (Walter himself was not even 20 at the beginning of construction for the school, and seems therefore too young to have led any of the phases, though he might certainly have labored on the project. On the other hand, by 1888 he designed the Shelton-McMurphey House in Eugene, and the National Register form suggests he was active as a carpenter in 1880 as a teenager.)

If it turns out not to be a Pugh, our old friend Wilbur Boothby is a likely suspect.

Construction for the school ran from 1883-87. (The 1893 date for a Pugh school cited in the OSH nomination form is wrong and is most likely an error for 1905.) There were financial difficulties and construction was delayed at least once. By fall 1886 construction was complete enough for students and teachers to use the building, though it didn't seem to be finished until 1887. We hope to have more on the school.

* Well, after we got into this a bit, we found an old-media note that would have simplified things! Drawing on her earlier 1932 dissertation, Constance Weinman contributed "A History of the Salem Public Schools, 1893-1916," to Marion County History, XIII: School Days I, and said clearly that Pugh designed the school. Weinman also added that among the chief cities in the Willamette Valley, Salem was late to develop high school education; she also felt Salemites were generally dismissive of education. It's an interesting antecedent to the So-Lame/Salemia meme.

** The Cooke-Patton house was razed for the State Library and Capitol Mall in 1939. Virginia Green's note on 1938 has some of the history and notes on the passing of Luella Patton in 2007.

*** This piece references a Reverend William Pugh as the patriarch, not David Pugh, Sr. The biographical material cited here in the cemetery records is in part compiled from the oral histories in the Book of Remembrance of Marion County, Oregon Pioneers, 1840-1860 by Sarah Hunt Steeves (1927). Drawing on material from Catherine Entz Pugh, the wife of David Hall Pugh, it contains several short biographies of Pugh family members, and identifies the father as David, Sr. The Reverend William must be interpolated from some other source.

Welcome Summer! A Poetical Toast

2011-06-21T23:55:00.000-07:00

In honor of the first day of summer, here's some beer poetry!

It's very California, but the mood of late rain and waiting seems just right now here in Oregon.

We have felt neurotic ourselves!

An excerpt from "Psychoanalysis: An Elegy" by Jack Spicer.

What are you thinking?

I think that I would like to write a poem that is slow as a summer
As slow getting started
As 4th of July somewhere around the middle of the second stanza
After a lot of unusual rain
California seems long in the summer.
I would like to write a poem as long as California
And as slow as a summer.
Do you get me, Doctor? It would have to be as slow
As the very tip of summer.
As slow as the summer seems
On a hot day drinking beer outside Riverside
Or standing in the middle of a white-hot road
Between Bakersfield and Hell
Waiting for Santa Claus.

(Heat wave article here.)

Louis Hazeltine, Bligh Theater Architect

2011-06-18T22:30:00.000-07:00

Here's a follow-up to our note about the Bligh Theater. This article from January 1, 1911 poses several questions for more research! It's important to remember this is advertorial rather than straight news, though. But while it may not be conclusive by itself, it suggests several new attributions.

EASTERN ARCHITECT MAKES GOOD HERE

L.R. HAZELTINE DESIGNED NEW MARION HOTEL AND OTHER FINE BUILDINGS

"By his fruits ye shall know him." There is no more appropriate expression that could be used in praise or recommendation of Louis R. Hazeltine, Salem's new architect, than the biblical quotation above given. Although Mr. Hazeltine has been engaged in the business of architectural designing and drafting in Salem for considerably less than two years, he has been responsible for the creation of some of the handsomest business and residence structures in the city and has gained an enviable reputation in his line of work.

Mr. Hazeltine came directly to Salem from New York city, in March, 1909, and had no more than "hung out his shingle,: than he was flooded with business and has been buried in work up to his ears ever since. He was awarded the contracts for some of the largest state buildings during his first year of work in this city, and his work was of such a character than his bids are always given the preference by the state board of building commissioners, all else being equal.

Perhaps one of the most striking examples of his ability an ingenuity in the art and science of modern architecture is the almost miraculous transformation of the old and antiquated Willamette Hotel, into a hostelry of the most modern type, both as to design of architecture, inside and out, and the interior appointments, which places the Hotel Marion, the new creation, well up in the list of first class hotels upon the coast, and it is the pride of every loyal citizen of Salem - and they are all loyal.

Among the most important or prominent of the business and residence structures which Mr. Hazeltine designed and superintended the construction of during the past year, to say nothing of more than a score of dwellings of a minor character are the two-story business block for Catlin & Linn, on State street; residence for District Attorney John H. McNary*, at the corner of Center and Summer streets; the state sanitorium for the treatment of tubercular patients**; Bligh's new two-story theatre building, on State street; residence for B. C. Miles on Court street.***

Mr. Hazeltine designed and furnished the detailed specifications for all of the physicians cottages**** at the insane asylum, and many other state buildings last year, as well as numerous dwellings and business blocks in the city, all of which stand as monuments to his knowledge and skill in his profession, and just now, he is so overcrowded with applications that he cannot procure competent assistance sufficient to perform the work that is being heaped upon him and has been obliged to decline many of the applications made to him.

The downtown historic district nomination form lacks information on Hazeltine, and the attribution here for the Catlin & Linn building appears to be new.

* Here's a note on a heritage tree, a ginko, at the old site of his house.

** More here and here. It's not entirely clear whether Hazeltine did a remodel of the old deaf-mute school or designed new construction.

*** The Spaulding house, next door to the Miles house, and its neighborhood heat plant is discussed here in a fascinating note.

**** Information on the State Hospital cottages is hard to find, and the historic district nomination form has little. The library photo collection identifies the two largest and fanciest as Hazeltine's, however. (Modern view here.) One of the cottages resembles the Spaulding house next to the Miles house on Court street, but this might be coincidence.

New Brewery Preview: These Mavericks offer Big Beer, not Big Basketball

2011-06-14T21:00:00.000-07:00

Tired of the Dallas Mavericks? Them and LeBron, they're so yesterday. So how about David's Mavericks!

The Salem beeriverse is getting bigger, and there's a new brewery just about ready to launch.

David's Mavericks will be in north downtown focusing on big beers. They list Reconciliation Red, Prefunk Porter, and The Diplomat IPA. Apparently they wanted to brew "imperial" versions of each, but cannot do so:

Since our inception, state licensing restrictions have forced us to change our beer styles...
Discouraging yes, frustrating certainly; but we see this as an obstacle not a show stopper and we certainly will not let this stop us from doing what we set out to do. For the interim we'll remain Diplomatic and Reconcile with the regulators. We'll share with you a Prefunk, of what's to come, by bringing you the best 6.0 abv beers. I'm sure you'll enjoy our current lineup and with your support we'll find deliverance; eventually bringing you our select monster ales.

This is a little strange, as plenty of Oregon brewers seem to be able to brew above 6.0% abv, but perhaps there is some regulatory wrinkle unknown to us. (Hopefully we can get more and update the story.)

The target audience for Mavericks beer seems to be fans of Tennessee sour mash more than Belgian sour ale, NASCAR more than electric car. The brand vibe, as you can probably tell, is very guy: "monster ales," "big beers," and trucks. The beers aren't brewed just with love, they're brewed with testosterone!

Good luck Mavericks. May you win, too!

UO Students Pitch Brewpub by the Bridge

2011-06-12T12:57:00.000-07:00

You know the Riverfront needs a brewpub, right?

You're not the only one to think this!

A reader passed along "The Growler," a project from the University of Oregon Sustainable Cities Initiative residency.

You can see the full project poster here.

It's a brewpub concept for the east side of the Union Street Railroad Bridge.

How great would that be?!

Stumptown Coffee Sold? Would Join Vitamin Water and Famous Amos

2011-06-06T12:01:00.000-07:00

In order to finance cafe and roaster expansion, as well as grocery store sales of cold coffee in stubbies, Stumptown Coffee appears to have been sold to a investment firm with track record of flipping.

The rumors first blew up on Twitter early last week, and at first it seemed like an overreaction to an outside investment. But over the weekend enough details have emerged to make this more than rumor mongering.

If you follow coffee, you'll have seen the Esquire screed and the follow up. Here's the latest at Willamette Week. Portland Food and Drink has more.

The story continues to get play in the New York Times. It is also still developing, as Stumptown has been late to confirm details.

You could see it coming of course, with the expansion to New York.

Back in 2007 Mark Pendergrast wrote a piece for Wine Spectator about Stumptown Coffee and its special relationship to the el Injerto farm in Guatemala.

Wine Spectator, of course, is a lifestyle magazine, a manual for signalling and disposable income more than a guide to either connoisseurship or geekery.

That was probably the moment Stumptown jumped the shark.

TSG Consumer Partners is said to have a 90% stake in Stumptown. Vitamin Water and Famous Amos cookies are two of the brands Stumptown will be joining. You see where it all is going.

In the past year several Salem cafes have been brewing Stumptown. It's great coffee, an important contribution to a more lively beverage scene in town. The hipster and indie cred is going to disappear. This may not matter to Salemites, who aren't much interested in hipsters or indie-anything. What will matter is the potential loss of really good coffee.

So get to Salem's Latte, Clockworks, or the Broadway Coffeeshop before it all goes away! Support your local roaster, like the Governor's Cup. Ask for good coffee, not sugary flavor delivery systems! Carpe Diem!

Lost Glories: Bootlegger Bligh and August Schreiber

2011-06-05T12:30:00.000-07:00

Oh, the stories long gone hotels would tell!

After Oregon had gone dry, but before Prohibition went Constitutional, theater owner T.G. Bligh was busted for booze. In February 1917 agents confiscated seven cases of beer from his home, his hotel, and his theater.

Today we remember Bligh mainly as the man behind the recently demolished Capitol Theater.

But in the late Vaudeville and early movie eras, Bligh was an emperor of entertainment, and had a large chain of Salem theaters. It cannot surprise us he was might be involved in illicit beer! And it wasn't the only time the hotel was associated with Salem's seedy side.

Empty lots, unfortunately, commemorate most of the theaters today.

Facing State Street between Liberty and High, on either side of the alley running between the McGilchrist block and the Masonic building, are two parking lots.

In mid-century Salem, however, State Street offered a continuous line of buildings and a lively streetscape.

Here you can see (L to R) the clock in front of Pomeroy building, the Gray building, the gap for Liberty, the McGilchrist block, the Bligh Hotel, the State Hotel, the Masonic Building, and the Capitol dome in the distance. Notice the two-way traffic on State Street! (Centering the word "Bligh" over the "t" in "Hotel" makes the sign read "Blight" - funny!)

The Bligh Block started construction in 1910. On November 29th, a small news item noted that Bligh had placed a $20 gold piece among the bricks by the cornerstone. A thief had vandalized the bricks and taken the gold.

A 1927 account describes the many theaters of T.G. Bligh and says he

in 1908 opened the Star Theater in Salem. This was the first ten-cent show house in the city and had a seating capacity of one hundred and ninety-seven. In 1912* he established the Bligh Hotel, provided with sixty guest rooms, and in the same year opened the Bligh Theater, which contained five hundred seats. It was closed in 1927 and the Star Theater was sold in 1912. He also owned the Mascot Theater, with seating accommodations for two hundred and fifty persons, and the Bligh, formerly known as the Klinger** Grand Theater, provided with three hundred and fifty seats. He added the Liberty to his chain of theaters, and for six years was the owner of the house, which had five hundred seats. He was one of the foremost business men of the city and left the deep impress of his individuality upon the history of its development. In November, 1925, when fifty-four years of age, he was fatally injured in an automobile accident. His widow still makes her home in Salem.

It notes that the Capitol theater was originally known as the "New Bligh Capitol Theater."

According to the downtown historic district nomination form,

Following the death of T. G. Bligh, Frank D. Bligh took over the family hotel and theater business. In 1926 he built the Bligh Building [site of the restaurant La Capitale] and the adjoining (to the east) Capitol Theater of reinforced concrete.

Across the alley from the Bligh Block was another hotel in the Schreiber Block.

Information on it is harder to find. At the top of the building are the words "Schreiber, 1902" and we recall a 1908 note about a Schreiber saloon on State Street. The void is also two separate tax lots, and the photo of the fire (below) appears to show two buildings.

The Polk directories show August Schreiber operating a saloon from at least 1889, and on State Street from 1891. In the 1905 directory, when the Schreiber block appears for the first time, he also has a saloon in the building. It seems likely that August had been a successful operator and was able to finance his own building.

As for the hotels, details are few. Around 1905 "The Keith" Hotel appears next to the Schreiber block. We were not able to determine if it had a separate name for the building and it will take more digging to learn about this building. Ads for the Keith called out "furnished rooms" and a "European plan."

The State Hotel dates from much later than this period.

One online note suggests the Schreiber Building may have burned on December 6, 1966 - but the newspaper of the 7th and 8th doesn't seem to have an article on it, and we cannot confirm it.

The fire in the Bligh Hotel was front page news. It burned on Saturday, June 8, 1975. According to the June 9th Statesman, the first alarm was called in at 12:19am and not long after it was a full three-alarm blaze. Like many old hotels in Salem and elsewhere, the Bligh operated as a boarding house (or SRO) with 40 rental units. The rooms rented for about $2.75 a night. About 58 residents, whom the paper called "the transients or winos of Salem," escaped, but two died, Arnold "Smokey" Stover, age 48, and August "Auggie" Cico, age 49. Both were farm laborers and had lived there for several years.

The paper quoted another resident, "Okie," about his night:

I had beans and cornbread for supper Saturday after working in the broccoli fields all day. Then I went to bed about 8pm because I was tired. Didn't get drunk last night. Friday, but not last night.

Other businesses in the block were Transamerica Title Insurance, Steimonts Studio, and The Jewel Box jewelry store.

Within the week, investigators determined arson was the likely cause.

Today, all three lots remain vacant, generating fees from auto parking. After both fires, it was apparently not profitable to rebuild.

The arched flying "buttress" that appears behind the Roth Building (old Jonathan's space) cannot be part of the original Bligh Theater or sit in its old footprint as a faux-vestigial proscenium. On the north side of the Masonic Building, and across the alley from the Roth Building, the 1926 Sanborn shows a large second-hand furniture and appliance store constructed with "wood posts," and it is possible the buttress was actually to stabilize that building. Anyone know what it really is?

The Bligh family members are buried in City View cemetery. The monument reproduces Bligh's signature, presumably, and is one of our favorites.

The Schreibers are mostly buried in St. Barbara's cemetery.

Photo credits:
Empty Lots: Personal CT "Archives"
Down State Street, 1941: Salem Public Library Historic Photograph Collections
Bligh Block, 1940s: Salem Public Library Historic Photograph Collections (zoom in!)
TG Bligh: Oregon State Library
State Hotel: Marion Dean Ross, University of Oregon
Firefighting, 1966: Salem Public Library Historic Photograph Collections

* The 1911 Polk directory has an ad for the Bligh Hotel and several listings for businesses in the Bligh Block. It seems possible that the 1912 date of completion is errant, a year late.

** This may be a reference to a different business operated by Maurice Klinger or one of his children! Bits on Klinger here and here.

Taste Dirt: Learn about Jory Soil

2011-05-30T21:00:00.000-07:00

In the run up to this weekend of winetasting, you might have read about the political dueling over a proposed State Soil, a signature ingredient to many bottles of Pinot Noir and notions of distinctive Oregon terroir.

Curiously, there are also dueling opinions on its agricultural quality. Even Legislators can't resist throwing a little dirt!

The history, politics, and semiotics of soil are telling.

There is here, it seems, a possible conflict between large-scale industrial and petro-chemical agriculture on the low-lands and smaller scale boutique farming on the hills and in the vineyards. It's also a conflict between the soil of the pre-settlement oak savannah and the settled nature of cultivation. Notions of class, fear of change, and forgetting of the past all seem implicated.

Before the bill was resurrected

Several senators said they thought the bill was a waste of time, and some grumped that Jory soil - found on the hillsides of the Willamette Valley and often planted in vineyard - isn't anything to brag about.

"It's terrible soil," said Sen. Larry George, R-Sherwood, whose family has a hazelnut farm. "You can't grow anything with it."

Statesman editor Dick Hughes quotes another farmer:

Jory and Nekia are droughty and infertile to the point that only a handful of crops can be grown on them. The fact that vineyards are one of these seems to have led to the designation. My dad used to say the red soils are what was left when all the good dirt was washed down to the valley floor. Beyond that, Jory and Nekia exist mainly in the Eola and Ankeny hills and comprise a tiny fraction of the state’s agricultural land.

Soils like Woodburn and Willamette cover many more acres, and have the legendary fertility that drew the pioneers to Oregon. Not only is the legislature wasting time on frivolity in this matter, they have made a ridiculous choice.

The infertility of the soil may be a bit of hyperbole. Also last week Oregonian, wine writer Katherine Cole observed

The Willamette Valley's flagship dirt is Jory, the basalt-based volcanic soil found in most vineyard sites in the Dundee Hills (the most prominent sub-appellation in the valley).

High in clay content and iron, Jory is reddish in color and nutrient-rich. "You could grow anything in volcanic soil," [Jim, of Patricia Green Cellars] Anderson says. "It is lush." It holds water well; smash it between your fingers and it will stick together.

"I can pick out a Dundee Hills wine pretty consistently in a blind tasting," [Jessica Mozeico-Blair of Et Fille] Mozeico says. "There is a minerality to it, especially on the finish, with a bright cherry and red-fruit flavor profile." Mozeico-Blair says she always finds that this silty clay-loam imparts a "dusty earthiness" to pinot noir.

So who knows...good soil or bad soil? Maybe it doesn't matter. It's all about the interpretation...

More interesting is Jory history! They were Pioneers of 1847 and have an important place in Salem history.

Here's an excerpt from a 1903 piece in the Oregon Historical Quarterly. Note that it calls the South Salem Hills the "Red Hills," just like the "Red Hills of Dundee."

The Jorys all reached Oregon in safety, and coming into the Willamette Valley looked about for a home.

They were struck with the attractive little settlement at Salem, and the advantages of church and school. The choice lay between this and the yet unoccupied prairies of the Santiam, and above Albany. There the land seemed better, but the other attractions, and the fact also that in the hills near Salem the prospect of health seemed better than on the prairie, outweighed in the decision, and all took claims together about six or eight miles from the present capital. This was in the land of oak trees, and the Father Jory having seen such timber in England believed that the soil would prove fertile. The sons, however, never expected to farm, except along the narrow creek bottoms; but the open oak groves and endless hills offered great scope for cattle range. As a matter of fact, however, the hills have proved the best of wheat land, and have now become still more valuable for fruit and prune raising. "The Jory settlement " is now in the very region where there are great orchards crowning the hills, and where fruit driers are as conspicuous as the hop houses of French Prairie. The donation land claim of John Jory has been divided into small fruit-raising tracts, and H. S. Jory, the youngest brother, has become well known as the inventor and maker of one of the most serviceable fruit driers in use.

This detail from the General Land Office 1852 Cadistral Survey Map shows the "Jory settlement," the hills and valley around what is now Rosedale and Joryville Park. The road running down the center is Liberty Road, one of the oldest roads around here! Battle creek crosses the road right at John Jory's home, the modern site of Rosedale School.

While, however, the Jorys have been agriculturists in Oregon, their tastes have been mechanical, reverting to the original occupation of their grandfather and father. H. S. Jory, of South Salem, has invented and patented the "Oregon Fruit Dryer," and an ingenious harrowhinge; Henry Jory, who died in Marysville, California, and his son, James W., each invented and patented a swivel plow. John W. and Arthur, spns of James Jory, invented and patented a wheat header; T. C. and John W., sons of James Jory, of this sketch, invented and patented a grain separator. Thomas C. Jory, who was for some time Professor of Mathematics at Willamette University, Salem, where he graduated, also invented and presented for patent a machine for converting reciprocal into rotary motion, avoiding the "dead points;" but was preceded by Westinghouse, of the celebrated airbrake apparatus. These items are of interest as showing a still larger truth, that probably half the young men of Oregon, at least among those at school, devote much of their leisure time in planning practical inventions in mechanics, and of the many who do not succeed in producing a tangible result the case is not so much lack of practical skill as the intense rivalry of others at more central points. Oregon alone could furnish enough inventors to supply the world if the race of Fulton and Edison should fail elsewhere!

Not far from the school is the Jory cemetery, where James and Mary are both buried, as well as many of their children and descendents. The family website also has more.

In any event, if you're out wine tasting this weekend or another time, think about the Jorys.

(And we need to figure out how to make Joryville Park a place you'd want to visit! It's sadly neglected and in its isolation had attracted a reputation for crime. Maybe its tie to the State Soil can help change this!)