About this project

What it is not

The original club belonged to its era, with the language, assumptions and exclusivity that came with that. The emblem outlived it and is worth carrying. The club is not, and this project does not pretend otherwise.

Not the Emblem Club.

The club dissolved. This project has no members, no officers and no continuity with it.

Not its successor.

No organisation here inherits the club’s name, its property or its authority. Nobody can join.

Not a City of Bend project.

The city has used the emblem and appears in the archive as a record. It did not make this site and does not run it.

Not a certification mark.

Using the emblem is not membership, endorsement or approval. There is nothing to qualify for.

Not a claim on anyone’s trademark.

No trademark clearance has been done, and none of the rights offered here are trademark rights.

The short form: revive the emblem, not the club.

How the history here is made

Every date, name and figure on this site comes from a document, or it is written down as a gap. Where sources disagree the page says so at the point of difference rather than picking the tidier reading. There are 250 filed records behind the story, and the archive shows what is on hand for each.

Two habits follow from that and are worth stating plainly, because they make the site look less certain than a tidier one would:

• A negative is a result. Searches that found nothing are recorded with what was searched, so nobody repeats them.
• Resemblance is not descent. The emblem drawings are measured against each other, but a high score means two drawings share a shape — not that one came from the other.

The clearest example is the promise itself. The club swore to wear the emblem until Bend reached a hundred thousand people, and whether that happened depends on which measure you use. The site names the measure instead of choosing the answer it likes.

The emblem itself

Bend counted 536 people at the census before the emblem appeared. It is now a city many times that, and the mark is still in use — mostly by people who never heard the oath behind it.

The artwork is offered back with its rights stated per drawing, because they are not the same for all of them: the 1912 reconstruction and the modern adaptation carry a CC0 dedication over this project’s own contributions, and the common drawing’s origin is unresolved, so no licence is asserted over it. What you may actually do with each one is set out in full.

Who made this

The project is Grayson Graham’s, in Bend. The research, the reconstructions and the site are its own work; the newspaper scans belong to the University of Oregon Libraries, and other institutions and businesses hold the rest. Each record credits its holder and links back to them.

Third-party pictures are reproduced here at documentary size, for commentary on the emblem, and every one is credited to the institution or business that holds it. If you hold rights in a picture on this site and would rather it were not here, say so and it comes down. The project has no address of its own yet, so the route is the repository’s issue tracker.

Corrections are the most useful thing anyone can send. If a date here is wrong, or you know where the common drawing came from — which is the largest open question the project has — that is worth more than any amount of further searching.