Home / Archive / September 4, 1912
An illuminated emblem on the train
The Bend Bulletin · September 4, 1912
In the story: 1. A city of two thousand, to 1912.
Drag to pan. Scroll, pinch, or press + and − to zoom. Esc closes.
Two months after the Bend Park Company said the emblem was copyrighted, it was on the back of a train between Puget Sound and the Deschutes, lit up.
The Bend Park Company ran a special train from Seattle in September 1912 — four sleepers, a dining car, a baggage car, a barber, sixty-eight guests whose money was no good — and the Bulletin gave it the front page. W. D. Cheney, the company’s president, headed the excursion.
The emblem is one clause of it, and the clause is set apart below because of where the device was and what it was doing. Not on a letterhead and not in a box in the classifieds: on the rear platform of a moving train, electrically illuminated, between Puget Sound and the Deschutes and back again. This is the earliest description in the archive of the emblem being used for anything, and it is two months after the copyright notice of 3 July.
The archive holds no photograph of it. What it holds is the sentence, and the sentence says “trailed a message of Bend” — a mark doing the work of an advertisement the whole way down somebody else’s railroad. The O.-W. R. & N. Co. handled the special from Portland to Bend.
The same column records a second commission the town made for the occasion: the band met the train with the “Bend Park March”, “specially composed for President Cheney of the company, and first used on Railroad Day”. The club would commission its own march the following year.
From the source
BEND GREETS SEATTLEITES
Unique Special Train, With 68 Puget Sound Visitors Headed by W. D. Cheney, Spends Strenuous Day Here, Taking Town by Storm.
From the rear platform a big Bend emblem, electrically illuminated, trailed a message of Bend from Puget Sound to the Deschutes, and back again. There were 68 people aboard. They made enough noise and had enough enthusiasm for 680; when they were awake and at work — meaning 22 hours out of the 24 — their performance would have put a conservative calliope to the blush.
