From Farewell Bend to Welcome Bend

The Bulletin reprints a Portland visitor’s account of the club, and the sentence that renamed the town.

Reprinted from the Oregon Journal after the Portland Ad Club’s special train came to Bend in September 1914. The correspondent found “a log temple dedicated to hospitality and good cheer”, which is a description of the addition that had gone up over that summer — built with room for two hundred diners, for this visit.

The sentence the archive keeps is the one about the name. “The old name Farewell Bend they changed in implication to Welcome Bend.” Farewell Bend was what the crossing had been called when it was a place travellers left; the club turned the word round.

The piece also quotes the club’s obligation — to praise virtues, veil faults and speak encouragement — which is the oath’s temper without the oath’s arithmetic. Nine months later the governor’s banquet in the same hall would be measured against this dinner: “the largest since the dinner for the Portland Ad men for which the club hall was built last September.”