Home / Archive / February 8, 1917
The company that owned it was still using it, 1917
The Bend Bulletin · February 8, 1917
In the story: 4. Emblematic measles, 1917–1922.
A real-estate advertisement, ten weeks running, with the emblem in the middle of it — placed by the company that had claimed the brand five years earlier.
Page 3 of the Bend Bulletin, 8 February 1917, in a single-column box between Bend Hardware Co. and a notice offering Portland prices for poultry, veal, fresh eggs and butter. Four lines of type, about three inches high — and the emblem set between the street address and the trade, about an inch across, where a letterhead would put it.
The same advertisement runs on 8 and 22 February, 1, 8, 15, 22 and 29 March, and 5 and 12 April, and twice on 1 March, once on page 2 and once on page 3. Ten impressions in ten weeks, and the sweep only opened the issues that happened to run long.
What makes it worth a page of its own is the advertiser. On 3 July 1912 the Bend Park Company bought a full page of this same newspaper to print the emblem and, under it, “The above brand is copyrighted. The Bend Park company, to whom it belongs, intend to devote a life-time to making this brand a coveted guaranty of integrity, optimism, persistence, co-operation, hospitality, and municipal patriotism.” That is the archive’s founding document for the emblem. This is the same company four and a half years later, using the mark the way a business uses a mark: small, weekly, beside its street address.
The device is reversed out — white letters on a solid disc — where the 1912 full page is dark letters inside a ruled circle. The same treatment turns up on the Shevlin Pine advertisement that June, and again on the newspaper’s own business directory from 1939. What that means, if anything, is not settled here: at an inch across on newsprint a thin inner rule would not survive the printing, so “reversed out” may describe the block or may only describe the impression.
Nothing in the advertisement mentions the emblem, explains it, or repeats the claim of 1912. It is just in the box, next to the company’s name, the way a mark sits on a letterhead.
From the source
Bend Park Company
122 Oregon Street
REAL ESTATE
INSURANCE
Measured
The 1917 rounding, the rounded construction. The 1912 cut's broad letters and three-armed E with corners that turn in a curve, and the last letter still tapering to a point.
Read at medium confidence from 112 px of letter.
Not measured. About 112 px across, and the measurement it produces is not about the drawing. Every pair with a real impression moves with the cut - 0.45 to 0.71 against the 1912 advertisement, 0.44 to 0.78 against the 1939 masthead - while the one pair that holds still is with this project’s own reconstruction of the 1912 cut, at 0.67 to 0.72. A clean modern render compares consistently because it is clean, not because the 1917 advertisement is that drawing, and publishing a cluster that puts a 1917 newspaper beside a 2026 SVG would tell a reader something untrue. Read by eye instead; the characters are in the matrix. Excluding a drawing is itself a finding, so it is recorded rather than estimated.
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