A home for the library

For the duration of the war the Bend library moved into the Emblem Club’s building, and the Ladies’ Library Club accepted at a special meeting.

Less than four weeks before the Armistice, the Emblem Club offered the Bend library the use of its building “until after the war”, and the Ladies’ Library Club called a special meeting to accept. The books were to be moved at once.

This is the clubhouse doing something other than entertaining. The same room that held banquets, dances, the militia company’s Wednesday drill and a governor’s party became, for a while, the town’s library — and the club gave it rather than let it.

The weekly carries the item over the line “(From Wednesday’s Daily.)”, so it had already run two days earlier in the daily edition. The Bulletin published in both forms in this period and the archive holds the weekly’s reprint.

Twenty years later, when Bend built the library it has now, the paper listed where the money came from and named “one of $25 from the Emblem club” — fourteen years after the club had voted to wind itself up. What that gift was, and who made it in the club’s name, is not recorded anywhere this archive has found.