Home / Archive / August 25, 1948
The house from which Bend grew
The Bend Bulletin · August 25, 1948
In the story: 6. The emblem outlives the club, 1930–2010.
A photograph of the clubhouse in 1948, and the sentence that names the man who built it — on the half of the feature nobody had read.
The Bulletin’s County Fair edition of 1948 ran the fullest account of the Emblem Club’s building this archive has found. Most of it is on page 36, and it says it is continued from page one. Page one of the paper is Russia severing consular relations. The edition is in six sections, and this is page one of the section, under a head that promises the history of Bend’s oldest building.
Across the top of it run three photographs under “Pictures Illustrate Growth Of Bend From Lodge Into City”, and the middle one is the house: a low building with a shingled roof and a dormer, a deep porch on turned posts, a picket fence, big trees. The caption places it “on the eastern bank of the Deschutes”, says it “still stands on its original site”, and calls it “now headquarters for the Masonic lodge in Bend”. The other photograph of this building in the archive is the museum’s, published in 2021.
The opening tells the founding of Bend as a near-miss, which nothing else here does. A covered wagon stopped by the willow-fringed Deschutes on a chilly day in 1900; Mrs. Drake liked the camp site and Drake was “apparently determined to move on”. One of his horses was weak, so he sent his cook up-river to buy a replacement from the rancher W. P. Vandevert — and when Vandevert came down to finish the trade, Drake recognised the man who had guided him on an antelope hunt in Arizona’s Petrified Forest in 1888. “Drake remained longer for a visit — and founded Bend.”
The cook has a name here, and that is why this page was worth fetching. The research note has carried “Who was Cottor? The 1948 feature gives no first name” as an open question since the feature was found, because the first name is on this page and not on page 36. He is Charles Cottor, and the horse he came back with was “Tuf”.
What page 36 adds is the building. Cottor, “a carpenter as well as a cook”, and J. I. West built the lodge of hewn logs, with the finishing lumber, doors, shingles and windows hauled from Prineville. “The front of the building, facing the river, remains unchanged. That part of the building facing Broadway is an addition of more recent years” — which is the Emblem hall, put up in the summer of 1914 with room for two hundred diners because the Portland Ad Club was coming in September.
By 1948 the paper calls the club “a highly active civic organization of pioneer days”, twenty-four years after it wound itself up. The museum dates its demolition to 1956.
From the source
History of Bend’s Oldest Building, Lodge Facing Deschutes and Cascades, Is Recalled
The house from which Bend grew still stands — and is still in use.
It is the pioneer Drake residence, now the Masonic hall, and it was erected 48 years ago this fall, when the community, with its few scattered settlers, was known as Farewell Bend. The Drake residence, on the same site where it was erected, faces the snow-tipped Cascades, with its lawn sloping toward the Mirror pond.
Seeks New Horse
One of Drake’s horses was weak, and it was his hope that he could buy a replacement from some Deschutes rancher. Upriver was a pioneer rancher, W. P. Vandevert. Drake sent his cook, Charles Cottor, to the “Old Homestead.” Cottor returned with a horse, “Tuf.”
