Bend Iron Works marks fifty years

In 1953 the foundry that once offered to cast the emblem in aluminium advertised fifty years of its own history, and the emblem was not in it.

In June 1922 the Bulletin reported that the Bend Iron Works stood ready to cast the emblem in aluminium for automobiles. Thirty-one years later the firm bought a full page in the paper’s Golden Jubilee edition and told its own history in three photographs, each with a dated caption. Those captions are set apart below, because the third one is the finding.

“1953: OUR FIRST TRADE NAME.” The photograph under it shows a new sign reading “Bifco”. A foundry that had offered to cast the town’s emblem in 1922 went thirty-seven years without a mark of its own, and when it finally took one it was not the emblem.

The 1922 photograph shows the building in the very year of the casting report, lettered in plain painted capitals — BEND IRON WORKS, MACHINE SHOP, WELDING, BLACKSMITHING. Neither sign is the emblem, and neither is anything like it.

That is not a disappointment so much as a confirmation. The emblem belonged to the town and was lent to everyone, and the record keeps showing that even the people who made it and owned it did not keep it for themselves.