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The emblem on the Chamber’s website, 2001
Bend Chamber of Commerce · August 14, 2001
In the story: 6. The emblem outlives the club, 1930–2010.
The oldest dated picture of the letter device in this collection, found on a chamber of commerce website.
For the whole of this project the earliest dated drawing of the BEND letter device was a 2011 design-contest entry. This is from August 2001, and it belongs to the Bend Chamber of Commerce — the same body, by descent, that adopted the emblem as Bend’s own in June 1922.
It is a small file, 93 × 37, and this record used to say it was a divider. It is not. The Chamber’s site was built in framesets, so the image’s own capture had no page around it; fetching the inner frame on 15 September 2026 shows where it actually sat. At the foot of the “Visiting Bend” page is a two-column table, and each column is a body with its own mark over its own name and its own address. The roundel is the right-hand column: the Visitor and Convention Bureau’s logo, over the Bureau’s name, over the Bureau’s address on North Highway 97.
The left-hand column is the finding. The Bend Chamber of Commerce’s own mark in August 2001 was a white swan on a dark red diamond, 36 × 36, and nothing to do with the emblem. On one page on one day, the Chamber used a swan and its Bureau used the roundel, side by side. The family this archive calls the bureau roundel is named for the body that was actually using it, and that is now evidence rather than an inference from a filename. The swan is not an accident either: the Chamber chose it in a competition in July 1984, judged from thirty entries, and was still using it in May 1998.
What the record used to claim about the gap is no longer true and is worth saying so plainly. It said this find left the eighty years before it as empty as they were. The roundel sweep of 14–15 September put five printed impressions into them: the Bend Park Company’s own weekly advertisement of February 1917, the county fair edition of September 1925, the Bulletin’s business directory from 1939 to 1951, the block replaced inside three days in February 1950, and the Chamber’s own full page of June 1953. The near edge moved back; so did the far one.
The page and the swan are filed with their hashes under archive/online-research/2026-09-15-chamber-2001/.
From the source
BEND CHAMBER
777 NW Wall St, Bend, Oregon 97701 · 541-382-3221
VISITOR & CONVENTION BUREAU
63085 N Hwy 97, Bend, Oregon 97701 · 541-382-8048
Measured
The bureau roundel, the notched construction. Narrow letters, a notched E and a notched B at the same height, an arched third letter, and rounded corners.
Read at low confidence from 21 px of letter.
Not measured. The roundel is about 37 px across in the filed capture of the Chamber's 2001 page. Nothing thresholds into letters at that size; the record's value is its date, not its geometry. Excluding a drawing is itself a finding, so it is recorded rather than estimated.
Ties touching this drawing, each in the class of evidence it has:
- A question Drawn from the glass?. The glass is the only emblem continuously in public view between 1953 and 2001, on the corner of Bond and Oregon, and it is narrow-lettered like the bureau’s roundel. Anyone redrawing the emblem around 2000 without a 1912 newspaper had the window and little else. What would settle it: A square-on photograph of every O’Kane transom, entered into the measurement and read at the letters cut against the 2001 roundel, plus the 1985 fabrication record from Bend Stained Glass’s successor saying which panes are 1916 glass.
- A question The same drawing, one letter changed?. Every narrow drawing on hand, civic and commercial, carries a notched E and a notched B at the same height. The only difference that is not weight, tilt or colour is the third letter: arched in the civic uses, a capital N in the commercial ones. What would settle it: Downtown Bend’s own answer to who made its earliest file and from what, and the artwork attached to the 2011 LogoTournament brief, which the public contest page does not carry. Either would show whether the capital N was cut into an existing drawing.
Compare this drawing with another · The board · How the drawings were measured