Thrown open to them during their stay

Fifty lumbermen in three sleeping cars, and the Emblem Club handed them the keys.

On August 9, 1916 over fifty members of the Western Pine Manufacturers Association arrived in Bend in three standard sleepers for their quarterly meeting — and, the paper added, to inspect the new saw mills and view the fastest growing town in the northwest. They breakfasted at the Wright hotel, spent the forenoon going over the mills from end to end, and at a quarter past one gathered at the Shevlin town boarding camp for a meal of vittles.

Then the sentence that matters, and it is the one below. A dance followed the Commercial Club's dinner that evening, also at the Emblem Club, and the visit would end the next night with a dinner given by the Emblem Club in its own name.

So the club was not a hall hired for an evening. It was the association's base for two days, it hosted their working session, and it played host in its own name at the close. That is the 1916 club acting as the publicity body it was founded to be — four years before it became, in its own president's words, purely social.

Two threads run through this page. The Order of Hoo-Hoo, the lumbermen's fraternity, held a concatenation that afternoon — five years before the 1921 concatenation already in this archive. And the Western Pine Manufacturers Association is the body whose 1927 programme carried the Bend emblem on its back cover. That programme has never been found. Here is the association, eleven years earlier, being entertained by the club whose emblem it would print.