The circular Bend emblem

The emblem on a commercial wrapper, called circular, called the club's, and taken off again inside a week.

J. F. Arnold, manager of the Central Oregon Farmers’ creamery, told the Bulletin that butter made in Redmond was being shipped to Bend in wrappers bearing a circular Bend emblem and sold here as Bend butter. The words “Deschutes Gold Butter”, the name of the product actually turned out in Redmond, were not on the wrapper; buyers took it for the local article, “only discovering the error when the superior quality of the real Bend butter was found lacking”. Lately the true origin had been rubber-stamped faintly at the ends of the roll, which Arnold thought could easily escape a purchaser.

Then, in a single sentence and without ceremony, the paper says whose emblem it is.

Three things follow, and each is rare. The emblem is described — “circular” — which is the only shape this archive has from a contemporary source, and it agrees with the roundel that resurfaces eighty years later. It is identified outright as the Emblem Club’s, not merely as a Bend device. And it is being used as a mark of origin on a product, in commerce, fourteen months before the town formally adopted it.

The fourth thing is what happened next. Under the subhead “Antles Investigates”, L. Antles, secretary of the Bend Commercial Club, took the matter up with the Redmond creamery’s management and thought it could be settled without difficulty, doubting “whether the people of Redmond would care to have a product of that city sold through the use of Bend’s name”. Under a later heading the paper closes: “Following Mr. Arnold’s charge, it was stated by the local distributor for the Redmond creamery that the Bend emblem would no longer be used on their butter wrappers.”

So the emblem was, in 1921, a thing a town could object to seeing misused — and the objection worked, without a lawyer and without a register. Nobody ever registered it federally or in Oregon. This is the nearest thing the record holds to it being enforced.