The Bend Co. to Emblem club

The club appears in the county's land transfers — the first time this archive sees it in a property record rather than a social column.

Among the week’s conveyances, under the abstract company’s own heading, five parcels in one quarter-quarter section went the same week for ten dollars each — to L. B. Baird, to Elizabeth B. King, to U. C. Coe, to G. M. Hudson, and to the Emblem club. The first two are set apart below to show the shape of the list; the club’s entry reads the same way, “The Bend Co. to Emblem club, part SE ¼ NW ¼, section 32-17-12, $10.00.”

So this is not a company making the club a present. It is a landowner deeding out a block of lots, with the Emblem Club as one name among five.

The archive already had the earlier instrument. In May 1919 the reorganised Emblem Club bought its grounds and building from D. E. Hunter of The Bend Company for $5,300, with T. A. McCann as trustee; the property had been W. D. Cheney's, and Cheney gave his equity to the newly organised club. This 1922 entry is the same company conveying to the same club in the same part of town, for ten dollars.

That gives the title chain a documented middle. Cheney to The Bend Company, The Bend Company to the club by purchase in 1919, a recorded transfer in January 1922, and then in May 1924 the stockholders voting to disband and sell the Drake property, which the Masons bought that July. Four steps, all of them now in the record.

What the entry cannot do is describe the land. "Part SE ¼ NW ¼, section 32-17-12" is a partial description of a quarter-quarter section in the Bend townsite, and the deed itself would carry the metes and bounds. Whether this parcel is the clubhouse ground, an addition to it, or something else entirely is not determined here.