Remembering the Masons’ purchase

Fifteen years on, the column reprints the day the Masons bought the place — and gives the clubhouse the only street name this archive has for it.

One sentence, and it carries three things the archive wants. The buyer: the Bend Masonic lodge. The date: 19 July 1924, two months after the stockholders voted to wind the club up. And the address — “on Broadway facing the Deschutes river”, which is the only street this archive has ever been given for the clubhouse.

Everything else the record holds about where the building stood is either a description or a legal description: Cheney bought “the A. M. Drake property on the east side of the river”; the 1920 conveyance reads “lot 2 and part lot 1, blk 4, Bend”; the 1914 fishing hoax happened “in front of the Emblem Clubhouse”. This line puts it on a named street.

The original report of 19 July 1924 has not been found, and neither has the deed. Historic Oregon Newspapers holds no 1924 Bulletin at all, which is why the club’s last year keeps arriving through this column.

The building did not come down for another thirty-two years. Cheney’s obituary in 1943 says the Emblem hall, added to the old Drake house, “is still in use as the Masonic temple”.