What of its future?

The Bulletin photographs the building, asks what will become of it, and gets its answer fourteen months later.

The photograph shows the house from the lawn: a wide covered porch behind a picket fence, an exterior stair rising to the upper floor, gabled dormers, trees close on both sides. It is the building A. M. Drake put up in 1900, that W. D. Cheney bought and added Emblem hall to, that the reorganised club bought for $5,300 in 1919 and sold in 1924, and that the Masons had held for thirty-one years.

This archive holds two earlier pictures of it — the Bulletin's own of May 1919, printed beside the report of the club's purchase, and the Deschutes Historical Museum's lodge photograph. This is the last, and it is the only one taken with the building's end in view. The paper is asking a question in the caption, not reporting an answer.

The answer came on June 29, 1956: “Historic A. M. Drake House Being Razed”, torn down to clear a fire hazard, with little of the building salvageable. By 1961 the Bulletin was lamenting it and recording what the site had become — parking space on Brooks Street.

One detail the caption settles and one it disturbs. It confirms the street: the building faced the Deschutes, and the 1948 feature says the part facing Broadway is a later addition. And it dates construction to the fall of 1900, where the 1956 demolition report says the fall of 1901. The paper has never been consistent about that year and this archive does not choose between them.