Forty-nine cents, at 916 Wall Street

Between 1916 and 2001 the project has almost no dated specimen of the emblem. Here is one selling for less than fifty cents.

Houk-Van Allen, 916 Wall Street, ran a sale in March 1956. Hand saws at $1.29. Illuminated auto hood ornaments, $1.98. Large-size luggage, $9.95. A Huffy girl’s bicycle with training wheels, $49.95. Auto seat covers at half off. And between the bicycle and the seat covers, set in the same type as everything else on the list, is the entry this record exists for.

A license-plate emblem is a small metal plate or topper bolted to a car's number plate. They were sold by the thousand in the 1950s, usually carrying a town's name or device, and Bend evidently had its own — stocked as ordinary auto accessory alongside the hood ornaments, marked down from ninety-eight cents.

What the advertisement does not do is show it. There is no picture and no description, so this page cannot tell us whether these carried the Bend Emblem itself or some other device for the town. What it establishes is that in 1956 a mass-produced object called a Bend emblem was on sale in Bend for forty-nine cents — which makes it the most findable object in the archive's missing decades. Bend had a trade in this sort of thing: the Bend Iron Works was ready to cast the emblem in aluminium for automobiles in 1922, and two Bend men invented an Elks emblem motor meter in the 1920s, made in Chicago.