Little of the building can be salvaged

The clubhouse came down in the summer of 1956, and the paper watched it go.

The house faced the Deschutes from 584 Broadway. Leonard Lundgren had acquired the property about a year before, and company officials said there were no immediate plans for the site it occupied.

The Bulletin used the demolition to tell the whole story of the place. Alexander M. Drake and his wife halted their covered wagon on the edge of the Deschutes; Mrs. Drake was struck by the beauty of the bank facing the Cascades; they built a mountain lodge on the spot where they had camped. From that lodge grew the hamlet of Farewell Bend, and from that the Bend of 1956 with its twelve thousand people.

And in the middle of the account, one sentence that is the reason this page is here: “In earlier years, as Bend emerged from a village to become a city, the old Drake home was headquarters of the Emblem club.” The part being razed was a later addition, which had served as the Masonic lodge room. Inside were two large stone fireplaces. A Leico crew was tearing down the 55-year-old building, to rid the area of a fire hazard; it had stood vacant since the Masons moved to their new temple in the eastern part of Bend.

The building had passed from Drake to W. D. Cheney, who added the Emblem hall; to the Emblem Club, which bought it back in 1919 for $5,300; to the Masons in 1924, who kept it for thirty-two years and left for a new temple on East Greenwood; and finally to Leonard Lundgren, who had acquired the property the year before and meant to take it down.