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Two clubs in a growing town
National Register of Historic Places · National Register study
This record carries no date and is not plotted along the story. The archive holds it.
A National Register study places the Commercial Club and Emblem Club within Bend’s early development.
One sentence in this paragraph is about the Emblem Club and it is eleven words long. The paragraph is set apart whole, because the eleven words only mean what they mean beside the Commercial Club’s — the slogan, the two hundred members, the general welfare of the community — against which “a real estate promotional organization” is a deliberately different kind of description.
It is a later reading, not a contemporary one, and the archive’s own record complicates it: the club ran flower shows, lent its hall to the militia and the lodges, bought a buck’s head for the Civic League and gave the library twenty-five dollars. But the study is right that the club was founded by a land company’s men, and it is the bluntest statement of that anywhere in the record.
It also records Clyde McKay’s participation, and it makes both clubs forerunners of the Chamber of Commerce — which is the line the 1953 page and the 1984 contest both sit at the end of.
From the source
COMMUNITY ACTIVITIES
The need for commercial bodies, churches, clubs and societies, hospitals, public agencies, trade and labor organizations, schools, bands and orchestras, theatres, and parks was recognized early. The Bend Commercial Club, formed in 1908, advanced the slogan “A clearing house for community activity with the single idea of promoting the general welfare of the community and making Bend a better place in which to live”. The organization promoted the area, and grew to 200 members by 1924. The Emblem Club was a real estate promotional organization. Both groups were forerunners of the Bend Chamber of Commerce.
