About this account

This record is the citation a sentence carries when it is this project’s own reading of the documents rather than something a document says.

BendEmblem.com brings together the club’s publications, contemporary newspapers, later recollections and surviving uses of the emblem. Connecting them is work, and the joins are not in any of the sources: which account to weigh more heavily, what a silence in the record can and cannot mean, where two documents disagree and which difference matters. Those sentences cite this.

What it never covers is a date, a name or a figure. Each of those cites the document it came from, and where no document has been found the site records a gap in its research notes instead of writing a sentence. That is the line: this record is a reading, and a reading is not evidence.

The interpretation carries most weight in three places, and each of them is a disagreement the site prints rather than settles. The club’s founding: contemporary notices put it in the Bulletin in July 1912, the club’s own disbanding report of 1924 says 1913, a 1943 obituary says 1911, and a 1969 recollection remembers a dinner in January 1913. The drawings: they are measured against one another, and a high score means two share a shape, never that one descends from the other. The promise: the club swore to wear the emblem until Bend reached a hundred thousand people, and three measures give three different answers to when that happened, so the site names the measure it is using.

The project preserves and shares the emblem. It is not a successor to the original club, and nothing here is a claim on anyone else’s rights.