Camp White Revisited, Again

Beginning in 1990-1991, I have had a connection with Camp White, the WWII-era US Army cantonment that was built in the Agate Desert, north of Medford, Oregon.  Camp White was constructed in 1942 to train US infantry troops.  Covering more than 70 square miles, its 1400 buildings were mostly built of wood.  More than 100,000 troops were trained at the camp and the base was the second largest city in Oregon at the time.  100s of babies were born here, the valley’s first large contingent of African-Americans arrived, and there was even a German POW camp near the end of the fighting.  By 1946-47, most of the camp buildings were being dismantled for parts, or moved to serve as schools, churches, and other uses.  Not much remained.

The Camp White Station Hospital, however, was built of brick, what the local leaders of the time called “permanent construction.”  The Rogue Valley, for all its independent bluster discovered that having a major federal presence in the valley was good for business and, with the end of WWII they were loath to let it evaporate.  Medford and Jackson County used political muscle (in the form of Wayne Morse) to, um, convince a foot-dragging Veterans Administration that Camp White would make the perfect location for a veterans facility.  The VA, from the start, said the Camp White Station Hospital was too big, too remote, and would be too expensive to operate.

Fast forward to 1991, the 50^th Anniversary of WWII, and Camp White was celebrating almost a half century of service as the White City Veterans Administration Domiciliary, the “Dom” in local parlance.  Renamed Southern Oregon Rehabilitation Center & Clinics, the Camp White Station Hospital and its lovely grounds continue to provide services to returned soldiers and the VA presence remains an important part of the valley.  The huge two-story brick buildings of the station hospital, most connected by an amazing series of internal hallways, are arrayed in military-like formation, neatly in rows and rows.

In the mid-1990s the Camp White Station Hospital was evaluated for historic significance in connection with an ODOT-funded widening of Highway 62.  Later the hospital was the subject of both a detailed survey of its 50+ structures and the development of a Manual for Built Resources.  Now, as the result of the Department of Veterans Affairs long-range plan to provide improved facilities at the site, we’re again in the process of the evaluating the resources at Camp White, determining which, if any, are individually eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places.  Many will likely be replaced by newer, and more efficient, structures, still arrayed in the neat little rows that personify the camp.

In 1991, in Camp White: City in the Agate Desert, I wrote of the legacy of Camp White and the station hospital, really the only “built” elements of the camp that remain.  “Nothing so large, so monumental in scope, can be measured solely by its remnants, no matter how impressive.  The true heritage of Camp White is the change that it brought.”   That is still true, seventy years after the first construction at Camp White began.  We are just starting this new evaluation project at SORCC, but I think it's pretty likely that at least some of the hospital buildings are going to prove eligible for listing on the National Register.  Call it an educated guess.

Found Oregon-ZCBJ Lodge

There are some truly great buildings in Oregon and I am always surprised when driving from Point A to Point B to stumble across something exceptional for the first time.  Long ago somebody wrote a book on residential architecture that was entitled “A Gift to the Street,” or something like that, meaning a building that everyone benefitted from, even if it was built for a specific purpose and owner.   There is such a gift in Linn County, on Richardson Gap Road east of Scio, on the way to the Larwood Covered Bridge (another gift, let me assure you).  As I was heading north, I saw a large, white, boxy thing in the distance and thought “What the heck is THAT?”

 

It was, like the sign says, the Z. C. B. J. Lodge, a fraternal order of Czech-Americans, that was built in the early 20th century (1911) according to the National Register listing.  It’s a great building, made all the greater because of where it is located, in the middle of still largely rural, sparsely populated, part of the county.  Sure, it has great architecture (notice the dentil-like projections on the boxed soffit?) and the great wide frieze and all those other Classic Revival elements that make buildings like this so familiar.  But what I think is REALLY great is what it says about the people and the community that built it.  There must have been a LOT of Czech-Americans in the Richardson Gap Road area at the turn of the 20^th century.  And they must have had not only a strong community but every expectation that it would survive and grow.  Why else would they have built such a large and imposing structure?  

I don’t know what happened to them, or why the Lodge was apparently converted to a private dwelling at some point.  I don’t know why (but appreciate) that nobody ever painted over the old sign on the north-facing elevation.  But I am betting that nobody in Lodge No. 224 ever expected that a future use of their fine lodge hall would be as a basketball court.

ADDED:
Here is a great link on the history of the Czech community in the Scio area, including some more detailed information on the Lodge....thanks, readers, for sending this along!
Czech Footprints in Oregon

Bridges, bridges, and more bridges

This Friday the State Advisory Committee on Historic Preservation will review the Willamette River Highway Bridges multiple property submittal.  This is a document on the significance of the ten major spans across the river in Multnomah County and includes the formal nomination of four bridges; Hawthorne, Morrison, Burnside and Broadway.  I started working on this project almost two years ago and in the process found a new appreciation for each of these amazing spans.  Almost every Oregonian knows the bridges in downtown Portland, from the “erector set” Marquam, to the soaring Fremont and most of us, I like to think, have our favorites.  They are an amazing group of spans, probably unmatched anywhere in the country, certainly on the West Coast, if only for their diversity.  From the Hawthorne, which is the oldest vertical lift bridge in the nation, to the St. Johns, the longest suspension bridge in the world when it was completed, to the Morrison, the first bascule bridge designed with open  piers to allow water to flow directly through them, Portland does bridges with panache.  It was fun to study these works, and honor to be able to document them for much-deserved recognition on the National Register of Historic Places.

If the Willamette Bridges are the pinnacle of bridge technology in the middle of Oregon (vying with McCullough’s coastal bridges for State-wide honors as a group), they surely are not the only spectacular spans in Oregon.  As I wrote many years ago, getting around the state Oregon, a state replete with creeks, rivers and crevices, without bridges would be darn near impossible.  And Oregon has always taken its roads, and its bridges, seriously.  We still do.  Covered Bridges, those comfortable, quaint, roofs over rivers were a popular form in Oregon where wood, just like rivers, can be easily found.  For years I have worked on the rehabilitation of numerous covered bridges, usually as a part of a team headed by the great guys at OBEC Consulting Engineers.  Together we’ve been involved with the rehab of award-winning projects like the Lowell Covered Bridge or, more recently, the Chambers Covered Railroad Bridge.

This week, on my way up to Portland, I will swing through north central Lane County, where the Deadwood Covered Bridge is soon to get a new shake roof and some other minor but much needed attention.  Deadwood, like so many of Oregon’s 50+ surviving covered bridges, has been bypassed by a typical slab, beam and girder (i.e. pretty boring) concrete span.  Thankfully the good people of Lane County had the vision, and the continued willingness, to retain the Deadwood, and a bunch of other covered bridges, for their history and charm.  Lane County has the largest collection of covered spans in Oregon, which as the largest collection of such spans in America west of the Mississippi River. 

Irish Bend Covered Bridge- Historic once again

In 1979 the Oregon SHPO approved a thematic study, a multiple property submittal, to list 46 of Oregon’s then 56 covered bridges on the National Register.  That document brought not only new appreciation for these quaint structures, but eventually access to funding through the Federal government and the Oregon Department of Transportation.  One of those 46 structures, the Irish Bend Covered Bridge, located outside Monroe, Oregon, was already in trouble.  The bridge, built in 1954 from 1920s plans, had been bypassed by a new road and the portion of the Willamette Slough that it traversed in this rural, agricultural, area had been shunted through a culvert.  Hardly romantic, but certainly functional and easy-to-maintain.

Benton County, which could no longer maintain the bridge with road funds, tried to find a good use for the span as interest in covered bridges grew.  They offered it to the City of Albany, which considered moving it to Bryant Park, and then to Multnomah County, who as Oregon’s most populous county felt disadvantaged by their lack of a covered bridge.  Neither offer came to fruition.  After what the Covered Bridge Society of Oregon termed “14 years of uncertainty,” the Irish Bend Covered Bridge was disassembled and the pieces were stored at the Benton County Fairgrounds.  Oregon’s State Advisory Committee on Historic Preservation did what such committees do when a resource is dismantled with no assurance it’ll be saved; they removed the bridge from the National Register in May 1989.

They may have acted precipitously.  Spurred by the situation, the Covered Bridge Society approached Benton County’s Board of Commissioners with the idea of rebuilding the bridge as part of the Campus Way bike path at OSU.  The location was perfect, crossing Oak Creek, out on the western end of the campus near the agricultural college’s barns.  It’s about as rural a location in the middle of college campus that you can imagine.  The County said “sure,” and offered to pony up a third of the funding (and the bridge) if the community could raise the remainder.  OSU agreed to the idea, funding and volunteer hours, much of it from off-duty Benton County Public Works employees and OSU staff, brought the bridge back to life, rebuilding the trusses, and replicating the damaged pieces carefully and accurately.  The rebuilt Irish Bend Covered Bridge was rededicated on November 13, 1989.

While the story has a happy ending, the bridge hasn’t been formally considered “historic” since May 1989.  As part of a project to better protect the bridge and do some minor work on it, Benton County is now going ahead and submitting a new nomination to again list the Irish Bend Covered Bridge on the National Register.  Oregon, today, has only 50 remaining covered bridges.  It will be good to see one more recognized by the National Register.

National Register Documentation

For the first time in several years I am working a group of National Register nominations, the formal documentation that we use to “List” a property as historically significant as opposed to the more internal “Determinations of Eligibility” that generally suffice for what is termed compliance work.  DOEs, which are quicker to write and review, are what agencies and regulated entities prepare as part of their Section 106 process.  It used to be that the only time you actually “listed” a property was when a private party wanted to secure the various tax benefits available for “listed” resources, or when a city was seeking formal National Register designation of a district.  NR documentation isn’t all that different than a DOE, though it has usually been expected to be a little more detailed and formalized.  Now, it appears that the DOE process and the NR process are merging a bit, toward simpler, shorter, reports.

Back in the day NR nominations were shockingly brief if not downright terse, often topping out at ten pages including maps and graphics.  When I was writing lots of these, in the 1980s and 1990s, they had expanded into a detailed narrative that often included scads of local history if for no other reason than a nomination was obligated to develop a context if it was making the claim that a particular building or property was significant within it.  I like to think that nominations from this period serve as valuable sources of information on the historic development of many small towns, or industries that would not otherwise be very well understood.  I mean if I was interested in the Walnut industry in southern Oregon during the pre-WWI period, I sure know where I would turn for information.

Well, apparently, NPS and perhaps the SHPOs too, have grown tired of lengthy history and are embarking on an effort to streamline the nomination process, perhaps so that more property owners will feel comfortable in preparing them on their own.  That’s fine, though I am not sure that lowering the documentation standards is in anyone’s long term best interests.  The national listservs (Forum-L) occasionally have small comments or complaints about fighting NR documentation “creep,” the implication being that those early 10 page nominations had it just about right (if you can’t prove it’s significant in ten pages, then it probably isn’t).  I am not so sure that is the right approach and I’m a little bit sorry to see the era of comprehensive documentation end.  What do you think?

The center, in Talent

Last week saw beginning the research on the Talent Elementary School, an 1899 building that is in the early steps of becoming that city’s second ever National Register-listed property.  Built at the corner of I and Main streets as Talent’s third public school, it was replaced after little more than a decade of school use by a larger, brick, building.  In 1914 the Talent School District sold the property to the city for $1500, which transformed it into Talent’s first City Hall.

Today the building is called the “Talent Community Center” and now, as for most of the past century, that name is entirely accurate.  Talent’s first city hall, the location of the city’s council meetings and officials, the venerable building housed Talent’s public library from 1920 until 1975, has served as a polling place, the post office, the chamber of commerce, and the historical society.  In addition to the Talent Community Club, which played a major role in the building’s history and its grounds, the VFW and the Grange met here,.  So did the Campfire Girls, the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, and the Garden Club and, during WWII, the Red  Cross.  Talent's fire department and police department were both housed here.  The Lions Club has helped improve the property from more than half a century.  There was even a church group that met here for awhile, renting the hall from the city to hold services and in the 1960s and 1970s one of the city’s first preschools occupied the basement.

Since the main floor of the Community Center (then the city hall) was the largest assembly space in town, in addition to all its regular users, the building hosted any number of dances, and fundraisers, talent shows, art shows and other events.  A schedule for the City Hall during any typical week of the mid-20^th century must have found nearly every citizen in Talent in the building at one time or another.

Looking back at that history, it's hard not to compare the role of the Talent Community Center, a vibrant combination of government, civic, charitable, religious and educational uses all co-mingling under one roof, with the way we separate all those activities into different venues of today.  Few towns still enjoy the experience of pushing back the trappings of local government to make space for the garden club or an ice cream social.  I’m not so sure that is progress.

Talent prides itself on its small town character and its friendliness.  Their historic community center, still a pretty busy location, epitomizes that attitude.  It has for the better part of 110 years.

Talent, Oregon

The City of Talent, Oregon, located just north of Ashland, has a long tradition of working hard to retain its character while still supporting change.  Over the years I’ve had the pleasure of working on several projects in Talent, starting with the city’s first comprehensive survey of historic resources, and continuing through helping with the development of the city’s landmark protection code.  Talent, with just 6,000 or so residents, has done a fine job of identifying what it values and then making sure it has the tools in place to to keep its history playing a role in its future.  One example is their complete reconstruction of the Talent Railroad Depot.  The original depot, actually built in Medford in the 1880s, was moved to Talent in 1900 and then was razed in the 1930s.  The city, using grant funding, rebuilt it with careful detail and it once again sits next to the tracks, right in the heart of town.

Talent's many volunteers, and staff, have made historic preservation and good design a recognized value in the city, a fact that means the actual designation of historic resources has lagged behind many other southern Oregon towns, even as Talent' s buildings are protected and often restored.  Some years ago I was honored to to be involved in the restoration of Hanscom Hall, the first, and still the only, building in Talent to actually be listed on the National Register of Historic Places.  Recently, with funding from the Robertson Collins Fund, the City has hired us to prepare a National Register nomination for the Talent Community Center, built at the Talent Elementary School in 1899.  Talent is finally going to have a second NR-listed building.

Barns!

The Forest House, outside of Yreka, was built c1852 as the centerpiece of an agricultural development that is considered to be one of the first commercial orchards in northern California.  As I continue to study this site, and work towards its listing on the National Register, we’ve decided to expand the nomination to include the three outbuildings, all 19^th century, that surround the main dwelling.

Barns are interesting things, in that they are essentially machines, used to reduce the workload of constantly over-worked ranchers and farmers.  Built stout, to carry heavy loads and take heavy abuse, the old barns at the Forest House are of massive post and beam construction, with mortise and tenoned joinery, each connected with wooden pegs.  These later are formally called “trunnels,” one of my favorite bits of architectural jargon (another is wythe, meaning a layer of brick in wall, but that’s another blogpost).

Barns, their structure, and the wonderful quality of light that their hardly impervious walls admit, make for great photography.  Here are a few views of the Stable and Carriage Barn, built about 1860, and the Dairy Barn next door, built in 1865.

Hidden in the Past

Most of the time, it’s about buildings and buildings are, generally, pretty easy.  They are there, their pieces are either intact or missing, or sometimes hidden, but you can look at them.  And poke around, and if you know what you are looking for, you can usually figure out what you need to know.

But sometimes, before you get to the poking around part you have to understand the history of the thing, too.  History isn’t quite as obvious as four walls and roof and sometimes, when you least expect it, it's dang near hair-pullingly obscure.

I am currently trying to unravel what the heck Horace Knight (or Knights), Marshall Short and Ferdinand Grisez were doing in Siskiyou County between, 1850 and 1852.  And more specifically whether any of it involved building.  Somewhere during that time period these three guys showed up, like so many others, looking for gold.  Short, born in Ohio, came over the Isthmus of Panama.  I don’t now what brought Mr. Knight here from his ancestral home in Vermont and know even less about Grisez.  

One way or the other the three of them, or at least Knights, ended up at a property SW of Yreka that is still known as the Forest House, the gem I wrote about a month or so ago.   By 1853 Knight had leased a sawmill from a millwright named D. P. Sanborn, the guy who has been credited with operating the “first” sawmill in Siskiyou County, and milling the lumber for the Forest House.  The thing is, I don't know if the "Forest House" was standing when Knight and Sanborn signed the lease.

Knight, and Marshall didn't actually get their patents on the land claims until 1881 and 1882.  On the other hand the Forest House was certainly in place by 1853, when the County dedicated the road between Yreka and Fort Jones, by way of the Forest House Road…And Knight was soon hosting "gala" dances at a fine dwelling with a large auditorium, clearly the building that is still on the property.

I am just stymied that what was obviously an early and important structure receives such scant reference in most of the early histories.  I am currently operating under the assumption that Harry L. Wells, who wrote the 1881 “History of Siskiyou County” had, um "issues" with Knight and Short or vice versa.  Best take care when tangling with a historian. Whatever the reason, if there is one, Wells, and others, report pretty much nothing to clarify what Knight, Short and Grisez were actually doing in the early 1850s.  There's a nice piece in the local paper, published in 1901, and then, after the current owner's family purchased the property in 1909, a host of stories, all from the same source, that are generally consistent in character but vary somewhat in the early particulars.

Some have claimed that the Forest House was built as early as 1850, which seems unlikely to me, but it could have been.  And the current structure could have been built as late as 1865 on the site of an earlier on at the same location, and of the same name.  There is no evidence of that, by the way, but then there’s not much direct evidence of the house that is there now having being built earlier either.  At least not yet.

Back to the microfilms.

The Bridges of Multnomah County

Back to working on Portland bridges again. There are lots of bridges there, across the Willamette, in downtown and after having drafted a context statement, a Multiple Property Submittal that covers ten of them, I am now nibbling away at the formal nomination of four spans owned by Multnomah County; the Hawthorne, Broadway, Burnside and Morrison.

Writing about these spans it is a struggle to avoid the use of superlatives. It’s an amazing collection Portland has put together, including works by some of America’s most renowned bridge engineers such as Gustav Lindenthal, Ralph Modjeski, David Steinman, Waddell and Harrington and Joseph Strauss. In Portland, between the upstream Sellwood and the downstream Fremont bridges one can find the oldest vertical lift span bridge in the United States (the Hawthorne), the ONLY double-vertical lift span in the world (the Steel Bridge), and the largest Rall Bascule bridge ever built (the Broadway). The St. Johns Bridge was the longest suspension span in the world when it was completed and, until very recently, the Fremont Bridge was the longest orthotropic tied-arch span in the world too. Each one of these bridges, aside from the incredible functional value that they bring to Portland, is in its own way something of a masterpiece, an amazing piece of engineering whether it’s the longest, oldest, first, or whatever other superlative that can be layered atop the simple fact that this is a great set of bridges. The fact that you can stand on one and, in most cases, see almost all the others, is just stunning.

We preservationists can be fairly cutting when the mood strikes. Efforts to save historic structures by relocating them in packs to safer, less pressured ground, are almost universally dismissed as “preservation round-ups.” In Portland, over the period of 1910 to 1973, the City, the County and the State of Oregon have effectively created what amounts to a “Bridge Round-Up.” And it’s a pretty spectacular assemblage.

An Unexpected Gem

When people call me about the possibility of getting their house on the National Register I am frequently uninterested. Not that they aren't nice people, or nice houses, but usually it's a fully restored "Victorian" or a bungalow in some older part of town. While such places are lovely, they only rarely have the qualities to make them more than a contributing property in a historic district, one that the community hasn't gotten around to pursuing as it should. So, when the party on the other end of the phone has a different tale, it gets my attention.

Last week I was in northern California, looking at a house that has been owned by the current family for over a century.  In 1909 the family had purchased it from the people that had built it in 1851-52. Two owners, essentially, in 158 years gets my attention. So did the property, the Forest House, built on what became the Shasta-Scott Valley Turnpike, a toll road west of Yreka, that became Highway 3. The toll road was built by (wait for it) Horace Knight and Marshall Short, the first owners of the Forest House. This imposing two-story structure, with a full double porch, is almost entirely intact. Most of the original furnishings remain, along with everything else.  It even has the ledgers from the various 19th century enterprises that were focused on this outpost of civilization: a hotel, a distillery, a fruit orchard, an ice plant, a sawmill, and most anything else that would make a fella a buck at the side of the road.

So, over the next months, we'll work to get the Forest House on the NR as the first step in an effort to find some funding to make sure it survives. Unfortunately Messrs. Knight and Short built the structure with what was on-hand, in this case full 12" round log floor joists, all with the bark in place. Beetles, and perhaps termites, have found that old growth just irresistible with the result that the building is slowly compacting the powdery wood. Some rooms, like the upstairs ball room that occupies an entire side of the house (there are dance programs for its events in the lobby) now has a floor that looks like a wooden ocean wave. The current generation, who have inherited responsibility for this amazing piece of California's pioneer history, take that responsibility seriously. We're looking forward to helping them help the Forest House.