Parks & Rec Board to talk Baseball and More

The Parks and Recreation Advisory Board meets on Thursday the 11th, and there's a lot of interesting items on the agenda and in meeting materials.

Before the stadium seating  (note cars, too)
(Willamette University Archives)

The main one is the prospect of a summer college wood bat league and associated improvements to John Lewis Field and Spec Keene Stadium, an information and discussion item, not any action item, "Proposal Regarding Renovations and Improvements to the Willamette University Baseball Stadium and Tokyo International University of America Softball Stadium." (The softball component has not generated the same level of interest and critique.)

But first a digression, which seems actually to be a little related.

Fairview Park: 2016 (top), 2024 (bottom)

One of the items also in the meeting packet is an update on the Fairview Park Master Plan "revisit."  Sentiment on the park seems to have shifted quite a bit, and the change is easily visible a side-by-side with the adopted 2016 plan and one of the new concepts.

People want accessible paths to walk on, passive recreational amenities, and flexible spaces that can support a range of activities. There was also some interest in active recreation and sports facilities, as well as interest in preserving the park's natural resources, especially the existing mature trees, as a retreat for reflection and rest.

The reduction to "some interest in active recreation and sports facilities" is striking. People now want the "retreat for reflection and rest." Maybe the Pandemic has prompted a shift.

A dwindling interest in "sports facilities" and associated numbers of spectators and participants also seems to characterize a lot of the debate over baseball improvements at Bush Park.

History in the Sunday Paper: Truitt Bros Cannery, Bush House, Saun Lee Lewis

A theme of history and change rings in several articles in the Sunday paper today. It's a reminder that the bundled product of a print edition remains pretty neat.

Concrete imprint on a loading dock (2015)

On the front page was news that the former Truitt Bros. cannery had a proposed sale and redevelopment project in the works.

Front page today

A century ago they were hyping dehydration at the plant.

June 1th, 1923

Dehydration hype, Canning Age, January 1920

It ran its course, important but not quite as revolutionary or enduring as it might have at one time seemed.

• "A Century Ago: Truitt Bros Building on Market and Front to Celebrate 100th" (2017)
  

The area has been of interest. Here's a proposal for mixed-use zoning from the 1997 North Downtown Plan.

Asahel Bush: A Footnote in the History of Letitia Carson

A few days ago the Oregon Historical Society published a post on Letitia Carson, "the only known Black woman in Oregon to successfully secure a land claim."

via Twitter

The post drew on materials from the Letitia Carson Digital History Collection. Buried in the collection was a receipt from Asahel Bush to the main villain of the story, Greenberry Smith, for advertising Carson's estate, which Smith had seized.*

Receipt from Asahel Bush for ads, Oct 10th, 1854

I couldn't find those ads in late 1854, but here is another series of ads in the Statesman from a little more than two years later.

March 10th, 1857

April 28th, 1857

The time line on these is very interesting.

Reassessing Asahel Bush and the 1922 Election: Our Problematic Legacies

The front page column today in the Sunday paper could not be more timely, unfortunately.

Front page today

Given his role in Salem history, only a little less mythic than Jason Lee but so much more definite in the prelude to Statehood and then in the second half of the 19th century, Asahel Bush has to be better understood as a real person with real power and wealth and with real bias. His personal sentiments were not merely privately held, but could be made public and structural. They had real effects on the lives of Salemites.

It's a great piece and should be widely read and discussed. (It's paywalled now, and hopefully they will find ways to circulate it more widely.)

Another legacy that the paper should give more attention to is our 1922 election and its immediate aftermath.

Learn about Hiram Gorman in the 1870s and 80s at Bush Barn Lecture

We'll never find out enough about the Gorman family. A few years ago the Corvallis house of Hannah and Eliza Gorman was placed on the National Register. Hannah had come to Oregon as a slave, claimed and gained her freedom, and achieved modest prosperity.

Hannah and Eliza Gorman House, Corvallis
National Register of Historic Places Nomination

The Sunday paper had a small notice about another member of the Gorman family, Hannah's son, Hiram. At Bush Barn on May 15th there will be a lecture titled, "The Statesman and the Freedman: Asahel Bush, Hiram Gorman, and Black Exclusion in Oregon."

A capsule biography gives us an outline,

Hiram was well known in Salem for his beautiful home on the corner of Liberty and Chemeketa streets and his prized vegetable garden. But he was best known for being the operator of the steam powered letter press at the Oregon Statesman. For twelve years, every paper printed by the Statesman passed through Hiram Gorman’s hands.

May 25th, 1877

This note about bringing early potatoes to market is striking because it is not racialized. Most of the time Hiram Gorman is tagged in racialized ways, as in this note year later about fostering an abandoned child.*

Agate Beach and the Bush-Bloch Connection: Little Bluffs Built in 1917

The paper today has a nice travel feature on hiking from Beverly Beach, over Yaquina Head, down to Newport, and across the Yaquina Bay Bridge.

In the paper today

It briefly mentions Agate Beach, and by coincidence a friend of the blog who happened to be vacationing in Newport separately was alert to a Salem connection.

A grainy scan from the National Register Nomination

Music fans will likely know about composer Ernest Bloch and his connection with the Oregon Coast.

But Bloch's history might have overshadowed an earlier relation to Salem history. What we know as "The Ernest Bloch House," a large beach cottage on the National Register of Historic Places at Agate Beach, was in fact first a summer residence for the descendants of Asahel Bush.

City Council, July 26th - Bush Park Plan seems Rushed

There are many things of interest on the Council agenda it turns out. On Monday they will also look to adopt the Bush's Pasture Park and Deepwood Estate Gardens Cultural Landscape Management Plan.

Sections were greyed out and incomplete

When the draft plan was circulated for public comment last month it was incomplete and key sections were greyed out.

New draft has completed sections

The Staff Report for Council on Monday is silent on the fact that the draft has been substantially updated with new sections. In fact, the plan itself is not included at a regular attachment at the top of the Staff Report, but is buried down in the middle of it as a separate link, and again not mentioning that it has been updated substantially in the last month.

In the updating the document ballooned: The draft published for public comment had 315 pages, and the latest one has 882 pages, and in size from 28MB to 82MB. 

Maybe these additions are truly not significant, but that's a lot of material just to slide in silently!

Bush Park Cultural Landscape Plan out in Draft for Review

The City's announced a draft is out for review of the Cultural Landscape Management Plan for Bush Park and Deepwood.

Draft Plan out for review

From here, while the plan touches on the way the parks are embedded in the larger Gaiety Hill and Bush Park Historic District, the plan does not give sufficient attention to relations across the park edges, especially the question of how people travel to the park.

Strictly speaking, this is outside the scope of the plan, but when we talk about trip end facilities like better bike parking, or of "gateways" at park corners, we should give more thought to how people arrive at the bike parking or at the gateways. Instead, the plan assumes people have already arrived.

Yew Park and Corner at Mission & 12th

This is most apparent in the discussion of Yew Park. Yew Park at Mission and 12th really lacks its own identity as a thing separate from Bush Park and Deepwood, and it's also very disadvantaged by traffic. The draft plan specifically calls out "noise and auto pollution at this corner create an unwelcoming pedestrian environment." The Mission Street overpass, the 12th/13th couplet, the start of the Pringle Parkway, the railroad, and a wild spaghetti of multiuse paths together create a formidable barrier for people who might like to walk or bike. It's hard to reach the park area from the northeast, east, and southeast especially. This deserves more attention.

1876 Election Back in the News

A couple of years ago the Mill published in the paper a piece about a suspicious check for $8000 that was sent to Ladd & Bush bank over a century ago.

From Chicago to Memphis readers [in 1877] bent on reforming the corruption in Washington, watched the story of this check unfold in dramatic fashion, and Asahel Bush’s name and Salem, Oregon became national news. To summarize several hundred pages of testimony, just before the electors were to meet in Salem a check was drawn at the Wall Street Firm of Martin & Runyon and directed to the Ladd & Bush Bank in Salem via a New York agent in a cipher-encoded telegram.

For the main frame they focused on corruption in President Grant's administration.

Let’s set the stage for this bizarre tale. It’s 1876 and the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes is running against the Democrat Samuel J. Tilden of New York. Both candidates are running on a platform of reform, seeking to counteract the corruption of then-President Ulysess S. Grant. Grant’s scandals were so bad that he had split the Republican party. Fellow Republican, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts even coined the derisive term “Grantism” and gave a speech on the Senate floor differentiating Grant’s activities from the core values of the Republican party. Tilden won the popular vote and looked like he would win the electoral college except for contested returns in several states, including Oregon.

While most of the elections controversy circled around voter intimidation in the South, the issue Oregon focused on the eligibility one of their three presidential electors.

Especially in our current moment, this take on the election, separating national and local matters, and focusing on scandal in the Grant administration, may not have the right emphasis and context.

Conservative writer David Frum, no great progressive, Sunday published a thread about the Election of 1876, interpreting it on different grounds.

You're hearing a lot of talk about "irregularities" in the election of 1876 that led to a "disputed" outcome. What is being referred to in this hazy terms?

He underscored that "white conservatives had used terror and massacre to deter former slaves from voting" and placed the dispute in the context of the Reconstruction period and its sequel of racist "Redemption." A conservative, he is alarmed by the reactionary right, whom he finds radical rather than conservative.

Over the next half century, the states "redeemed" by white conservatives shriveled into tight oligarchies.

Democracy in the United States has a contested history. It's being contested again right now. The foundational idea of democracy is that each person counts. Let's commit to proving that theory true in the dangerous week ahead.

Corruption and problems with Grant's administration may not, then, be the best lens for interpreting this weird episode with Ladd & Bush Bank. 

Bush and Geer Park Updates Have New Open Houses Online

The City's got updates to three important park plans going right at the moment. One just wrapped its second Open House, and two others have Open Houses that just started.

Bush Park and Deepwood Management Areas
December 2020

The most noteworthy is the "Cultural Landscape Management Plan" for Bush Park and Deepwood.

They've got a new Open House on sections of the park, proposed uses and changes. They've also published results from the first Open House, and even among the self-selected group of survey respondents, there's not much bike transport to the park.

More than half of respondents drive a car to the park (56 percent), while 40 percent walk or ride a bicycle (34 percent and six percent respectively).

Unsurprisingly, Yew Park doesn't have an identity separate from Bush and Deepwood.

Yew Park is generally not well known and most people had no opinion but mentioned noise as a factor at that location.

As we are shifting Open Houses from in-person to online, the City and various consultants by design or by accident are testing out a number of different software/web developers. I find this one difficult and non-intuitive to navigate. Once you get in to the survey, there is a funny pop-up map and you have to click on the web page behind it, a second image of the map, not on the pop-up itself, to access the questions. It's a little awkward.

On the map, each area in Bush Park has some recommendations for you to assess. There are lots of things about plantings and activities and such, and here are three of particular interest for mobility.

Power and Wealth at Bush Park and Deepwood: A Cultural Landscape Plan at the HLC

The Historic Landmarks Commission convenes on Thursday the 16th and they've got an unusually meaty agenda.

The most interesting item on it is the outline and work plan for a Cultural Landscape Management Plan for Bush Park and Deepwood. Beyond the practical aims of a management plan for the two parks and associated houses, it will be a chance at a deep dive on urban ecology, geography, and history. Beyond setting policy, it could be fascinating! The area is such a layered mash-up. Indeed, collage might be one of the best ways to look at it.

Oaks and Camas in Bush Park, a Kalapuya legacy,
 the second week of April 2014

There are two major Oak groves, one of them with Camas, and these have direct and indirect links to First Peoples and their own technology of pyroculture. These were never "natural" and already depended on human intervention.

Not far away, the Lord & Schryver formal garden at Deepwood
via Oregon Encyclopedia &
Univesrity of Oregon, 2010_VRC_06197

Less than a block away, just across a creek bed, is a European formal garden, with its roots in early modern fortifications.

That juxtaposition is a little amazing, really.

Bush House starts Reassessment of Asahel Bush

Asahel Bush
(Salem Library
Historic Photos)

Hey, here's some mostly good news. A story at Salem Reporter says that Bush House altered a grant application in an interesting way that resulted in winning a grant:

"Last year, when they reviewed our grant, they asked if we were telling a complete story about Asahel Bush, and at that time, they wanted us to address some of the problematic statements he had made," [Director Ross Sutherland] said. "Over the last year, we have been working to understand the issues surrounding museums and white privilege and instructional racism, and other similar issues."....

In its grant proposal, the Bush House team proposed to tell the stories of marginalized Salem community members.

"The idea was: What if museums in Salem had developed around sites that were related to traditionally underrepresented Oregonians? From that idea, we thought we could take these histories and then flesh them out and find out where they actually happened in town," Sutherland said.

It is a little concerning, however, that there's a pivot here, from the "problematic statements" of Asahel Bush to "stories of marginalized Salem community members."

Retrieving the second is important of course, but Asahel Bush himself provided a significant part of the actual mechanism of marginalization, and his agency in that should not be minimized. He had a newspaper, he was an important banker and investor, and exercised a great deal of power here.

Asahel Bush to Matthew Deady,
on the Waldo-Bogel Wedding and Rev. Obed Dickinson,
cited in "Obed Dickinson and the 'Negro Question' in Salem"
Oregon Historical Quarterly, Spring 1991

There is certainly is work to do on "the issues surrounding museums and white privilege and instructional racism," but old man Bush himself was a racist. Even in the context of garden variety racist norms and customs in the middle of the 19th century, Bush was racist. That's the core of the story here, and we need to do less work protecting, even laundering, his legacy and the house, and more work exploring realistically what is the full legacy, warts and all. The pivot from Bush to "community members" looks like it could be a partial dodge and reflective of anxiety that Bush House and Museum could be subject to the same critique and urge toward denaming we are seeing in Eugene around Deady Hall.

Changing out Deady Hall, front page Register-Guard
(Update, June 26th)

Willamette Week reported last week that the Federal Courthouse had also quietly taken down the portrait of Matthew Deady. As we said here a couple of years ago, the history of the Salem Clique needs more attention to slavery and to race. Bush's statements and sentiments are more than merely problematic, and our history of him needs to move beyond the hagiography. We also need more investigation into the businesses and institutions associated with him.

As for community stories, Oregon Black Pioneers are already working on the stories of Black Salemites, and maybe Bush House does not need to lead but instead should take a supporting position on that part of the project. The part that Bush House needs to lead on is the history of Asahel Bush and a self-aware critique of it.

Hopefully the project Bush House is undertaking will be a positive step in that direction. This will be very interesting to follow.

Supreme Court Building and Bush House: At the Historic Landmarks Commission

The Historic Landmarks Commission meets on Thursday the 19th and they've got a couple of items of interest on the agenda. Most interesting is a full draft (though the pagination is totally scrambled!) of the formal Nomination Form for a National Register listing of the Oregon Supreme Court building. There's also an update on Bush House.

W. C. Knighton's Supreme Court building of 1914

Nearly finished in 1913 here, dedicated in 1914

Bush Park Terrace Concept should Revive Historic Carriage Way

Over at the Mission Street Parks Conservancy, they just announced a proposal to

make several improvements to an area immediately east and south of the Bush House conservatory, including the nearby parking lot.

From the concept announcement (carriage way note added)

They identify "the neglected area between the conservatory and the parking lot" and propose changes to make it more attractive, more active, and more useful.

For connectivity, the concept appears to focus on the path skirting the parking lot down to the derby track. (Mainly phase III on the site plan map.)

But one tantalizing note asks if a different path segment should be continued.

Ladd & Bush Turns 150, Nearly Opened on April Fools Day 1869

Here's an anniversary that should be noticed more. Yesterday Ladd & Bush Bank turned 150. The building was completely rebuilt (and conventionally is dated to 1868, but we're talking about the business, not the building), supplemented by cast iron ornament from a different bank in Portland, and the business was swallowed up by a large out-of-state institution, so you can quibble on details of the anniversary. Whatever survives of that first business in the current instantiation has been diluted, and the relation is more notional than direct. But still! The building remains important, and even heavily remodeled and restored, it's very much part of the "there there" for Salem.

Very early Ladd & Bush,
showing the short 25-foot frontage on Commercial St.
It looks like the frontage on State has already been expanded.
The street trees are small.
(WHC 1999.013.0024)

A 70th anniversary pamphlet
(via this great post on the cast iron and
Ladd & Tilton bank at Cafe Unknown;
also in the Hugh Morrow pamphlet collection
at the Library)

100 years ago, in 1919 they published a history piece on the 50th anniversary of the bank in the paper. It interesting to think about a bank as a novel financial instrument or institution, and about building new mercantile practices to use the services of a bank. The Hartman jewelry store referenced in the piece was in the Gray block, the corner storefront on Liberty and State where the Brick used to be. The cashier, John Albert, is Myra Albert Wiggins' father; his wife, Mary Holman, was Salem's first automobile fatality. He was prominent and at the center of a great deal of early Salem history.

March 29th, 1919

New Book on Salem Clique needs more on Slavery

Matthew Deady, c1859
Oregon Historical Society
OrHi 63119

In the last couple of years the University of Oregon conducted a thorough reassessment of the legacy of Mathew Deady. Students had called for renaming historic Deady Hall on campus. In announcing the final decision not to rename Deady Hall, University President Michael Schill wrote:

Deady was...a deeply flawed man. He held racist views which I find abhorrent and contrary to the principles of our university. His support of slavery prior to the Civil War cannot be excused....Although Deady’s racist views did not abate after the Civil War, he fully embraced the new constitutional order....Deady supported the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which guarantee to all equal protection under the US Constitution....Deady does not represent an example of an egregious case justifying overturning the presumption against denaming...[and] I will not recommend that the Board of Trustees dename Deady Hall.

In the same decision, Schill ruled that Frederic Dunn, an Exalted Cyclops in the second KKK of the 1920s, and who had taught at Willamette University between 1895-1898 previous to his time at the University of Oregon, was in fact an example of such "an egregious case." His name was removed from his namesake building, and it has been renamed Unthank Hall.

Matthew Deady was at the center of the "Salem Clique," the name of a small Democratic party machine mostly headed by Asahel Bush during the run up to Statehood in the 1850s, opposed first to a Whig coalition headed by Thomas Dryer of the Oregonian in Portland, to the Know-Nothing party, and then to the early Republican Party in the later 1850s.

Asahel Bush was almost certainly more racist than Matthew Deady, and it does not appear his views evolved the way Deady's changed. We know, for example, about his scorn for the efforts of Rev. Obed Dickinson and his wife Charlotte later in the 1850s and 60s.

Time to think more about Asahel Bush

A reassessment of the legacy of Asahel Bush is overdue. (We also need to know more about his real estate, investing, and banking activities later in the 19th century! He is such a key Salem figure, but hardly known in detail.)

In her new book, The Salem Clique: Oregon's Founding Brothers, Barbara Mahoney leans away from such a reassessment, and without denying the way race and slavery was implicated in our Territorial government and then the debate and drive to Statehood, she may not center it enough. Of Bush in 1862 she writes:

Writing in the third person...[he said] he was "in favor of maintaining the Government at every hazard and to the last extremity. He wouldn't destroy the Government either to enslave or liberate [yes, that word*]; he believes it to be a Government of white men, and if the liberties of that race can be preserved, he regards it of comparatively little consequence what fate betides [the same word]."

Rather than providing the central thesis and focus, this is an ancillary moment.

It seems instead like the machinations of the Salem Clique, starting with sending out Bush to organize the Democratic party from the very start, have at their basis the perpetuation of slavery in the South as supported by the Democratic party of the time, and arranging in Oregon a "Government of white men." Race and slavery are absolutely central here, both in our local politics and in the national political wrangling involved in admitting a new state to the Union.

Slavery isn't backstory or side story, it's absolutely central to the main story, and may indeed be the essence of the main story. (You might recall "Oregon Was Founded As a Racist Utopia," a Gizmodo piece from a few years back that pushes this argument.)

Grant and Bush, Transit and Cars, Cap and Invest - Newsbits

Just some passing comments on weekend news...

Grant and Bush

I'm not exactly sure what the right standard is here. Most of the time the paper's history columns are informal, chatty, fun, and not something to fuss over. But this story about a juicy scandal at Ladd & Bush bank seems half-baked. It's a tricky narrative, and probably needed a much longer word count. Maybe editing whacked it down too much. Whatever the reason, it flattens out too many elements in the story and is hard to follow.

First off, it's time for a more nuanced sense of President Grant.

Let’s set the stage for this bizarre tale. It’s 1876, and the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes is running against the Democrat Samuel J. Tilden of New York. Both candidates are running on a platform of reform, seeking to counteract the corruption of then-President Ulysess S. Grant. Grant’s scandals were so bad that he had split the Republican party. Fellow Republican Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts even coined the derisive term “Grantism” and gave a speech on the Senate floor differentiating Grant’s activities from the core values of the Republican party.

Just a reminder: Under Grant in 1870 the Department of Justice was created, he signed the anti-KKK Enforcement Acts, and the 15th Amendment on voting rights ratified.

Don't Forget about the Exclusion Laws in the Newly Restored Oregon Constitution

One of the Negro Exclusion clauses
in our original 1857 Oregon Constitution

State Archives and the Secretary of State have announced a "public unveiling of the newly restored Oregon Constitution" for Monday the 6th.

That's pretty neat and all, but at this particular moment in time, what with General Lee in the news again, it's worth remembering that Oregon, while excluding slavery positively, was also explicitly established under the desire for no people of color at all. Current residents might have been grandfathered in, but the message was clear.

No free negro or mulatto not residing in this state at the time of the adoption of this constitution, shall come, reside or be within this state or hold any real estate, or make any contracts, or maintain any suit therein; and the legislative assembly shall provide by penal laws for the removal by public officers of all such negroes and mulattoes, and for their effectual exclusion from the state, and for the punishment of persons who shall bring them into the state, or employ or harbor them.

If that's not a Constitutional provision for a system of white supremacy, just what exactly is it?

A recent essay at the Mill, "Rachel Belden Brooks and Family," shows some of the difficulty in our interpretation.

In 1844, a strong desire to avoid racial tensions led the Oregon Provisional Government to outlaw slavery in the Oregon Country. However compassionate this may sound, it was closely followed by a ban on the settling of free blacks in the region. Both laws were designed to keep the black population at a minimum and avoid conflict. Despite these decrees, many families brought slaves on their journey west and few, if any, of the slaves were set free upon entering Oregon. Rachel Belden was one of these, and is the first known black woman of Marion County....

"Avoiding racial tensions" and "avoiding conflict" are inadequate descriptions for the malignant impetus behind the Exclusion laws.

As it happens, it seems the Exclusion laws weren't enforced much, and our informal and ordinary understanding of our history is that we neglected and ignored them. It was bad law. We try to read this neglect in the most virtuous way possible.

But even unenforced, it was still more powerful as general culture than we would like to think. As a general rule, we don't take seriously enough the intent of the Exclusion clauses and the pervasiveness of the racism behind them.

Of course any history on this is difficult. Most of the sources also come from white people, white men particularly, and even when they are well-intentioned, we lose the agency of non-white people, who are not able to be in charge of the stories they tell about themselves in their own words. The "real history," such as it is, is certainly both richer and more terrible than we know. Additionally, around Statehood, Salem was a tiny community, and the stories we might wish to tell are all entangled and so very ambiguous. A Pioneer or civic hero in one context turns out compromised or even vicious in another.

America Waldo and Rachel Belden come to Salem

From Breaking Chains

In his book, Breaking Chains: Slavery on Trial in the Oregon Territory, R. Gregory Nokes writes about several Salem families:

History Notes: A Wine Bar for Downtown, Letters to Asahel Bush

The Historic Landmarks Commission meets tonight, Thursday the 21st, and their agenda brings news about a new wine bar proposed for downtown.

They have another interesting item. The Mill's "History in the News" as well as a major project on the letters of Asahel Bush are also worth noting. (All of them grapple in one way or another with the question of how best to retrieve and make lively the past.)

Starkey McCully Block

Proposal for a new wine bar and apartments

At the HLC is a proposal with a varied package of changes for the northmost third of the Starkey-McCully Block, one of the very oldest intact commercial buildings downtown.

Starkey-McCully Block and First National Bank
(The tower and Gerlinger Block on the corner are long gone,
but you can still read Lamport in the sidewalk!)
Image circa 1887, Salem Library Historic Photos

You may remember that the Salem-Keizer Education Foundation bought part of it, the southmost two-thirds, a couple years ago and there was a debate about whether Urban Renewal subsidy should be going to a non-profit that would not be paying property taxes for the "tax increment." (Here, here, and here.)

The ownership of that northern third was separate and was not in the sale to the SKEF, and now either through a different sale or merely that the current owners wish to upgrade, the HLC is looking at a

Major Historic Design Review of a proposal to add new signage, replace the front storefront, and construct a new addition on the rear of the Starkey/McCully Building (1867), a historic contributing resource within the Salem Downtown National Register Historic District...

On the whole, Staff Recommendation is for approval.

In the Neighborhoods: Ass-a-Hell Bush and the Salem Clique!

Have you seen the newish signs at Bush Park?

One of the newish historical and interpretive signs at Bush Park

History's in the air.

This week at SCAN, Barbara Mahoney, author of the forthcoming The Salem Clique: Oregon’s Founding Brothers, and probably our greatest current expert on Asahel Bush, will talk about Bush and his political gang.

About the Clique, advance press for her book says,

Led by Asahel Bush, editor of the Oregon Statesman, the Salem Clique was accused of dictatorship, corruption, and the intention of imposing slavery on the Territory. The Clique, critics maintained, even conspired to establish a government separate from the United States, conceivably a “bigamous Mormon republic"....many historians have concluded that its members were vicious and unscrupulous men who were able, because of their command of the Democratic Party, to impose their hegemony on the Oregon Territory’s inhabitants.

Bush is the most significant influence on Salem, right? Who else has a greater claim to shaping the city and its culture? He's got to be it. Even though we might look to others during the pre-statehood settlement era, Bush's influence lasted through the second half of the 19th century and into the 20th. He scores major points on longevity.

But it's not an unambiguously positive influence, and we should be talking about it more! One of his nicknames was "Ass-a-Hell," after all.*

So this presentation could be an opportunity to learn more and to think more critically about the ways Bush was great for Salem - legacy things like Bush's Pasture Park - and maybe ways he and his legacy weren't so great.

South Central Association of Neighbors meets Wednesday, August June 14th at 6:30 p.m. in the Pringle Community Hall, 606 Church St SE.

---

* See Mahoney's Oregon Encyclopedia article and her "Asahel Bush, Slavery, and the Statehood Debate," in Oregon Historical Quarterly for more. The Oregonian just published a review of the book, though it's more of an overview and summary than a critical appraisal.