Hey, here's some very pleasant news!
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| New book on Pugh |
Yesterday online the Oregonian ran a feature on a family genealogy story with an important Salem angle, architect Walter D. Pugh. They led with an image of the family at Eugene's Shelton-McMurphey-Johnson House, designed by Pugh, and just up the hill from the Eugene Amtrak Station.
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| At Pugh's Shelton-McMurphey-Johnson House |
The family history project turned into a book, and the cover of it uses images of our old City Hall and of the current building of the Thomas Kay Woolen Mill, now the Willamette Heritage Center.
Besides those two, Pugh designed many important buildings in Salem, and was a direct link between the earlier practice of Wilbur Boothby and the later practice of Fred Legg.
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| Pugh's Le Breton Hall shortly after construction at the Oregon State Institution for the Feeble-Minded circa 1908 - WU Archives |
As the State developed institutions in the late 19th and early 20th century, Pugh was right there with architectural design and later with contracting work.
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| Uncle John's house, July 2018 |
And his family were early settlers in Keizer, and played other roles in the starts of local institutions.
The book is written by a retired Stanford historian, Terence Emmons, a grandson of Pugh, and is sure to have new details about Pugh and his buildings, some of which remain integral to the urban fabric here, and others of which now lost remain the object of a kind of nostalgia and longing. Emmons lived near Pioneer Cemetery and remembers Grandfather Pugh and his house on 18th Street near Center. According to the Oregonian piece, Emmons is "donating royalties from his book to the Salem Public Library’s Historic Photographs Collections."
There is lots to like! (And maybe more to say later.)
Pioneering Oregon Architect W. D. Pugh, by Terence Emmons, Arcadia Publishing/History Press, May 24th, 2021
The Book Bin will likely have it, and probably the Mill also. If you are interested in old buildings here, check it out.
1 comment:
There's a really lovely three page feature with lots of photos in the Homes and Gardens section of the Oregonian today - but that's a full month after it appeared online!
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