The Oregon Historical Society periodically announces a new batch of digitized photos, and it is always interesting to go through them to see if there are any new Salem scenes.
One of them some time ago, a batch old photos from PGE, showed a good mystery.
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| Mystery Solved! PEP Co, Line Division Warehouse, 780 N. Liberty (Oregon Historical Society) |
This photo was labeled quite vaguely,
Photograph of Salem warehouse building with automobile parked outside. A paved street can be seen in the front of the frame, and another building is visible at the left.
Where was this warehouse?!
Preliminary research didn't turn up anything and it went onto the backburner.
On a recent walk near Boon's, historical signage on the corner of Division and High at the new-ish bank building showed a very similar picture and had more detail to fill in some of the blanks. Though the sign was on the corner with High Street, it wasn't wholly clear the older building it referenced was on Liberty Street, on the other side of the block from the sign. So we can fill in a few more blanks.
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| November 4th, 1927 |
Back in 1927 the electric company purchased the lot.
By 1929 they had definite plans for a warehouse there. A later piece suggested the actual cost was closer to $25,000 than $40,000.
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| February 22nd, 1929 |
On the corner of Liberty and Division, nearer the actual site of the building, there's also a new utility wrap with historic material, but it's concerned with the mill race. The one for the PEP Co building might have better been located there.
That piece from 1927 touches on the mill race and says
a spillway of the old mill race ran diagonally across the property... [from Division Street] to Mill creek at Liberty street, forming quite a deep cut through the property, and the power company has been filling in this spillway...
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| Nov. 4th, 1927, continued |
This is the same mill race that turned the corner at Division north on Front Street, having showed up around the time of the archeology investigation for the forthcoming Police Station.
And in 1931 they featured a picture of the building in a full page ad. The photo appears to be either the same one that OHS has or is from the same session.
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| March 28th, 1931 |
Though these clips from c.1930 don't give the address, some later ones do, 780 North Liberty Street.
You can see it and another PGE building on the 1950 Sanborn map.
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| PGE buildings, 1950 Sanborn Fire Map |
Here's the other building that fronted Division, a "garage," and not the Line Division Warehouse. It was demolished for the new bank building on the corner of High and Division (where the signage was located).
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| The alley off Division and the PGE Garage It was demolished |
When in 2019 the new bank building moved into its construction phase, City identified the older building merely as one of "two vacant buildings, formerly used for auto repair, that will be demolished." The association with PEP Co/PGE was not identified. This is not any building that needed to be preserved, but it is a building that deserved fuller historical discussion and site context as part of the demolition process.
Back in 2004 when the MAPS HQ building was underway, news articles did mention the PepCo/PGE connection.
In a little over a decade, by 2016 when the bank plan was first at the City, the information was lost or was regarded as unimportant.
Like the May-McCully House, these buildings do not seem terribly important to have preserved, but they testify to substantial history and historical processes here in Salem. The loss of memory about them also testifies to the fragility and erosion of historical knowledge. The buildings themselves we don't have to keep, but we should keep their stories better.
As a footnote, the building in the background on the far left of the c.1930 warehouse picture is part of the Ramages Star Bottling Company, which may have first built there in 1927. In the mid-30s, perhaps a few years after the photo was taken and shortly after Prohibition ended, they ran an ad campaign around the "non-fattening" qualities of Acme beer. It appeared to be targeted at women.
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| August 12th, 1935 |
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