Salem in 1908

World Events

• Japanese emigration to U.S. is forbidden under terms of the "Gentlemen's Agreement" by administration officials of Japan and United States, easing the fear that a legal treaty against Japanese might cause hostilities
• Sentiment against Chinese labor in America grows as part of the fear that cheap Asian labor was taking America jobs.
• Young Turk Committee of Union and Progress issues ultimatum to Sultan Hamid II to restore the Ottoman Constitution of 1876: it is done the next day.
• Tunguska Event (or Russian Explosion) in Siberia is believed to be caused by air burst of meteorite or comet 3 miles above the earth surface.
• Grand Canyon National Monument was established due to Roosevelt's enthusiasm for preserving America's natural assets.
• Henry Ford introduces the Model T, the first affordable automobile.
• Related inventions: Fountain pens become popular after Walter Schaffer patents a vacuum ink filler. The Hoover Company acquires manufacturing rights to an upright portable vacuum cleaner.
• New Books: The Circular Staircase, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame and Room with a View, E.M. Forster.

In Salem
The Oregon Electric Railway runs between Portland and Salem with a terminus at the Hubbard Building on the corner of High and State Streets (as seen above) in the hub of our city. A block to the north is the City Hall. The Grand Hotel, the Grand Theater and the Marion County Courthouse are just steps away. One block to the east is the First Methodist Church and the Post Office. Beyond that are Willson Park, the State House and Willamette University. Truly, this is the center of the city. There are 35 daily trips, each taking an hour and a half and costing twenty-five cents.

When you visit
The building remains, painted a light color. The Grand Hotel Annex and Theater are still there. Gone are the City Hall, the classic Courthouse, the Post Office and the State House of those years. The trains and even the rails are also gone: victims of the Depression years and the growing convenience of the automobile. The trains stopped running in 1935 and the rails were gradually removed. In 1972, the final Trade Street rails were dug out for the new Civic Center and improvements to Willamette University campus.

Other events

• Local boy, A. C. Gilbert, wins an Olympic Gold medal. He qualified for the 1908 Olympics in London, but his victory there was disappointing. After a controversy with the judges about his use of a pole of his own invention, he used the same pole as his rival, E. T. Cooke - and still won. However, the judges ruled that Cooke had reached the same height in the preliminaries, and that the two should share the medal. Cooke graciously let Gilbert have the medal which was presented to him by Queen Alexandria of England.

The Chinese float in the annual Cherry City Parade

• The local Chinese community, active in Salem life, enter a float in the annual Cherry Festival Parade.
• Eaton Hall is built on the Willamette University Campus. This classroom building was built with a $50,000 grant from Mr. A.E. Eaton, the owner of Union Woolen Mills.

The Gottlob and Wilhelmina Pade House

• On 15th Street, the Pade House is built by Gottlob and Wilhelmena Pade, recent immigrants. This was also home for their son, Bernhardt, a partner in Simon and Pade grocery store. He operated Pade’s Market until retirement 1965. After his death in 1975, his widow, Leona, lived here until 1985. She was well known for her garden of rare plants. This Local Landmark is also in the NEN neighborhood.

Walter and Grace Gerth House in West Salem

• Another 1908 house to become a Local Landmark is the Gerth House. Walter and Grace Gerth operated their Edgewater Street store for 35 years, from 1911 to 1946. During this time he served several terms as mayor of West Salem, built the first two-story commercial building in West Salem, started the first grocery delivery and loaned the city money to pay its bills.
• An ornamental concrete block house is built at 1724 Chemeketa Street using Sears Modern Home Plan #52. This year the Sears catalog had 8 pages advertising machines that could stamp out blocks that were "cheap, quick and practical" building materials. This house was probably built by C. B. Stone, who had purchased the lot in 1907 and was listed in the City Directory of 1909-10 as a "cement worker" with a next-door address as his residence. See it in the Court-Chemeketa Walking Tour.
• The Oregon State Institution for the Feeble Minded opens in December. Renamed as Fairview Training Center, it continued as a Salem institution until its closing in 2000. A 1920s photograph shows the LeBreton Cottage (the 1908 administration building), the 1919 Hoff Cottage and the 1910 Chamberlain Cottage. All were, despite their names, sizable buildings resembling hospitals.

From the Capitol Journal:

• Spectators pronounced the fistfight witnessed on State Street in front of the Spa as "one of the finest". Even the street car stopped to allow combatants, who were slugging it out in the mud along the tracks, to continue their battle.
• W. B. Gibson, who had operated a barber shop at 147 Commercial Street for the past three years, moved to a larger and more elegant quarters at 364 State Street. His new shop would be one of the largest outside Portland with 11 chairs, two suites of bathrooms and club and card rooms in the basement.
• This newspaper advertized for a carrier boy on a route that required he own and ride a pony.

(See Ben Maxwell's Salem, Oregon, edited by Scott McArthur, 2006)

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Salem in 1881

World Events

• Alexander II is assassinated near his St. Petersburg palace by a bomb, falsely blamed on Russian Jews. He is succeeded by his son, Alexander III. The ornate, Medieval-Russia styled Church of the Savior on Blood was built on the spot where the Tsar was mortally wounded.
• James Garfield is wounded by an assassin four months after his inauguration, but due to unsanitary medical practices, died 11 after weeks.  Chester Arthur becomes president of the United States. He made significant reforms in government practices, but, due to ill health retired at the end of his term.
• Kansas becomes the first state to prohibit all alcohol beverages.
• Clara Barton, pioneering nurse of the Civil War, establishes the American Red Cross.
• Tuskegee Institute and Spellman College, both for African-American students, are founded.
• Gunfight at the O.K. Corral occurs in Tombstone, Arizona.
• New American Books: Portrait of a Lady, Henry James and Uncle Remus, Joel Chandler Harris.

Mrs. Chloe Willson's home in 1858

The same residence as Lausanne Hall in early 1900s.

Images courtesy of Willamette University Archives and Special Collections

In Salem 
Almost thirty years before, Chloe Willson and her husband William, the founder of our city, had built their home on the northeast corner of Court and Capitol Streets. The property was part of their land grant, actually their allotment from the mission properties. Since the property was in both names, Chloe fought to retain her half after William's death ~ she won.  The image above was published in 1858 when Chloe lived there as a widow. By 1871 she had moved to her daughter's home in Portland. She died there in 1874.
In this year of 1881, Willamette University President Thomas Van Scoy purchases her "English Cottage" and has it moved to the campus as the Woman's College. Over the years it was enlarged, heightened, given a Mansard roof and, finally, a tower. In 1919 it was demolished for the construction of the present Lausanne Hall. The Chronicles of Willamette states, "The original of unit of this outworn old building...was the beautiful old Willson mansion but the numerous additions to it had long before made it into an architectural monstrosity and there was general rejoicing when it could be blotted out of the landscape."
The name Lausanne, given to this university building, recalls the ship that brought missionaries to the Oregon settlement in 1843: Chloe was one of these. She became one of the first teachers at the school that is now Willamette University.

When you visit
After the Willson house was moved to the Willamette campus, H. B. Theilsen and his wife Jennie purchased the property on Court Street where her house had stood. They built a home where they lived with their three children. In the 1930s, after possibly forty years, the house was demolished, although the family continued to own the land. For approximately seventy-five years, an automobile service station has occupied this historic location at the northeast corner of Capitol and Court Street.

Other events

• W. Crawford is elected mayor this year.

Thomas Cronise photograph of Sung Lung Chinese Laundry at 105 Court Street, 1889

• Chinese came to the Salem area in the 1870s and early 1880s with the Chinese population at its peak at 300. The First Baptist Church in Salem opened a Chinese mission school in Salem in 1877 and enrolled up to 40 at various times. Jeung Gwoon Jeu was made city missionary. The mission school was continued through this summer of 1881, but Reverend C. H. Mattoon, editor of the Baptist Annals of Oregon, sorrowfully notes: "Doubtless the only object of the pupils was to learn the language for personal and pecuniary benefits". The school may have closed when the pastor’s wife began conducting evening classes for the Chinese community. Forty pupils were learning about Christianity and to read and write English for a monthly tuition of one dollar.
• Lucyanna Lee Grubbs, the only child of Jason Lee, died this year at the age of 39. Lucyanna was the daughter of Lee's second wife, Lucy Thompson Lee, who sailed to Oregon in 1839 on the Lausanne with the reinforcement of missionaries. Lucyanna was three weeks old when her mother died, and three years old when her lost her father. Adopted by Lydia and Gustavus Hines, she graduated from Willamette University in 1863, becoming a teacher, and then became Governess of Women when Chloe Willson resigned. Lucyanna married a classmate, Francis H. Grubbs, who also became a teacher. Lucyanne's students described her as being tall, with a slender, and stately appearance, her hair braided and wound around her head. A woman of superior knowledge, she was reserved and dignified, and a most devout Christian. A gifted teacher in many disciplines, her students recalled how they sat around a fire on winter days, eating their lunch while Mrs. Grubbs read aloud her favorite poem, "Evangeline." Exacting in her instruction and her expectations of her students, they also recalled she could be amusing, even slightly sarcastic at times, when calling a student’s attention back to the lesson.
  Professor Grubbs raised their daughter Ethel after her mother's death. Professor Grubbs taught at Willamette University for six years  and then in several other schools in the Pacific Northwest until poor health forced him out of his profession. Grubbs took part in various enterprises, finally going into a printing business in Portland. He died in 1911 when Ethel was in her thirties. Since Ethel did not marry, the Jason Lee family line did not survive into another generation.
• Funds had been allocated for the Oregon State Insane Asylum the year before; the site selected was north of the state prison on a slight rise just east of Salem, its present location. Groundbreaking takes place in May of this year with much of the labor force and brick building material coming from the penitentiary. The Kirkbride Building, later known as the "J" Building because of its configuration, was completed two years after.