February 13, 2009

An Original at 150
Original county courthouse has a mobile and checkered past

By KATHY GRAY
of The Chronicle

     Wasco County conducts its business in marbled halls these days, but when Oregon was born, a day short of 150 years ago, the work went on behind clapboard walls above creaking floors.
     Oregon isn’t the only creation turning 150 this year. So is the Original Wasco County Courthouse.
     “It was built for $2,500 out of green wood,” says Barbara Telfer, an original courthouse board member. W.C. Wallace built the building. Colonel Gates and W.C. Moody were on the commission that oversaw the planning and construction. “And they wouldn’t sign off on the building, since the jail cells didn’t have doors.”
     The cells have sturdy, rough-hewn doors now. Behind one sits a display of various handcuffs and leg irons; behind the other, the courthouse gift shop.
     Tucked away on dead-end Second Place, just behind The Dalles Area Chamber of Commerce, the original courthouse is an unassuming piece of history, blending quietly with its late 19th century and early 20th century neighbors.
     The simple, shed-roofed porch out front mimics the boardwalk that would have fronted the building when it was originally built, on the lot where The Dalles City Hall stands today.
     It served as Wasco County’s courthouse through Oregon’s early days.
     Before statehood, Wasco County stretched for 130,000 square miles, from the crest of the Cascades to the Rocky Mountains, between the 42nd parallel and the Columbia River. The Dalles was its county seat.
     When Oregon became a state, the county was confined by the state’s borders. Eventually, the state’s 17 eastern counties were all carved from Wasco.
     The original courthouse served the county as sheriff’s office, clerk’s office and courthouse until 1883.
     The sheriff’s office and jail cells were divided from the courtroom, each with separate entrances, Telfer notes.
     “You can imagine the judges wouldn’t want to be too close to the prisoners,” she says.
     They were close enough. Because the green wood construction left chinks between the floorboards, the judges were often subjected to the fleas and chiggers that prisoners brought with them to the jail cells.
     Those creaking original floorboards, with their square-nail construction and caulked gaps, are still evident in the upstairs courtroom.
     Church groups used the courtroom for their Sunday services, also had some unwanted contact when the inmates occasionally chimed in on the hymns.
     “However, their words were more suited to below than above,” Telfer says.
In those days, when the original was the courthouse, The Dalles offered a microcosm of frontier life, Telfer says. In this one location, the railroads with their Chinese laborers, Indians, missionaries, pioneers, gold miners, riverboats and an army fort all came together.
     “We reek of history,” Telfer says.
     The building’s life as a courthouse came to an end in 1883 with a startling conclusion.
     “That’s when they realized that if they didn’t have a jailer, the prisoners could kick their way out of the cells,” Telfer says.
     So the second courthouse was built and the original served as city hall.
When its city life came to a close, the old courthouse took to wandering. It first moved across the street. Then it moved to the old Brady’s Market parking lot (for newcomers, that’s where The Chronicle’s parking lot sits today). It served as a boarding house there for the longest stretch of its life, from 1909 until 1961.
     Then it was moved out to where the Lewis & Clark monument sits today, then back behind what is now the Ted Walker Memorial Swimming Pool.
     “But it was a victim of vagrants there because it sat empty,” Telfer says.
     At that point, the city was prepared to demolish the derelict building, until Alf Wernmark intervened.
     “He literally got in front of the bulldozer and said, ‘You can’t do this,’” Telfer says.
     Volunteers were given a certain amount of time to get a plan together and move the building yet again.
     This time, the courthouse took up residence on the chamber of commerce grounds, right next to Mill Creek, and was where cherries were sold during harvest season. Then the 1996 flood sent the creek over its banks and damaged the foundations of the building.
     The courthouse made its final move, to land leased from the city, where it sits today on Second Place.
     Inside the courthouse are more than just old walls and floors. The building houses a treasure of historic photos, and a variety of old ledgers and other books charting the history of the county.
     “This is my favorite,” Telfer says, leafing through the yellowed pages of a ledger from the old Tygh Valley store. “The family names are still the same.”
     To the left of the front door sits a modest little wooden podium, the courthouse bow to Shaniko. It was the podium used as the auctioneers block at the turn of the 20th century, when Shaniko was the inland wool capital of the world. In 1902, Shaniko moved 4 million pounds of wool.
     The Original Wasco County Courthouse has other historic resources, as well, and hopes to put many of them online eventually. It has digitized a series of 1970s era slide tapes on topics like Celilo Falls, wheelwrighting, horse-powered wheat farming and cherry farming.
     “We’re going to see if we can update them, but as they are they’re part of the historic record.”
     They also have audio tapes of 30 years of the annual courthouse history forum.
The historic courthouse operates with the financial help of an endowment fund, but that money came not from a big foundation or fat-pocketed benefactor.
     “The funds for the endowment came from bingo games — years and years of bingo games put on by Walt Ericksen,” Telfer says.
     Ericksen was a longtime cherry orchardist and businessman in The Dalles, and the father of current Wasco County Judge Dan Ericksen.