A new exhibit at the Willamette Heritage Center called “History in Rubble” takes visitors on a historical journey through Salem, showcasing some of the city’s most iconic lost buildings, perhaps the most famous of which is the old Oregon State Capitol, which burned down in the spring of 1935, killing a firefighter and Willamette University student named Floyd McMullen.
At an open house on Thursday, McMullen’s niece Weisha Mize toured the exhibit and said that although she never met her late uncle, she had heard a lot about the man from her family lore.
“From all accounts, he was an absolute gem of a human being,” Mize said. “Just a wonderful human being.”
She said that by visiting the new exhibit, she felt a connection to both Salem’s past and her own.
Mize grew up in Salem and appreciates seeing an exhibit that showcases buildings she once knew, such as the former Liberty Elementary School where she attended and the Capitol Theater where she saw movies.
“All of these things are familiar to me and now they’re gone. So it’s really nice to see their history and see how things have changed and evolved. Some good, some bad,” Mize said. “I just find it fascinating and I like that connection from the past to where I am now and I wonder what’s going to happen in the future.”
Prior to the exhibit’s opening, dozens of community history enthusiasts gathered Thursday afternoon in the Spinning Room on the third floor of the Willamette Heritage Center’s Mill Building for a reception before receiving a preview.
Curator Kylie Pine said the idea to display about 16 of Salem’s historic buildings came to her when she saw a photo of Salem’s old civic center while flipping through a 1921 magazine. The stark contrast between the old city hall, a 20,000-square-foot masonry building, and the current 1972 Salem Civic Center in all its brutalist glory got her thinking.
“I’ve been really fascinated thinking about how our public buildings and our landscapes have changed in just a few generations,” Pine told the group. “We happen to have a lot of… rubble… is maybe a nice word for it. Remnants. Memorabilia of buildings past, and many of those are being taken out of storage and brought into the light of day today.”
Downstairs at the exhibit, Pine said the buildings featured in the exhibit were built between the early 1850s and the 1940s, and that the majority of them were destroyed after World War II.
“After World War II, there was a big building boom, and that led to a lot of these older buildings being deemed redundant in the face of the more modern things that people wanted to build,” Pine said. “They were also a little dated.”
Pine said she began working on the exhibit nearly a year and a half ago. She spent about three months poring over old records, artifacts and photographs from the Heritage Center’s archives and selecting structures for the exhibit. During that process, she was able to get some much-needed organizational work done.
“A lot of the stuff we exhibited was mislabeled in our collection, so a lot of this process was just digging around in photos a little bit and saying, ‘Oh, that’s not part of this building, that’s actually part of this building,'” Pine said.
Pine pointed out some of the more well-known buildings that visitors to the exhibit will learn more about. They include the old Marion County Courthouse and the Holman Building, which served as the de facto state house of representatives in the late 1850s and early 1860s while the young state of Oregon considered where to build its capital, Pine said.
The former site of the Holman Building is now home to the Holman Hotel, which will open downtown in 2023.
It was not until 1876 that a proper capitol building was built in Salem, after the original building burned down in 1855.
When the second Capitol burned down in 1935, the community at that time did its best to preserve the past.
“We have some burned-out documents that literally rained down on the city of Salem. Everywhere. People were collecting them as souvenirs. People were coming together. You could see the fire from a mile away,” Pine said. “Everyone came out, and they formed little brigades to get as many artifacts out of the building as they could, but it was really haphazard.”
“History in Rubble” is on view through Dec. 21 at the Heritage Center, 1313 Mill St. SE. Admission is included in the price of admission.
Contact reporter Joe Siess: (email protected) or 503-335-7790.
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Joe Siess is a reporter with the Salem Reporter. Joe joined the Salem Reporter in 2024 and primarily covers city and county government, but loves a surprise. Joe previously reported for the Redmond Spokesman, the Bulletin in Bend, Klamath Falls Herald and News, and the Malheur Enterprise. He was born in Independence, MO, where the Oregon Trail officially begins, and grew up in the Kansas City area.
