Derelict hotel reborn as mountain summer camp

In its heyday, the Meacham Hotel, built in 1897, was a welcome sight for weary travelers making their way through Eastern Oregon’s Blue Mountains. In the early 1900s, freight and passenger trains stopped in the tiny hamlet along the Union Pacific Railroad line to take on water and fuel after the long haul up from the Umatilla plain in the west and the Grande Ronde Valley to the east. The white frame hotel served family-style meals in its large dining room, and a dozen rooms were available on the second floor.

Once dining cars were introduced to UP trains, the hotel saw much less use. Then Highway 30 was built, and eastward and westward construction met in Meacham. In 1923 President Warren G. Harding set up headquarters at the hotel for the dedication of a new, faster way of traveling across Oregon. But fast diesel trains and improved highway construction in the next few decades meant the Meacham Hotel was no longer needed, and the building gradually faded into obscurity. It was closed to business in 1941, and over the years suffered from looting, vandalism and neglect.

In 1962, the hotel’s owner, Mrs. Earl Gillanders, met an evangelist and his wife during a musical tour of the Northwest. Mrs. Gillanders wanted to reopen the hotel and dedicate its new life to the memory of her husband. The Rev. Herschel Thornburg and his wife sold her on the idea of a summer music and art camp for all ages, using the hotel as a base. And the Melody Mountain Hotel was born.

The former Meacham Hotel was rechristened the Melody Mountain Hotel in September 1966 by the Rev. Herschel Thornburg and his family, who ran the property as a summer music and art camp and retreat. (EO file photo)

The Thornburgs took a long-term lease with Mrs. Gillanders for the hotel and 40 acres of the surrounding property. Then they went to work repairing and refurbishing the hotel, relying on the kindness of strangers and thrift stores for much of the interior decor. “Every light fixture has been donated by a different group,” Rev. Thornburg said. “We get furniture and fixtures from all over the Northwest, and what isn’t given to us, we have bought in second-hand stores or the Goodwill stores.”

The Rev. Herschel Thornburg (EO file photo)

The summer camp opened in July of 1966 with a series of week-long music and art classes. Patrons were grouped by age, with junior high boys and girls registered at the first of the season and high school and adult groups following on later in the summer. And while the Thornburgs were not running the camp as an evangelistic endeavor, they did offer devotions twice a day.

The Thornburgs envisioned further renovations, of the cottages and barn on the property, for additional sleeping quarters, hoping that eventually up to 75 guests could be lodged at one time. And though Rev. Thornburg was willing to tackle most any remodeling project, he sometimes made several tries at it before he was successful.
“I had a pretty fizzy bath last night,” said Mark Herman, 12, son of the camp cook. “He hooked up the soda fountain here in the lobby to the plumbing. And when I turned on the bathtub faucet upstairs, carbonated water came out.”

The hotel, which has been renamed the Historic Meacham Hotel, continued to welcome groups for retreats and served as a bed and breakfast under the guidance of the Rev. Thornburg’s son, Lon, and his family as recently as 2016. It was listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places on Aug. 6, 2002.

Pendleton native strikes gold in Alaska

A former Pendleton man who relocated to Alaska during its gold rush years struck it lucky in 1900 when partners in a company he was backing discovered gold in a creek basin at the foot of glaciers eight miles from Juneau.

Wesley N. Matlock, son of Pendleton politician William F. Matlock, joined thousands of men who moved to the Alaskan wilderness in search of gold in the late 1800s. On July 2, 1900, Matlock’s partners Sam Butts and Jesse Crawford arrived at Nugget Creek north of Juneau and began panning for gold in the middle of three basins of the creek situated at the base of glaciers. Fifteen pans were taken from the creek and all showed good color, netting the pair 50 cents (about $15 in 2018) worth of gold flakes. They returned to Juneau without marking the locations of their find to report to Matlock.

Not satisfied with the take from the creek, Matlock returned himself on July 7 to the secret location, rowing up the creek to a sand bar and from there borrowing a team of horses to arrive at the foot of the glacier. There they met another prospecting team who claimed the area was a bust for gold purposes, saying they had sunk several test holes and found nothing when they hit bedrock under the soil surface.

Matlock and his partners arrived at the creek shortly thereafter and found that this assertion was indeed the case. However, they discovered that the other team had hit a false bedrock, and by digging 2 1/2 feet deeper found a coarse gold nugget worth $5 ($150 in 2018). Five locations were investigated, including the Lucky Salmon claim that was staked as their discovery claim, and gold was found in plenty at each site. The partnership discovered that the creek was fed by two glaciers running through the creek claim basins and under the big glacier near the sand bar.

The Matlock & Company discovery claim covered about 15 acres on the middle basin. Another 100 acres on the upper basin and 350 acres on the lower basin and numerous bench claims on the rolling hills around Nugget Creek meant there was plenty of room for prospectors to stake additional claims in the area.

Matlock and his partners returned to Juneau and formed their company, filing claim to 160 acres of the lower basin. Of the 19 total claims they filed in the new district, Matlock himself held half of them.

Once the claims were filed, Matlock divulged the location of the gold strike to the Juneau Daily Dispatch, and several boatloads of prospectors immediately made their way to the glacier fields of Mt. Juneau to stake claims of their own.

Matlock and his partners went on to find more gold in Alaska, with 20 claims near Nome by 1903. By 1905 the main claims near Nome were playing out, and Matlock ceased working them while entertaining offers from people wanting to take them over. He eventually relocated to Portland, though he traveled extensively to keep tabs on his many financial interests throughout the western U.S.

WWI armistice announced before Germany's surrender

A telegram received by the East Oregonian in November of 1918 announced the armistice that ended hostilities during World War I. But the United Press had jumped the gun by four days.

The telegram was sent at 9:30 a.m. from the UP’s Portland bureau on November 7, 1918. The news from Paris, according to the telegram, was that the Allies and Germany has signed an armistice at 11 a.m. that morning (Paris time) and hostilities had ceased at two o’clock in the afternoon — but not before the Americans took control of Sedan in northeastern France.

The actual telegram received by the East Oregonian on Nov. 7, 1918, announcing the armistice (EO archive)

The EO plastered “Huns Quit!” across the top of the front page of its November 7 edition. Neither the Associated Press nor William Randolph Hearst’s International News had heard anything about the signing an hour after the UP flashed its news to the world, and the AP accused the UP of faking the news.

The following day, Admiral Henry B. Wilson, United States Navy commander of American forces in French waters, came to UP’s defense: “The statement of the United Press relative to the signing of the armistice was made public from my office on the basis of what appeared to be official and authoritative information. I am in position to know that the United Press and its representatives acted in perfect good faith and that the premature announcement was the result of an error for which the agency was in no way responsible.” A second telegram stating that the armistice information was unconfirmed had been delayed for hours by censors, arriving in New York at noon on November 8.

Facts were, the Allied forces had offered armistice terms to Germany, but also given them until 11 a.m. on November 11 to decide whether to surrender.

The UP’s premature release of the news caused an uproar in Germany. It had been suggested that the news be delayed a world release until the German people could be informed, but instead revolts broke out in all the major German cities after the story broke, bringing the entire country to a halt. Kaiser Wilhelm II fled Germany for the Netherlands after abdicating his throne, and the crown prince was forced to abdicate just hours later. Germany subsequently became a republic.

Ferdinand Foch, the French general and military theorist who served as the Supreme Allied Commander during WWI, accepted the German surrender at 11 a.m. (Paris time) on November 11. Terms of the armistice required German forces to be evacuated from all invaded territories, and all air and sea craft returned to stipulated points on German soil; reparation for damage done to invaded countries and Allied and American vessels; the surrender of a vast amount of weapons and equipment; and the abandonment of all treaties forced on occupied countries by Germany during the war. And Germany had 30 days to make it happen.

The French palace at Versailles was chosen as the site for signing the official peace treaty, and on June 28, 1919, exactly five years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand that led to the war’s beginning, Germany and the Allied powers formally ended World War I.

Snowstorm traps hunting party in Blue Mountains

A large hunting party endured a struggle for survival after a blizzard marooned them for 10 days in the snowbound wilderness in the Blue Mountains near Pomeroy, Wash., in November of 1945.

Several groups of elk hunters ignored warnings of an impending snowstorm on November 10, 1945, and were camping on a mountaintop in the Blue Mountains northeast of Walla Walla when the storm hit. When it became obvious that they wouldn’t make it out of the mountains immediately, the groups banded together to share expertise and supplies.

Lester Riley, a Snake River cattle rancher, started out on horseback for Pomeroy to bring help. He fought through snowdrifts up to 40 feet deep and arrived in Pomeroy with his horse almost dead from exhaustion. He spent $600 to arrange for a bulldozer to attempt to clear the road back to where his fellow hunters remained huddled together for warmth and protection. Three days later, the dozer bucked through the last huge drifts to where 25 cars belonging to the parties were buried under the snow.

By Saturday, Nov. 17, the party was digging out the cars and rationing what food was left amongst them. The cars assembled into a caravan on Sunday morning and started for Pomeroy with the bulldozer clearing the road ahead. By Sunday night the caravan had made it three miles, and was forced to sleep overnight in the limited protection of their vehicles. Meanwhile, Washington Governor Monrad Wallgren and state game commissioner Virigl Bennington had arranged with the Walla Walla airbase for the use of three rotary snowplows, which started out from Pomeroy to meet the party coming the other way.

By late Monday the hunters were battling 70-mile-an-hour gales that dropped visibility to a few feet in front of them. They were frequently required to leave the safety of their cars to shovel by hand while the bulldozer labored ahead of them. A string of mules carrying supplies got off the road in the storm, and five of them plunged over a cliff to their deaths. Two more mules were lost but ultimately recovered, one of them weighed down by its pack and kicking feebly out of a snowdrift. Both were saved.

The hunting party had struggled just another three miles through the drifts before meeting the rotary snowplows and an army rescue party late Monday evening.

Members of the party praised Lester Riley for risking his life to ride for help, and Otis Banks, the mule skinner, who several times rescued people who became bogged down in the snow. Casualties in the party included a woman who suffered a heart attack, a man who contracted pneumonia, another with a broken leg, and a third with a ruptured kidney. All were treated at local hospitals.

J.C. Coleman of Kelso, Wash., said, “I wouldn’t take a million dollars for this experience, but I wouldn’t give two cents to do it again. It was the most terrible thing I’ve ever been through.”