A new exhibit at the Willamette Heritage Center called History in Rubble, offers viewers a historical journey through Salem by highlighting some of the city’s iconic lost structures. Perhaps the best-known among them is the old Oregon State Capitol which burned down in spring of 1935, killing a single firefighter and Willamette University student named Floyd McMullen.
During a Thursday open house, McMullen’s niece, Weisha Mize, perused the exhibit and said while she never met her late uncle, she heard a lot about the man from her family’s lore.
“By all accounts he was absolutely a gem of a human being,” Mize said. “Just a miraculous person.”
She said seeing the new exhibit connects her with both Salem’s past and her own.
Growing up in Salem, Mize said she appreciates seeing an exhibit that showcases buildings she once knew like the former Liberty Elementary school she attended, and the Capitol Theater where she saw films.
“All of these things are familiar to me and they are now gone. So, it is really nice to see the history of them and 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 opening, dozens of community history enthusiasts met in the Spinning Room on the third floor of the Willamette Heritage Center’s Mill Building Thursday afternoon for a reception before getting a sneak preview.
Curator Kylie Pine said the idea to showcase around 16 of Salem’s historic buildings struck her when she saw a photo of Salem’s old civic center while flipping through a magazine from 1921. 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.
“Thinking about how our civic buildings have changed, and how our landscapes have changed, in just a few generations, was really intriguing to me,” Pine told the group. “We happen to have a lot of … rubble … is maybe a nice word for it. Remnants. Mementos, of past buildings, and a lot of those get to come out of the storage area and face the light of day today.”
Downstairs at the exhibit, Pine said the buildings showcased in the exhibit were built between the early 1850s and the 1940s, and she said the majority of them were destroyed post-World War II.
“After World War II there’s a big building boom, and that led to a lot of those older structures, being decided they were superfluous, in the way of the more modern things people wanted to build,” Pine said. “They were getting a little old, too.”
Pine said she started working on the exhibit nearly a year and a half ago. She spent about three months pouring over old records, artifacts and photographs housed in the heritage center’s archives selecting structures for the exhibit. During this process, she was able to get some much needed organizational work done.
“A lot of this stuff that we put on display was mislabeled in our collection, so a lot of this process was also doing a little sleuthing through photographs, and saying, ‘Oh, this isn’t part of this building, this is actually part of this building,’” Pine said.
Pine pointed out a couple of the more well known structures that visitors to the exhibit will learn more about. They include the old Marion County Courthouse and the Holman Building, which at one point during the late 1850s and early 1860s served as the de facto statehouse while the young state of Oregon figured out where to put its capital, Pine said.
The former Holman Building site is now the Holman Hotel, which opened downtown in 2023.
It wasn’t until 1876 that a proper Capitol building would be built in Salem after the original burned down in 1855.
When the second Capitol burned in 1935, the community at the time did its best to preserve the past.
“We have some burnt out documents that literally rained down on the city of Salem. All over the place. People would gather them as mementos. People came together. You could see the fire from a mile away,” Pine said. “Everybody came out, and they did little brigades to get as many artifacts out of the building as possible, but it was really haphazard.”
History in Rubble is on display through Dec. 21 at the heritage center, 1313 Mill St. S.E. Entrance is included with admission.
Contact reporter Joe Siess: [email protected] or 503-335-7790.
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Joe Siess is a reporter for Salem Reporter. Joe joined Salem Reporter in 2024 and primarily covers city and county government but loves surprises. 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 starts, and grew up in the Kansas City area.
