Author Archives: edmunsot

Warm Springs Bead Artist and OSU Alumnus Brigette Whipple to Present at OSU’s Valley Library

beadingJoin Brigette Whipple, an OSU alumnus and renowned beading artist from Warm Springs, will be doing a presentation on her beading craft on Monday, April 20, from 4 to 6 p.m. in the Valley Library’s Willamette Industries seminar rooms. Joining Brigette will be her apprentice, Sharlayne Garcia. The presentation is part of “Oregon Is Indian Country” exhibit current on display during April in the Valley Library. Other components of the exhibit are on display at the Corvallis Benton County Public Library and the Benton County Historical Society in Philomath.

For more information, contact Larry Landis at 737-0540.

Learn more about the Oregon is Indian Country exhibit.

Free up your Friday!

stubborntwig.jpgLauren Kessler, author of an award-winning book on a Japanese-American family, will read from her work at 7:30 p.m. Friday, April 17, in The Valley Library’s rotunda. The winner of an Oregon Book Award and published by the OSU Press, “Stubborn Twig: Three Generations in the Life of a Japanese American Family” was chosen by the Oregon Library Association for its statewide Oregon Reads program to celebrate Oregon’s 150th birthday.

To learn more about the event, read the OSU Media Release or read the Gazette Times article.

More information about “Stubborn Twig” can be found on the OSU Press site.

It’s the birthday party that never ends!

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Happy Birthday, again, Oregon– you don’t look a day over 150. Okay, really you do (2 months, 1 day over 150), but it’s been a tough few months for us…

For the April 15th launch, we’re looking in new directions, exploring new pictorial frontiers, zooming through time and place, and partnering with Oregon Explorer to pull together 150 of our most stunning historic images of Oregon’s 15 river basins.

It gets better! Not only are we showcasing natural resources, we are celebrating our state. This collection is more than a collection, it’s an event: our project was also accepted as an official Oregon 150 sesquicentennial project!

or150_web_badge_small.gifNo, that’s not all! Because the Oregon Explorer is all about places and spaces, we’ve also geo tagged these photos, when and where we could, so check it out! To learn more about geo tagging in Flickr, visit the GeoTagging Group.

Step back in time, explore the state, and tell us what you think.

Watch for it Wednesdays: tomorrow’s launch is a big one…

or-150.jpgTomorrow is the 3rd Wednesday, which means the Archives is releasing a new set into Flickr Commons! While all our launches are special, this one bears a brand and marks a great partnership.

Curious?

For the April 15th launch, we partnered with Oregon Explorer, the natural resources digital library jointly managed by the OSU Libraries and the OUS Institute for Natural Resources, and pulled together 150 of our most stunning historic images of Oregon’s 15 river basins.

Not only are we showcasing natural resources, we are celebrating our state. This collection is more than a collection, it’s an event: our project was also accepted as an official Oregon 150 sesquicentennial project!

Step back in time, explore the state, and tell us what you think.

“That’s why they call it a deadline, because it almost kills you.”

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Last night “Stories & Legends from the Heart of the Valley,” a documentary film about Corvallis’ first 150 years, had its debut! And, in the final installment of Morris and Lynn Walker’s “Clips in Time” column in the Gazette Times, they discuss their expectations for the premier and a bit about how to get copies for your own collection. To learn all about the project, visit the Heart of the Valley site.

Great research on Corvallis and Benton County can be done at the Benton County Historical Society.

You can use the Gazette Times online Archive to find articles online from 1999 to the present.

You can learn about our city and county on the Corvallis and Benton County official tourism website.

As always, you can check out the Wikipedia article on Corvallis.

For the history of OSU, look to our Chronological History.

An eclectic assortment of links…

book.jpgIt’s mid-week, with the grand History and Heritage Extravaganza (the 2009 NW Archivist joint conference) looming on the horizon and a lot of archives instruction happening this week! What to do? A blog post full of links to keep you all busy reading!

The World Digital Library will launch on April 21, 2009

The World Digital Library will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials. The objectives of the World Digital Library are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research.

The History Engine: Tools for Collaborative Education & Research

The History Engine is an educational tool that gives students the opportunity to learn history by doing the work—researching, writing, and publishing—of a historian. The result is an ever-growing collection of historical articles or “episodes” that paints a wide-ranging portrait of life in the United States throughout its history and that is available to scholars, teachers, and the general public in our online database. Learn more!

Adair Village Blockhouse: witness to the Cold War, Adv07-08, OR: Who can resist this teaser?

Right in the middle of Adair Village squats a massive, rectilinear pile of concrete. Unmarked and nearly windowless, its perimeter guarded by a cyclone fence topped with three strands of barbed wire, the three-story structure known locally as “the Blockhouse” is a weird sort of contradiction? it’s the biggest thing for miles around, but it’s so utterly featureless that it seems to blend into the background, going almost unnoticed by the steady stream of motorists flowing past on Highway 99W. Today it stands cold, dark and silent. But flash back a half-century, and the Blockhouse was a concrete beehive called SAGE, its corridors filled with men and its rooms crammed with electronic surveillance equipment that constantly scanned the skies. The building was a sentinel standing watch against the looming threat of nuclear annihilation… Read more!

OHSU Historical Collections and Archives celebrates National Public Health Week!

It’s that time of year again: magnolias blooming, grass growing, and folks whooping it up for the annual celebration known as National Public Health Week! Check out their resources …

Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs & Oregon State University sign new MOU

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Yesterday, Tribal Council members of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs and leaders of Oregon State University signed a new memorandum of understanding, renewing and expanding their partnership. The day was full of presentations, sharing, and personal stories, culminating with the signing of the new MOU.

Council members visited the Archives in the morning and poster-sized versions of some of our photos were on display throughout the library. Tribal Council Chairman Ron Suppah found a connection to one displayed on the 5th floor: he was in the picture! What did he see?

suppah1.jpg4-H boys at the winter feed lot, located at the Warm Springs Agency

Beyond this personal connection, Suppah reflected on the larger connection between the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs and OSU. “Where this journey began was when the federal government built The Dalles Dam on the Columbia River. Celilo Falls was a major fishing area, and when they closed the gates on The Dalles, we lost that fishing site, and the tribes demanded compensation for that.” The Tribes took this money (over $1 million) and commissioned OSU to conduct a study of tribal resources. Suppah says “The Oregon State study set the course for us as a tribal government.” You can find a copy of this 3 volume report in ScholarsArchive@OSU (Final report: Oregon State College/Warm Springs Research Project: Vol. 1. Introduction and survey of human resources, Vol. 2. Education, Vol. 3. The agricultural economy).

Speaking of historic places…

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The Whiteside Theatre Foundation has received a $5000 grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation to help pay for a structural evaluation of the vintage Corvallis movie palace. The 87-year-old theater, shut down seven years ago, needs renovation work, and foundation fundraisers say this grant is a key first step in that process.

And that’s not all, because the grant award followed another piece of good news for the theater: the Whiteside has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places!

whiteside-2.jpg To learn more, visit the Whiteside Theatre website.

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And yes, they have a Flickr-based photo tour!

To read more about the new grant, read the Gazette Times article “Grant plants seed for Whiteside.”
To see the National Register of Historic Places application, which has tons of great information about the building and its history, check out the application pdf (warning, it’s a decent-sized download).