Salem Audio Tour: Echoes of Law, Lore, and Learning

This was originally Salem's first dedicated post office, constructed back in 1903. The man behind it was James Knox Taylor, the Supervising Architect of the United States Treasury. Taylor oversaw hundreds of federal buildings across the country, and he designed this heavy Beaux Arts structure, a highly decorative, classical architectural style known for its grand, theatrical details, with a massive steel and brick frame just to support the sheer weight of its thick Ashland sandstone exterior. Now, buildings made of steel, brick, and solid stone generally tend to stay exactly where you put them. But Salem has a habit of endlessly uprooting its monuments. Earlier, we saw the State Capitol, an institution that shifted its political weight around through fires and relocations. Gatke Hall, however, shifted its literal, crushing physical weight right down the road. In 1938, to make way for a new federal building downtown, this enormous stone structure was lifted entirely intact, placed on a complex series of rollers, and painfully nudged down State Street. It was a monumental engineering marvel for its era. The painstakingly slow journey took six whole months to complete. Imagine the agonizing progress of dragging thousands of tons of delicate masonry, inch by inch, without cracking a single window or splitting the stone. I complain when I have to help a friend move a sofa. They eventually parked the building right here, on a lot that had sat tragically vacant since 1871. That was the year the university's original wooden, three-story building, which had started as a manual labor school, burned down to ashes. Gatke Hall filled that empty historical scar perfectly, stepping in to serve as Willamette University's College of Law. In 1952, the building absorbed another piece of Salem's discarded history. A ten-foot-tall, nine-hundred-pound statue of Lady Justice was salvaged from the tower of a demolished Marion County Courthouse. She was hauled into the foyer of Gatke Hall, where she greeted law students for forty years until she, too, was packed up and relocated across campus. It seems everything connected to this structure involves careful transplantation. Even the building's namesake, Robert Moulton Gatke, loved to alter the landscape. He was a political science professor and a passionate horticulturist who personally planted many of the giant sequoias and rhododendrons that decorate the campus. Gatke Hall has even hosted some modern, albeit brief, airborne departures. In February 2007, a twenty-year-old man trying to evade the police suddenly leaped out of one of these second-story windows. He miraculously survived the plunge, only to be promptly arrested by state police in a neighboring building. A truly terrible escape plan.

Ford was not just a wealthy benefactor writing checks from a distance. After moving to Salem, she enrolled here as a non-traditional student in her seventies and eighties, taking art classes under noted painter Carl Hall. She forged a deep bond with the university, and just months before she passed away in two thousand and seven, she provided that massive gift, covering half of the sixteen million dollar cost to build Ford Hall. When Willamette University hired Hennebery Eddy Architects, they demanded a design that respected the land. The architects adopted a one hundred year building philosophy, an engineering concept focused on immense durability and minimizing waste. In a brilliant bit of ambitious rebirth, the trees that had to be removed from this footprint were not thrown away. Instead, the construction team milled them and brought them right back inside. That site-harvested timber was crafted into the standing trim, mechanical grilles, and custom furniture you see throughout the building, literally forging the new structure from the landscape it displaced. The engineering behind this place is genuinely fascinating. It earned a LEED Gold certification, which is an international standard proving a building is highly energy efficient. One of its cleverest tricks is a displacement ventilation heating system. Instead of blasting hot air down from the ceiling like a giant hair dryer, the system gently releases air at low velocity from floor level vents, allowing it to rise naturally as it warms. Combine that with a twenty six point eight kilowatt solar panel array on the roof and copper cladding chosen for its recycled content, and this hall consumes fifty eight percent less energy than standard codes require. Of course, building a green utopia is rarely entirely peaceful. The project's harmonious image took a hit when the Pacific Northwest Regional Council of Carpenters set up a picket line outside. They were protesting the use of a subcontractor who did not meet area wage standards. So you had intense labor friction on the lawn while an environmental masterpiece went up behind the gates. Despite the pickets, Hoffman Construction finished the forty two thousand square foot building in just fourteen months to open for the two thousand and nine academic year. Inside, the architecture forces interaction, featuring collaborative spaces called hearths where computer science, mathematics, and digital art students mix.

Since we just walked over from Ford Hall, you are starting to get a sense of how this campus operates. Salem is a city driven by a constant cycle of reinvention... tearing down the obsolete, shuffling its institutions around, and ambitiously rebuilding its civic identity. Eaton Hall, completed in 1909, is a perfect monument to that very cycle. It exists primarily because of Abel E. Eaton, a wealthy woolen mill owner who donated fifty thousand dollars. That is roughly one point seven million dollars today. But Abel did not just write a check and walk away. The man was a notorious micromanager. He demanded the building be designed in the heavy, rugged Richardsonian Romanesque style. The architect politely nodded, and then designed a Late Gothic Revival building instead. Eaton was undeterred. He insisted on overseeing the construction himself, enforcing his exacting standards brick by brick. For fifteen years, starting in 1923, this building was the premier center of legal education in the Pacific Northwest. Before the College of Law moved over to Gatke Hall, which we passed a few minutes ago, they earned their official accreditation right inside these walls. And Eaton Hall was a bizarrely effective multitasker. While aspiring lawyers debated torts downstairs, Professor Morton Peck was upstairs running his renowned herbarium. An herbarium is basically a vast archive of dried plant specimens used for scientific research. Peck housed the world's largest collection of Oregon wildflowers right here, meticulously writing his definitive botanical manual directly above the noisy law school. Of course, being the administrative center made it a prime target for student engineering of a less academic sort. In one highly coordinated prank, students hoisted a Ford Model T onto those front steps and hung a sign reading Honest Herb's Used Cars. It was a rather pointed jab at then University President G. Herbert Smith. If you look at the roofline again, those flat turrets used to support towering round spires. But by 1967, gravity and weather had won the battle. The spires became structurally unsound and vastly expensive to maintain. Rather than endlessly repairing them, the university simply dismantled them. They chose pragmatic safety over architectural vanity, forever altering the building's silhouette. Today, Eaton Hall serves the humanities departments, operating Monday through Friday from eight in the morning until five in the evening, and closed on weekends.

You see, getting this institution's book collection into a permanent, fireproof home was a test of endurance that took over a century. Willamette's original library was established in 1844, just two years after the school was founded. In those early years, it was housed on the third floor of Waller Hall. By 1909, the school had painstakingly amassed a collection of six thousand books valued at thirty five hundred dollars, which translates to roughly one hundred and fifteen thousand dollars today. It was a modest but hard won academic treasure. Then came the evening of December seventeenth, 1919. The threat of fire, a destructive force that repeatedly displaced Salem's institutions, struck the university again, this time targeting its precious books. A massive blaze completely gutted Waller Hall. This was actually the second major fire to strike the five story building, completely destroying its inside along with its distinctive Mansard roof. If you are not familiar with the term, a Mansard roof is a style of architecture featuring four sides with two slopes each, the lower slope being much steeper than the upper. The building's square tower collapsed entirely. The flames consumed the space where the university's books were kept, leaving the library homeless. But the story of this campus is defined by a refusal to stay in the ashes. Fortunately, the strong outer brick walls of Waller Hall, which were made from clay dug right here on campus decades earlier, somehow remained standing. The university rebuilt the interior, and the library was resiliently resurrected on the second floor just one year later. As the decades passed and the collection expanded past sixteen thousand volumes, the library outgrew its rebuilt space. The books were moved to a dedicated concrete building in 1938. Finally, in 1986, this permanent modern facility was constructed. Today, this two story building houses nearly four hundred thousand volumes. The architecture itself is a testament to transparency and permanence, featuring clear glass facades on the north and south sides. That sixty one foot clock tower you see features strips of bent glass woven together, running down to an eighteen ton concrete base. The library is named in honor of Mark O. Hatfield, a 1943 graduate who later served as Oregon's governor and a United States Senator.

That original house belonged to Chloe Clark Willson, the very first teacher at the Oregon Institute, which eventually grew into Willamette University. It is another great example of women shaping the early academic foundation of Salem, turning a frontier outpost into a hub of learning. The building eventually took the name Lausanne to honor the ship that brought a massive influx of Methodist missionaries to Oregon in 1840. That voyage brought vital reinforcements who went on to help establish the university itself. But wooden structures from the pioneering era tend to become massive fire hazards. True to the city's habit of tearing down the old to forge something bolder, the university demolished Chloe's expanded house in 1919. They hired local architect Fred A. Legge to design this fire-resistant Late Gothic Revival replacement, an architectural style characterized by those pointed stone arches and heavy masonry you see at the entrance. It cost one hundred and forty thousand dollars to build, which is roughly two million dollars today. During World War Two, Lausanne actually became a ship, operationally speaking. The United States Navy took it over for an officer training program, enforcing strict military discipline. Trainees were required to adopt nautical terminology, calling the walls bulkheads and the floors decks. I suppose marching up and down a brick stairwell was considered excellent practice for oceanic warfare. Today, the building is better known for its spectral residents. It has a long-standing reputation for being the most haunted place on campus. Students have reported phantom doors opening and a century-old ghost in the attic. There is even a specific toilet on the third floor that perpetually refills with water. Some residents insist it is paranormal activity, completely ignoring the fact that it is an aging plumbing system built in 1920. Since it is an active student residence hall, it is technically open twenty-four hours a day, giving those alleged ghosts plenty of time to roam the corridors.

Back in the 1850s, the university desperately needed space because their original building was quite literally falling apart. Enter Reverend Alvin F. Waller, a relentless Methodist missionary who spearheaded a massive fundraising campaign. To construct this Renaissance style structure, an architectural design known for its classical Roman symmetry and proportion, the builders ordered half a million bricks. In a very clever bit of pioneer engineering, they fired all those bricks right here on campus, using the clay excavated to create the building's basement. The total cost came to forty thousand dollars, which is roughly eight hundred thousand dollars today. At five stories high, it dominated the sparsely settled landscape. It housed classrooms, a library, and chapels, while the attic served as makeshift housing for male students. But maintaining a wooden-framed, brick-clad building in the nineteenth century was a risky business. As we mentioned at the library, Waller Hall caught fire twice. The first time was in September 1891, just eight days into the fall term. Crowds of Salem residents gathered in their nineteenth-century attire to watch smoke billow from the roof, while a meager collection of salvaged chairs sat scattered on the lawn below. The top two floors and the roof were utterly destroyed. The university's strict new president, George Whitaker, was bizarrely unfazed. He proudly reported to the board that the inferno caused a mere two and a half hours of delay to school work. His biggest complaint was the expense of bailing rainwater out of the roofless building. They rebuilt the hall, but the threat of fire was far from over. As we know, in December 1919, that second blaze broke out. This time, the devastation was exacerbated by brutal weather. A massive storm had dumped twenty two inches of snow, and temperatures had plummeted to six degrees below zero. Firefighters arrived only to find their hoses and the city hydrants frozen completely solid. They were forced to stand by helplessly as flames completely consumed the interior. And yet, the building still stands. Gutted not once, but twice, those original campus-fired exterior brick walls refused to fall. The university simply raised more money, completely rebuilt the interior for a second time, and restored the original cupola design. Today, the hall houses administrative offices and a beautiful chapel featuring a custom pipe organ. The building is generally open Monday through Friday from eight in the morning until five in the evening if you want to take a peek inside.

It says Art now, but this building has a rather gruesome, and frankly scandalous, past. Built in 1905, this Beaux Arts structure, which is a monumental and classical architectural style, was originally the Willamette University College of Medicine. It was designed specifically for the grim realities of medical education. Those large floor to ceiling windows were meant to flood dissection tables with natural light. The walls hid a specialized ventilation system to extract the odors of the anatomy labs, and a central shaft used a pulley system to hoist cadavers from the basement up to the third floor. As we have explored Salem today, we have seen wandering institutions forced to move by devastating fires or logistical nightmares. But this medical school moved because of sheer scandal. In 1910, a landmark study of medical education known as the Flexner Report evaluated programs across North America. It delivered a scathing verdict on Willamette, ranking the medical program as a severely deficient Class C institution because it lacked adequate clinical facilities. Facing intense public pressure, the university trustees essentially threw in the towel. In 1913, they merged the program with a Portland institution, abandoning this cutting edge building just eight years after dedicating it. If you tap the image in your app, you can slide between how this spot looked in 1877 and today, quite a transformation. Following the medical school's humiliating exit, the space became a revolving door for the law school, the science department, and finally the College of Music. Over the decades, the building suffered from severe neglect. By 1970, the upper floors were condemned. The danger became undeniable when a fifty pound window frame ripped out of the wall and plummeted straight down onto a piano. It miraculously missed a student who was practicing there at the time. Following that near disaster, the university launched a massive renovation, stabilizing the floors and moving the art department here in 1976. A later three and a half million dollar remodel added a modern wing and restored those massive windows. The beautiful, luminous quality originally intended to illuminate cadavers now helps students mix oil paints. Unsurprisingly, the building's grisly origins have left a few lingering residents. Students still report hearing the dragging footsteps of a ghostly young girl in the upper halls. Another local legend claims a thief broke in to steal artifacts, only to plunge to his death from the third floor while fleeing police. His restless spirit is now blamed whenever art supplies mysteriously move around the studios.

This handsome Beaux Arts structure, an architectural style characterized by formal symmetry and decorative stone accents, stands today out of sheer, unadulterated spite. Back in 1903, the Salem Woman's Club started a public library with a grand total of fifty books. By 1909, they had raised funds and purchased this very plot of land to build a permanent home. Naturally, the Salem City Council decided to take charge. Without consulting the women, the city applied for and secured a grant of fourteen thousand dollars, which is about four hundred and fifty thousand dollars today, from the Carnegie Foundation. Andrew Carnegie was a wealthy industrialist who funded the construction of free public libraries across the globe. The city thought they had won. They were wrong. In the ultimate act of women shaping the city's future, the club refused to be sidelined. Since they held the deed to the land, they went straight over the city's head and contacted the Carnegie Foundation directly to halt the funding. It was a brilliant, ruthless power move. Not only did they force the city to negotiate, but a local cultural leader named Lulu Bush lobbied Carnegie to nearly double the grant to twenty seven thousand five hundred dollars, roughly eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars today. The women got their grand structure on their own terms. If you tap the historic image in your app, you can slide between how this looked in 1922 and today, which is quite a transformation. When it opened in 1912, the building featured a look-out basement, an architectural trick where the lower level is only partially submerged so full-sized windows can let natural light flood into the reading rooms. But structures in this town rarely get to sit still. By 1971, the library had outgrown the space. The adjacent Young Women's Christian Association bought the building for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, or about 1.1 million today. They made some drastic physical changes, completely upending the quiet academic atmosphere by bolting a massive swimming pool annex onto the side. For over three decades, the hushed silence of reading rooms was replaced by the humid, echoing splashes of a busy aquatic center. But the cycle of reinvention turned again. In 2003, Willamette University bought the property. They demolished the swimming pool, restored the original layout, and resurrected the space into a modern hub for their College of Law. When it was rededicated in 2008, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg came to speak. During her visit, the diminutive justice joked about how often she used to be confused with Sandra Day O'Connor, noting she actually missed the mix-ups because it meant she was no longer the only woman on the bench.

This twenty seven thousand square foot structure was built in 1965 for Pacific Northwest Bell. It was an International Style building, which essentially means it was a rigid, functional box designed for telephone equipment, not people. Naturally, it was the perfect place to put an art collection. In the late nineteen nineties, the university purchased the property and gutted the interior. The director affectionately calls the remodeled space a jewel box, full of warm colors, curving walls, and an intimate scale that completely defies its corporate origins. The initial push for this facility began with a massive donation of ancient and European art from Mark Sponenburgh. Sponenburgh was one of the Monuments Men. This was a specialized Allied military unit during World War Two dedicated to protecting cultural property and recovering art stolen by the Nazis. He was stationed at the Altaussee salt mine in Austria, the literal underground vault where masterpieces by Michelangelo and Vermeer had been hidden. Sponenburgh's firsthand experience pulling looted art out of the dark profoundly shaped the massive collection he later donated here. But the museum needed a permanent home, and that is where Hallie Ford stepped in. As we learned at Ford Hall, her incredible generosity added another major chapter to the story of women shaping this city. Ford's motivation was deeply personal. When she was in the fourth grade, her teacher recognized her talent and sent a note home recommending special art lessons. Knowing they could not afford it, her family hid the note to spare her feelings. Ford only learned about it as an adult. That deferred dream fueled a lifelong crusade to ensure others had the access to art that she was denied. Those colored reflector panels in the upper windows were added later by neon artist Dick Elliott. The museum director and Elliott had bonded years earlier during a highly stressful installation at another gallery where a complex light exhibit nearly failed to open on time. That shared panic forged a friendship that led Elliott to create these permanent, light responsive portals that shift colors depending on where you stand and the angle of the sun. If you want to check out the galleries, the museum is open Tuesday through Saturday from noon to five.

To understand how this imposing sanctuary got here, we have to look back to the early missionaries who arrived by sea on the Lausanne, which we touched on earlier. The founding missionary, Jason Lee, originally set up his mission headquarters right on the banks of the Willamette River. Nature, however, had other plans. Devastating floods repeatedly washed through their settlement, forcing Lee to pack up and seek the safety of higher ground. He relocated operations here to the Chemeketa Plain, effectively planting the seed for the city of Salem out of sheer geographic necessity. By eighteen fifty-three, the growing congregation built their first dedicated structure, a modest wooden frame building on this very corner. But Salem has a habit of refusing to let its buildings rest in peace. When it came time to build the massive brick structure you see today, they did not just tear down the old wooden church. Instead, they hoisted it up and moved it to a nearby lot on Liberty Street. That humble pioneer church went on to have a strange, wandering afterlife, serving a series of entirely secular purposes for decades while the congregation moved on to grander ambitions. And those ambitions were certainly grand. In the eighteen seventies, the church commissioned a celebrated Chicago architect to design a majestic Gothic Revival building. Gothic Revival is an architectural style defined by soaring vertical lines and sharp, pointed arches designed to draw the eye toward heaven. The architect delivered a stunning plan with an estimated price tag of fifty thousand dollars, which is roughly one point five million dollars today. The building committee took one look at that number and refused. They capped the budget at thirty thousand dollars, or about nine hundred thousand today. How did they achieve this massive discount? Through a very literal compromise. They took the architect's exact blueprints and simply reduced the scale of the entire building by one-eighth to save on materials. It is a remarkably blunt engineering solution to a financial problem. Even scaled down, the Panic of eighteen seventy-three nearly derailed them. When the congregation gathered for the formal dedication in eighteen seventy-eight, the grand building was nowhere near finished. The massive arched windows were just boarded over with cheap wood to block the wind, and the iconic spire had not even been built yet. This habit of extreme patience extended to their music, too. In nineteen fifty-three, they installed a massive pipe organ but could not afford all the parts. It was installed with what organ builders call prepared stops, which are essentially empty slots on the control console reserved for pipes that have not been purchased yet. For forty-seven years, the organ played with a mathematically incomplete voice until the missing pipes were finally bought in the year two thousand. If you want to look inside, the building is open on weekdays until four, though they close at twelve thirty on Fridays and are entirely closed on weekends.

This is what happens when a Portland attorney with a taste for drama decides to build a medieval castle in downtown Salem. That attorney was George Guthrie, and in the 1920s, he set out to build the finest entertainment venue between Portland and San Francisco. He hired architects to design the space in a Tudor Gothic style. For the unfamiliar, Tudor Gothic is an architectural revival of late medieval English manors, characterized by heavy masonry and steep arches, and Guthrie specifically wanted to recreate the castle from Shakespeare's play Hamlet. The lobby was designed to look like an English great hall with a starry night ceiling, and the stained glass above the doors was crafted from glass salvaged from a German cathedral bombed during World War I. But building a grand dream comes with a steep price. Guthrie initially budgeted 100,000 dollars, but construction costs violently ballooned to over 250,000 dollars, which is roughly 4.3 million dollars today. Local gossips were absolutely convinced Guthrie was driving himself straight into bankruptcy to finish his masterpiece. Despite the crippling financial anxiety behind the scenes, opening night in May 1926 was a triumph. A capacity crowd packed the nearly thirteen hundred seats to watch a silent film while the song Finlandia echoed from a massive Mighty Wurlitzer theater organ. But as we have learned on this tour, Salem's landmarks rarely sit peacefully, and the Elsinore soon faced its own eras of ruin. In 1962, the massive Columbus Day storm battered the city with ninety mile per hour winds, shredding the theater's iconic vertical blade sign and leaving the facade bare for decades. That same year, Guthrie's son removed the original Wurlitzer organ, sparking a bizarre odyssey where the instrument was housed in a barn, hauled around on tractor trailers, and eventually dismantled and sold for scraps. By 1980, the theater had degraded into a second-run cinema and was slated for the wrecking ball. Yet, much like the rescued fine art we saw championed by Mark Sponenburgh at the museum earlier, the people of Salem refused to let a cultural treasure vanish. A grassroots committee fought tooth and nail to buy and restore the venue. Local enthusiasts even installed a massive twenty-six rank pipe organ to replace the lost original. The community's stubborn ambition culminated recently in August 2025, when a towering twenty-three foot illuminated replica of the original blade sign was finally restored to the facade. Of course, the theater might still belong to its anxious creator. Performers frequently report seeing Guthrie's ghost watching rehearsals from the empty seats, or blame his spirit when stage props mysteriously move. If you want to look for him yourself, the lobby is generally open to peek into Monday through Friday from 9 AM to 2 PM.

This is the Pacific Building, originally the retail wing of the Bligh Building, constructed in 1926. It was commissioned by Frank Bligh, an ambitious thirty-four-year-old taking over from his father, T.G. Bligh. The elder Bligh was a Canadian immigrant who arrived in Salem practically penniless in 1910 and built an entertainment empire. He opened the city's first ten-cent movie house, charging an admission fee that would be about three dollars today. But his run was cut short. He was arrested in a 1917 bootlegging raid where agents dramatically seized a grand total of seven cases of beer, and he later died in a 1924 car accident. Frank built this massive complex as a monument to his father's legacy. It covered a quarter of a block, featuring twelve storefronts, thirty-five offices, and the colossal Capitol Theater with twelve hundred seats. The theater was built for vaudeville, a popular form of live stage entertainment featuring a dizzying variety of unconnected musical, acrobatic, and comedy acts. On opening night, Frank waived the admission fee. Ten thousand people squeezed through to gawk at the Florentine-style interior, characterized by heavy, ornate Italian Renaissance architectural details. It even featured soundproof, glass-enclosed crying rooms so patrons could manage fussy infants without missing the show. The theater's crown jewel was its brilliantly lit, stained-glass marquee, shaped exactly like the dome of the second Oregon State Capitol. When the actual State Capitol burned to the ground in 1935, this theater's marquee became a glowing, accidental memorial to the lost landmark until it was finally modernized in 1952. Tap the image on your screen to see a historic photo from 1934, revealing that magnificent marquee for yourself. Like so many grand stages, the theater eventually lost its audience, converting to movies before closing in 1990 and facing the wrecking ball in 2000 because of structural decay. It is just a parking lot now. But pieces survived. Its prized Wurlitzer pipe organ embarked on a bizarre journey to a Seattle ice rink in 1941, before ultimately being broken down and mixed with parts from a Portland theater to create a massive franken-organ in a private Washington home. The Bligh family name suffered a similar dismantling. Their nearby Bligh Hotel devolved into a low-rent boarding house that tragically burned in 1975, taking the lives of residents Arnold Stover and August Cico. Frank had smartly sold this retail wing to the family behind the Pendleton Woolen Mills empire in 1927, shielding it from the Great Depression and leaving the Pacific Building as the last dignified survivor of the Bligh legacy.