WILD RIDES AT FARM-CITY PRO RODEO » PAGE A8
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 15, 2018
HermistonHerald.com
$1.00
INSIDE
NEW FIELDS
Lacrosse program asks for
new fields at EOTEC
PAGE A3
DRIVER
SHORTAGE
Looking for a job? Bus
drivers always in demand
PAGE A6
HISTORY
Blaze near Hat Rock in
1992 sent firefighter to the
hospital
PAGE A2
How a fast-growing city maintains its past
“There were
some other great
buildings torn
down. Some just
wore out, like the
Old Oregon Hotel.”
DICK LOWRY, HERMISTON
BY THE WAY
Help steer EOTEC’s
future with survey
Have an opinion about
the Eastern Oregon Trade
and Event Center’s future?
The city wants to hear it.
EOTEC has been oper-
ating for over a year and
in the city of Hermiston’s
control for a few months,
and the advisory commit-
tee is offering an online
survey in English and
Spanish at www.eotecsur-
vey.com.
“If you don’t know
where you’re going, then
any road will get you
there,” said city manager
Byron Smith in a state-
ment. “We want to use this
process to get a clear mes-
sage from the community
about what the EOTEC
facility should look like
10 years from now, and
that will allow us to avoid
short-sighted opportuni-
ties which may compro-
mise our path toward the
community’s
ultimate
goal.”
Anyone who fills out
the survey will be entered
to win a $50 Visa gift card
or family passes to the
Hermiston Family Aquatic
Center. The city will also
solicit feedback specifi-
cally from EOTEC cus-
tomers, partners and oth-
ers with an interest in the
project.
• • •
The American Red
Cross is still facing a crit-
ical blood shortage, and
See BTW, Page A14
Preservation of Hermiston’s
limited historic buildings is
a struggle
By JADE MCDOWELL
STAFF WRITER
ermiston only has one museum,
and most of its residents haven’t
even been there.
“People say, ‘I’ve lived here all my life
and never heard of that,’” Connie Maret
said.
Maret runs the Maxwell Siding Train
Museum next to Hodge Park with John
Spinden, offering up tours for a few hours
each Saturday of antique train cars “chock
full” of historical artifacts from Hermiston
and the railroad. A majority of the free muse-
um’s visitors are from out of town.
Maret and Spinden would love to pass
the museum on to some younger volun-
teers (at age 84, Maret said, he’s “no spring
chicken.”). But they have had trouble inter-
esting the next generation of Hermiston res-
idents in preserving the town’s history, of
which the railroad is a major player.
“I know the stuff I’ve saved ever since I
was a little bitty kid, my kids won’t want it,”
he said. “Once it’s gone, it will never come
back.”
There are pieces of Hermiston’s history
that have been preserved, in boxes of photo-
graphs at locals’ homes and a few scattered
ABOVE (Photo contributed by Mitch Myers): Hermiston’s Main Street in the early 1900s.
BELOW (Staff photo by Jade McDowell): Hermiston’s Main Street today.
historic buildings. An archway from the last
iteration of Armand Larive Middle School
stands near the public library as a testament
to the many school buildings Hermiston has
seen come and go over its more than cen-
tury-long history. But Hermiston doesn’t
have any buildings on the National Register
of Historic Places, despite being the biggest
city in a county that has 42 sites on the regis-
try (Pendleton has 16 of those; Echo has 10).
Carlisle Harrison, one of Hermiston’s
history enthusiasts, said some of Hermis-
ton’s lack of historical preservation has to
do with how the town developed. It was
small and very poor for the first few decades
of its existence (the town was incorporated
in 1907), then saw a population explosion
during the building of the McNary Dam
and Umatilla Chemical Depot in the 1940s.
At that point no one was as worried about
eye-pleasing architecture as they were about
getting buildings up fast and cheap.
The results, he said, were a lot of build-
ings that were “nothing to write home about”
and not built to last into the next century.
“Things were practical and inexpen-
sive,” he said. “In Pendleton the moneyed
wheat farmers came into town and built nice
houses.”
Harrison said that wasn’t necessarily a
See HISTORY, Page A14
Fair weathers the heat, learns from 2017
By JAYATI RAMAKRISHNAN
AND JADE MCDOWELL
STAFF WRITERS
Another year, another fair. Uma-
tilla County Fair employees and
community partners called the 2018
event a success, sticking with the
things that worked and changing
those that didn’t.
Fair coordinator Angie McNal-
ley said they wouldn’t have num-
bers for fair attendance until later in
the week, but said the busiest day of
the fair was Saturday and the busiest
evening was on Friday.
She said fair employees learned
from last year’s fair, the first in the
new Eastern Oregon Trade and Event
Center venue, and changed a few
logistical things.
“We learned a lot last year about
foot traffic, and where to place
things,” she said. “We’re still work-
ing on getting the flow moving in
parts of the fair that people can’t
see right when they walk in. But we
vastly improved (the flow).”
She said they also made parking
more efficient than last year, bring-
ing in people from the Toyota Center
in Kennewick to help.
Though it was hot and windy,
McNalley said people still came out,
and that the weather sent people into
the air-conditioned building more
often, driving traffic to vendors and
to the 4-H exhibits.
“We can’t plan the weather,” she
said. “We tried to make up for that
with misters, and some of our ven-
dors stepped up as well.”
See HEAT, Page A7
STAFF PHOTO BY E.J. HARRIS
A pair of hogs sleep next to each other during the mid-day heat Friday in
the swine barn at the Umatilla County Fair in Hermiston.