Collection was recently moved to Portland geology office

The way Gary Bloomer sees it, Baker City – once known as the Queen

City of the Mines – is a better place to display gold and silver

samples than is Portland.

The latter is Oregon’s most populous city by a significant margin, of course.

But it is rather deficient in mines.

Which explains why Bloomer is perplexed about state officials’

recent decision to move a collection of precious metal and gemstone

samples from Baker City, where they had been displayed for more than

half a century, to the state geology department’s headquarters in

Portland.

The collection includes an opal mined more than 100 years ago on

property near Durkee that Bloomer, who’s a cattle rancher, owns with

his wife, Kathy.

“It’s important that these displays be returned to Baker County, where they mean the most to our heritage,” Gary Bloomer said.

It’s possible that the samples will come back to Baker City.

State officials haven’t decided where to display the historic collection, said Mark Ferns, regional geologist at the Baker City office of the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries (DOGAMI).

DOGAMI had planned to close its Baker City office, at the corner of Campbell and Cedar streets, as part of a budget-cutting plan.

But the Baker County commissioners offered to let the department move into the County Courthouse earlier this fall.

Because DOGAMI’s new quarters are smaller, the agency lent most of its rock and mineral collection – about 300 samples from around the world – to the Baker Heritage Museum (formerly the Eastern Oregon Regional Museum) in Baker City, Ferns said.

But that donation didn’t include the pieces that both Ferns and Bloomer consider the most significant.

Those are the approximately 40 samples of ore and gems – most of which, like the opal, were mined in Baker or Grant county – that were driven to Portland recently.

The collection includes gold found in some of the more productive mining districts in Baker County, such as Cornucopia, north of Halfway, and Cracker Creek near Sumpter, Ferns said.

The collection is noteworthy in part because it was assembled to promote the area’s mining potential when Baker County’s economy was thriving, largely as a result of mining, around the turn of the 20th century, he said.

“It was basically a traveling advertisement,” Ferns said. “It was intended to show the economic potential of this area.”

The collection was displayed at international expositions in San Francisco in 1899 and at St. Louis in 1904.

The samples were lent to DOGAMI in the 1940s, and soon after the agency bought the collection for the bargain price of $50, Ferns said.

“It’s been an integral part of the department’s inventory for a long time,” he said.

And it’s an integral part of Baker City’s history that should be displayed here, Bloomer believes.

He’s trying to enlist the Chamber of Commerce and the county commissioners to lobby DOGAMI to send the collection back to Baker City.

“I just hate to see it leave,” Bloomer said.

Ferns said DOGAMI also hauled part of a similar collection from the agency’s Grants Pass office, which is closed due to budget cuts, to Portland.

He said the Grants Pass collection is “superior” to the one from Baker City.