COLUMN: An impressive tour of the Pythian Castle

Published 3:06 pm Friday, July 30, 2021

I walked through Baker City’s Pythian Castle with what I suspect was the bemused expression of a person who is seeing something that doesn’t merely exceed his expectations, but lies well beyond them.

(I didn’t have a mirror so I can’t be sure about my expression. But bemused is what it felt like.)

I stroll past this imposing structure, at the corner of First Street and Washington Avenue, at least a few times each week.

I drive by occasionally as well.

It is a noteworthy building, even by the standards of Baker City’s renowned, and deservedly so, historic downtown district.

The Pythian Castle was built in 1907, when Baker City still had its original two-word name.

(Three years later voters decided they were satisfied with plain old “Baker.” And 79 years after that, voters — no doubt including some descendants of those who dropped “city” — terminated the long experiment in brevity and put “city” back where it was originally. This proves something about the electoral process, but I have no idea what that might be.)

The Pythian Castle’s exterior walls are faced, like several other downtown structures including Baker City Hall and the Baker County Courthouse, with Pleasant Valley tuffstone, a type of volcanic ash welded into a solid (very solid) formation by the heat of an eruption between 15 million and 16 million years ago.

The building was the local headquarters for the Knights of Pythias, a nonsectarian fraternal order founded in 1864.

And though it was never a castle in the sense of a place where a king lives — or at least a medieval lord of some prominence — the name is not inappropriate.

The building’s battlement-style parapet — the series of stone “teeth” — certainly give the impression of a castle. These features, as part of an actual castle, gave archers both a place to shelter, as well as open spaces between from which they could fire their arrows or, perhaps, pour boiling oil on the enemy below during a siege.

I knew Heidi Dalton had bought the Pythian Castle in early 2020, and that she was restoring its interior.

The Herald published a story about her progress in late June 2020.

But I hadn’t been inside, to see the handiwork of Heidi and her contractors, until the afternoon of June 30.

I was there to have a look at the Herald’s new office space in the building. I’m excited about the move, which should be complete in early August. The newspaper, to an extent, has come home.

The Herald’s office was at the other end of the block, at First and Court, for more than half a century before our previous owner, Western Communications Inc., sold that building in the spring of 2018.

I feel honored, too, to work in the same building where Leo Adler oversaw his magazine distribution empire, the fruits of which continue to enrich the community he loved.

Once we had walked through the office, admired the original polished wood trim and the view through the tall, narrow windows on the Castle’s west side, Heidi offered to give us a comprehensive tour.

We climbed the stairs — more dark, lustrous wood of the sort you rarely see except in buildings at least a century old — and Heidi guided us to the ballroom.

There were audible gasps from the group as she opened the doors.

The renovation is ongoing, but this space is impressive even when it’s strewn with tools and lengths of lumber and small, aromatic drifts of sawdust.

Its grandeur is impossible to discern from outside. Inside, though, the sheer scale is so beyond what we experience in most structures — exposed wooden joists more than 20 feet overhead, windows nearly as tall as a basketball hoop, space enough to have a junior high rollerskating party — that I needed a minute or so to comprehend what I was seeing.

I could imagine the parties that happened here so long ago, couples in formal dress dancing across the maple floor in an era when people talked about the Great War but wouldn’t know what you meant if you referred to the Great Depression.

Heidi also showed us the second-story residential quarters where she and her two teenage daughters live.

The view of the Elkhorns is as you might expect from an elevated vantage point.

It’s a common thing to credit someone with “saving” a building. Sometimes this is literally true, of course. Barbara and Dwight Sidway rescued the Geiser Grand Hotel. Had the couple not taken a fancy to the decrepit building in 1993, it almost certainly would not stand today.

The Pythian Castle, by contrast, was in no danger of falling to the wrecking ball.

Previous owners Rosemary and Larry Abell did a considerable amount of renovation work on the building after they bought it in 2002.

Heidi is turning the Castle into a true showplace — the sort of structure that people drive hundreds of miles to see.

While we were following her around, I thought about a topic that I’ve heard discussed periodically over the past 30 years — the potential that exists in the second floors (and sometimes third or higher floors) of Baker City’s historic downtown buildings.

The changes Heidi has wrought in the Castle remind me of just how vast and untapped that potential is.

I pondered how many tens of thousands of square feet exist, the dust slowly accumulating, how many expanses of irreplaceable hardwood floors, awaiting only the ministrations of the sander and the buffer soaked in lacquer, the fine grain ready to gleam for the first time since Truman was president, or maybe Taft, or McKinley.

Time stretches. People die. Memories are lost, and photographs are buried in landfills.

But so long as the buildings stand, their bones still stout and their walls true, the next chapters in their long tales are waiting to be written.

Jayson Jacoby is editor of the Baker City Herald.

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