I thought I would have no more epiphanies about the destruction of Baker City’s Central Building until I walked past the site after the first fall of snow.

It was late in the afternoon, the sun gone but its presence still vivid in the pink glow of the clouds gracing the Elkhorns like a gauzy garland.

The snow on the sidewalks had melted earlier but in the dusk ice was beginning to form and the footing was in places treacherous.

I stepped lightly, as a soldier does when crossing ground which might be seeded with mines.

I was on the north side of the block where the building stood until early July.

That’s when workers dismantled the three-story structure, made in part of volcanic tuffstone quarried near Pleasant Valley. Six weeks earlier a trio of juveniles started the fire that gutted the Central Building, which served as Baker High School from 1917-52 and was part of the middle school campus until the structure was closed in 2009. Two juveniles have been sentenced to an unspecified term in a state youth prison. Charges are still pending against the third.

The block that the Central Building occupied is bare and flat.

The snow was an inch or so deep.

As I looked across the plain white expanse it occurred to me that more than a century has passed since the first flakes of snow landed here on bare ground rather than on a roof.

108 years, to be precise.

That is a considerable span.

Innumerable snowflakes have fallen since those newly laid stones were first whitened.

I thought, as I made my tentative way along, keen for the telltale glisten of ice on the concrete, about how many times students must have sat at their desks and watched snow drift past the windows.

How many thousands of people have trudged out of the building, snow squeaking beneath their feet, after watching a concert or a play or a basketball game.

The loss of a venerable building is not merely a physical wound.

The Central Building’s absence creates a chasm in Baker City’s history, a gash which can’t be healed.

The structure persists, of course, in a manner of speaking, in memories and in photographs.

But these are flimsy things compared with those chunks of tuffstone, fashioned and laid with care and skill by people long since dead.

Among the items recovered from the time capsule within the Central Building’s cornerstone, which anchored its northeast corner, is a handwritten list of the stonecutters, members of the Journeymen Stone Cutters Association of North America, who helped assemble the building.

I’m glad this list was saved, along with several other things including copies of the Baker Herald and Morning Democrat newspapers, ancestors of today’s Baker City Herald, from September 1916 when the cornerstone was laid, a list of premiums from the Baker County Fair Association and a directory of Baker teachers and school officers from 1915-16.

These artifacts connect us to a time we can scarcely imagine — a time when cars were newfangled, computers beyond comprehension and there was only one world war and its carnage was still going on.

But I’d rather have the building.