The Covered Pedestrian Bridge, Silverton

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In the last missive (and maybe one or two previous) I made mention of the pedestrian bridge that connects Town Square Park, next to downtown Silverton and across the creek, to Water Street at Lewis. 

Illustrated here is the bridge if you aren't on it taking pictures:

The covered bridge is something personal to Silverton; one of the most historic covered bridges in the state, the Gallonhouse Bridge, is located about two miles north of here, just outside of town (follow First Street to Hobart Road, left on Hobart to Gallonhouse Road, and right on Gallonhouse to the Bridge itself, as we will do sometime soon). So this charming little bridge, which makes it all of a piece.

The Gallonhouse Bridge was named for what people would trade at that point, during Prohibition years. The nature of the substance traded in gallons is an exercise left to the reader, but I'm sure I've left enough clues that the reader can intuit it.

The trade may have involved an ancestor; my mother liked to tell me one of the things my grandfather, the first Samuel John Klein, did, was hide 'shine on his dairy farm, which was located northeast of town about halfway between Silverton and Scotts Mills.

It's a family legend which will have to stay that way, because of reasons. But it's a fun story to hint at.

Town Square Park, Silverton, and My History Thereupon

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As mentioned in the last posting, there is a park in the middle of Silverton now, along West Main, between the bridge and Fiske Street, which is terribly charming and comfortable, and they call it Town Square Park.

It's roughly square in shape and goes back some 100-150 feet from West Main. If one goes to the south side of it, and looks north from the ramp to the covered footbridge, just past the war memorial, the view one gets approximates the picture, thenceforth and herewith.

This is a patch of ground I have intimate history with. I'll explain.

In the middle background, in front of that brick building (which at one time was the local phone company building and probably still is telco propertry, though not in the way it was when I was young), is a length of West Main Street that runs about 160 feet in length, give or take fifteen feet or so. And along that brief bit of road, if you drove west from the bridge, there were the following three buildings on that side of the street in this order:

1. A building that looked as though it once provided services to cars which, even in my youth, looked dusty and disused for decades
2. Hoyt's Grocery
3. A gas station on the corner of Fiske that started out as Hancock and later was a Fina station.

Hoyt's Grocery remains a treasured, if attenuating, memory. My mother worked there for a few months while I was a toddler and we were rooming with my Grandma Klein on South Second in the months before we moved up to, and I commenced my formative years on, Steelhammer Road. And many times during that childhood we stopped in for this and than at Hoyt's.

It was the old-school kind of small market, unlike today's quick-shops, c-stores, and roadside markets: it was stocked with dry goods, a small selection of produce and meat, and essentials that you could stop for on the way home if you didn't feel like going over to Roth's or the Safeway. I mean, we knew the owners. They were sweet people. I remember old Lillian Hoyt, how she was just this sweet old lady who ran the grocery store with the assistance of her family, how she lived in the apartment in the small triplex that was tucked in behind that gas station on the corner. I remember how the sign over the front of the store had HOYT'S GROCERY in big, chunky, curvily voluptuous letters, the way that sign was bracketed by two big 7UP (I think it was 7UP, anyway) signs, and the way the front wall was actually set on a track and could be opened like a closet door if they had to. I remember the wooden floor of the place.

And now here am I, wandering through this park and there's no trace of those places. I hope pictures of the old grocery store exist somewhere. I'd like to see them again. 

And now here am I, wandering through this park and in spaces that I couldn't have walked to when I was small, and thinking about how we think as we grow aged the world moves on without us and we can think that way if we want, but we can also think that things change and the world does move on but it moves on with us as passengers and the views from the ride are actually quite lovely, if we accept what we see. 

Getting too philosophical means I've maundered a bit too prolix, and I should leave this here. 

And that I shall. 

The Back Stairs To Silver Creek

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We return to Silverton to get to know Silver Creek a little better. It's changed and gotten incredibly charming, and deserves the tarry.

Along West Main Street, just the other side of the creek from the center of town and Water and Main, is a park, Town Square Park. Quite a lovely place and with it I'm rather smitten. It is roughly square in shape, fronting West Main between the end of the bridge and Fiske Street, with a small parking lot at the corner and a charming public toilet (Portland has its Loos, but leave it to Silverton to make a public convenience charming), and at the south side of the park, the pedestrian path winds past a war memorial to cross a covered footbridge over Silver Creek that'll connect you back to Water Street a block south of Main.

If you stand on the bridge ... which has ample room for those who want to take it slow and absorb the charm ... and look upstream, in the general southward direction, you see this, a property on Fiske Street backing up to the creek itself and this stairway from that property going right down to the creek bank which is all so adorable I say, without trace of irony, that I can't even here.

It has occurred to me that the owner of that property is quite the fortunate person. 

It, and the presence of Riverfront Park in Salem, speak of a quantum leap in how Valley communities relate to the streams that flow through them. In Salem, as I said earlier, downtown ended for most of us at Commercial Street, Front Street was a railway-laced nightmare for your car's chassis, and riverfront access for downtown Salem was the veriest of oxymoronic things to say. Silverton's relationship with Silver Creek was similar though not as brutal; an unbroken line of buildings along the west side of Water Street made the creek a thing you glanced in passing over the bridge.

No longer. Silver Creek is still screened from downtown Silverton by the buildings but there are more and more personal ways to get closer, and Town Square Park, a lovely thing, which allows one to come right down to the side of the stream that inspired Silverton's name.