you just might ALSO
enjoy ...
Whale explodes: Details at 11.
The highway department guy didn't know how much dynamite to use, and said so on camera. But he still thinks the operation was a success. Check out the story of Florence's famous exploding whale ...
Far-out guru "enlightens" Central Oregon.
What happens when a colony of acolytes of an East Indian guru move in, then try to take over Wasco County? Check out the four-part story of the rise and fall of Rajneeshpuram ...
this oregon youth went on to save half a billion lives...guess who?
A local Willamette Valley teen-ager named Bert Hoover, an orphan sent from Iowa to live with his uncle, went on to save millions of lives and become a singularly ill-starred U.S. president.
oregon's most spectacular shipwreck ever.
The steam schooner J. Marhoffer was almost brand-new when, burning fiercely from stem to stern, it piled onto the rocks near Depoe Bay. It's the remains of this fiery shipwreck that gave Boiler Bay its name ...
the gallant rescue of portland's floating brothel.
Maritime madam Nancy Boggs kept her bordello on a barge floating in the river, until a police raid cut it loose. But the captain and crew of a sternwheeler came to save the day. Here's the story.
take off to the province of oregon, eh?
Few people know how close Oregon came to officially becoming a British possession under the treaty that ended the War of 1812. Only the presence of a handful of scattered, starving survivors from Astor's fur enterprise prevented it. Here's how.
timberline lodge could have been a glass skyscraper
Calling the plan a "profit-making eyesore," a Forest Service manager nixed 1920s plan for a modern steel-and-glass structure with an aerial tramway. You can read about it right here.
pixieland: an edgy, vanished amusement park
Built in the late 1960s as a "fairy-tale history of Oregon," the amusement park lasted just a few years before slipping into receivership. Today, all that's left of this odd and uniquely Oregonian story is a dilapidated guardshack.
A pioneer scientist's autograph set in stone, deep in the Oregon Caves
Prof. Thomas Condon and his students signed a stalagmite in Oregon Caves in 1883; their autographs are now protected by a thin layer of translucent calcite and will remain legible for millennia.
EDITOR'S NOTE: A revised, updated and expanded version of this story was published in 2016 and is recommended in preference to this older one. To read it, click here.
The signatures of Prof. Thomas Condon and his students, put there in
pencil in 1883, are still visible beneath a protective coating of calcite in
the Oregon Caves. (Image: F.J.D. John)
By Finn J.D. John — November 8, 2008
Deep underground in southwestern Oregon, there are a series of autographs dating back 125 years that are actually part of Oregon’s geology.
Fittingly enough, the autographs are those of the state’s most famous pioneer geologist and a group of his students.
A building's namesake
If you’ve spent any time on the University of Oregon campus, you’re undoubtedly familiar with Condon Hall. It’s a big, dignified-looking building that went up on campus in 1925 to house the science department; today, it’s home to the anthropology department.
Born in Ireland
The building’s namesake, Thomas Condon, was born in 1822 in County Cork, Ireland. His family emigrated to America, and he came to Oregon on a clipper ship from New York as a missionary in 1852. In 1872, he became Oregon’s first state geologist while teaching at Pacific University in Forest Grove, and in 1876 was appointed the U of O’s first professor of geology, in the year that college was founded. He was there until he died, in 1907.
Touring the newly discovered caves
What we’re interested in today, though, is 1883. That’s the year Condon and one of his classes traveled to southern Oregon to look at the newly discovered Oregon Caves.
This view of the University of Oregon campus comes from a postcard,
and dates from the 1960s. Condon Hall is the building on the left. For a
larger version of this image, click here.
Condon and his students toured the caves — which are still one of the state’s top geological wonders. While they were there, they took a pencil and actually autographed one of the translucent cream-colored calcite stalagmites in one of the passages.
Autographing the stone
Today, of course, this would be considered an outrage, and would likely be paid for with the professor’s position, tenured or no. But in 1883, things were quite different. First, no one yet knew that those stalagmites had built up through the steady dripping of calcium-laden water over millions of years. People were actually chipping them off and taking them home as souvenirs. Condon and his students, most likely, were among them. In fact, many people thought the stalagmites were built up over a period of years measured in the hundreds or even dozens, not millions.
It would be decades before scientists realized that the Oregon Caves were a geologic treasure and should be protected. It would be a half century or more before someone realized that, wonderful as Professor Condon was, his class’s signatures didn’t belong on that stalagmite. Someone took a Pink Pearl down there — or some other device or chemical designed to remove pencil marks — and set to work removing the signatures from the stalagmite.
Marks can't be erased
They would not come off. In the intervening years, millions of gallons of water falling drip by drip on the stalagmite had covered the pencil marks with a thin veneer of calcite. Translucent, the calcite allowed the pencil marks to be seen perfectly. Scientists realized they would have to destroy the stalagmite in order to save it from Prof. Condon’s early version of “Kilroy Was Here.”
Today, if you take an Oregon State Parks tour of the caves, the guide will point out the signatures. The personal markings of these genteel and unwitting vandals are sealed there for all time. It’s interesting to look at them and realize they will be there, clearly visible, for several hundred thousand years before the calcite over them becomes too thick to read through, an artifact of early state history. The archaeologists of some future civilization may, thousands of generations hence, find themselves puzzling over the cryptic marks made in graphite on that stalagmite and covered over with a few millimeters of calcite — marks put there by one Thomas Condon.
Fitting, isn’t it, that the archaeology department is now in the hall named after him?
(Sources: Bishop, Ellen & al. Hiking Oregon’s Geology. Portland: Mountaineers, 2004; tour of Oregon Caves, Cave Junction, OR, August 2007; www.nps.gov)
-30-