It’s some 660 miles from Sun Valley to Seattle. It can be an easy drive but it can offer some challenges. We left shortly after 7 on Saturday morning, stopped at Starbucks, then launched down 75 and across 20. From Sun Valley to Boise there was fog, with visibility at times getting down to near zero. We stopped at Baker City.
A quick review of Baker City History shows where the priorities were and includes some irony. The first structure built? A saloon, in 1865. Nearly all the early buildings were wood, until Sheriff James Virtue built a stone fireproof structure in the 1870’s. It burned down ten years later. A later Sheriff, Harvey Brown, presided over the only legal hanging in Baker County in 1904. Sheriff Brown was assassinated three years later.
Over time there were several fires that ravaged the downtown area and one by one the wooden buildings gave way to brick replacements and those stand till this day. The architecture is nice, but it appears that there has been little funding for renovation since perhaps 1920.
Baker was named after the only sitting Senator to be killed in battle. Senator Edward Dickinson Baker was killed in the civil war battle of Ball’s Bluff (I am not making this up, really!). Abraham Lincoln, a close friend of Bakers, was said to be moved to tears when he learned of Baker’s death and Mary Todd Lincoln created a bit of scandal by wearing a lilac colored esemble (including hat and gloves), instead of the traditional black, to his funeral.
Once the largest city between Salt Lake City and Portland, the population showed steady growth until about 1940 where it has stabilized (stagnated) for the last 60 years.
Back to present day. We had a real nice lunch at the ‘Corner Brick’, saw some cute houses while walking Rex, then plunged back into the fog which finally parted when we hit the Blue Mountains.
The pass was a bit dicey, but we made it through safely and after a long day dropped down into Issaquah to Zekes for pizza.
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