Happy Birthday, Asahel Bush!

We are celebrating the 186th birthday of Asahel Bush II this weekend, with an Open House on Saturday from 1:00 to 4:00 pm at the Bush House Museum. There will be birthday cake, balloons for the kids, and stories about Mr. Bush. Please join us!

Asahel Bush II was born in Westfield, Massachusetts on June 4, 1826. In 1850, at the age of 26, he left Westfield for Oregon. He settled in Salem in 1853 and lived here for the next 60 years. He passed away in Salem on December 23, 1913.

When Mr. Bush was about to leave Westfield to come to Oregon he published the following poem as a farewell to his boyhood home and friends:

We do not know how much we love,
Until we come to leave;
An aged tree, a common flower
Are things o'er which we grieve;
There is a pleasure in the pain
That brings us back the past again.

We linger while we turn away,
We cling while we depart;
And memories, unmarked till then,
Come crowding round the heart.
Let what will lure our onward way,
Farewell's a bitter word to say.

Three Days' History of a Bogus Dollar

Guest blogger A.N. Bush, from the Ladd & Bush Quarterly, November 1912:

In 1885 Dee Howard had a butcher shop on State Street, where S.W. Thompson & Company's jewelry store is now. Oliver Higginbotham was cutting meat for him.

One Saturday afternoon Dee came into the bank with a bag of silver to deposit. Those were the days of an open counter and he had plenty of room to stack it up. When he was done he called to Claud Gatch to receive it for him. Claud's eyes instantly located something queer in one stack of dollars, and pushed back to Dee a lead dollar. It was twice as thick as a silver dollar, and almost black. It had been molded imperfectly, and was at best a crude imitation. Dee remarked with disgust that anything could be passed on Oliver.

Claud asked to have the bogus dollar returned to him, saying that he had not ordered his meat for the day and would try to see if he could pass the lead dollar on Oliver. Dee told several of the boys what was coming, and they waited about the butcher shop for Claud. Claud soon came in and picked out a dollar roast. Oliver tied it up and raked the bogus dollar into the till without looking at it. When they all got through laughing at Oliver, Claud handed him a silver dollar for the meat.

Dee then picked up the bogus dollar and invited all the boys into the alley saloon to have a treat. The barkeeper was as easy as Oliver, and the bogus dollar went into the till without a question.

Nothing more was heard of that dollar till the next Monday morning, when a prominent Salem minister attempted to deposit it, but Claud informed him that he had seen that dollar before and it was not current at our counter.

We are sorry not to be able to recount how the lead dollar got from the saloon into the contribution box, but we will leave the reader to surmise.