In Enterprise a theater waited out the flu, in Joseph a bank kept a hospital upstairs, and in Lostine a pharmacy shared its roof with a lodge. On these main streets, every doorway has a second story.
Enterprise’s OK Theatre was ready in December 1918. Nobody could go in. Influenza restrictions had closed public gatherings, and the new theater sat dark.
The city’s history says it finally opened on January 25, 1919, with instructions to leave every other seat empty. So the town’s new entertainment business began in the shadow of a worldwide health emergency. Before that, the project had already run into wartime shortages.
The builder, John Oberg, also worked on the Enterprise library. The same hands worked on the room where the town watched pictures and the room where it read.
A photograph of a main street shows a finished row of fronts. An opening date shows the wait behind them: time and work spent before anyone knew when the doors could open.
The OK Theatre facade in Enterprise. The marquee records a moment in the past, not a current program. The building whose opening was delayed in 1918; this is a later photograph. Ian Poellet · 2012-08-05 · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Image & source ↗
Bob Webb discusses preserving historical recordings and family stories, with Wallowa County elders’ recordings described in the Josephy Center’s program notes.
Joseph’s First Bank building went up in 1888. For about twenty-five years the bank took the front of the building, and a newspaper office worked from another room downstairs. Upstairs, a meeting hall became a private school. The museum points to a slate blackboard from around 1890 as one trace the building still holds.
In 1913, Dr. Vedro Gregory leased the building and turned it into a private hospital. The county museum’s history describes the layout: an office and waiting room in front, a kitchen behind, and a ward and operating room upstairs. A new interior staircase joined the two floors.
In 1927 the building passed to the city. The Women’s Club leased the upper floor and added a kitchen and a stage for classes, dances and banquets. City hall and a library took the space below.
The county museum opened there in 1977. Much of its collection came from the collecting of John Harley Horner, an assessor. A room that once served a bank, then a hospital, now held the evidence of other lives. Keeping a building meant finding new work for it, again and again.
“Keeping a building meant finding new work for it, again and again.”
Documented history
A pharmacy, a doctor and a lodge in one stone building
Lostine’s pharmacy building is stone, and Oregon’s historic-site record dates it to 1900. The pharmacy shared the building with a doctor’s office next to it, tied to Dr. Eberle Randolph Seeley. Upstairs, Lostine Masonic Lodge No. 123 met from 1906 to 1962.
The record ties the building to two bigger stories: changes in how doctors practiced medicine, and the part a lodge played in a small town’s social life. Stand on the sidewalk and you see the storefront. You miss the lodge room over your head.
A list of today’s tenants would miss even more: the doctor’s office and the lodge both. That is one reason Lostine deserves more than a quick stop between larger towns. Care, trade and club life all once fit under one roof here.
What the record shows: a historic nomination documenting the building’s earlier uses. It is not a statement about the services offered there today.
Marilyn Hulse remembers the soda fountains. Her account describes pharmacy counters in Wallowa and Lostine, and Enterprise’s Homan Drug Store as a place where teenagers gathered in the 1950s and 1960s. You bought something, and you stayed.
A counter like that mattered for reasons no assessed value or business category records. The sale paid for the room. The people who kept coming back gave it a second use.
Put the theater, the bank, the lodge room and the fountain side by side and a way of reading the street appears. Ask what happened inside, who could come in, and what changed when a room took a new purpose. The buildings stop being scenery from a finished past. They are a town still making itself.
Still open:
Did everyone feel welcome at the Homan Drug counter?
What happened inside these rooms between the dates the records give?
Which other main-street buildings in the valley kept a second life upstairs?
What the record shows: one local historian’s retrospective, with store identifications from her own account. It gives examples of counter life; it does not show that every resident felt the same welcome.
In October 2026 there were 79 homes for sale in all of Wallowa County, the most in years, and 17 of them cost less than $350,000. A two-bedroom rented for about $1,200 a month and a family house for $1,600 to $1,800. A new house cost about $375 a square foot to build, before anyone bought the land. A nurse who takes a job at the hospital has to live within twenty minutes of it. This is why that is hard, what the numbers can and cannot tell you, and what has been tried.
