The building to the left is known as the Gerlinger building. It was home of Salem’s Capital Business College, distinguished for the time future President Herbert Hoover took business classes there. According to the 1893 Polk’s City directory, the building was located at the SW corner of Commercial and Chemeketa Streets.
The Capital Business College was started in September of 1889. By 1903, the school had moved to 131 Court Street, and had 125 students enrolled in its business and shorthand departments.
[1] By 1919 the school had moved to the corner of High and Ferry Streets.2
This image, part of the Al Jones photo collection at the Willamette Heritage Center, is also posted on the Salem Online History Photo site. The site misidentifies the address of the building as SW corner of Commercial and Court, as volunteer Sue Masse discovered today.
I have an Essentials of Business Arithmetic book copy righted 1890 for this school. it is so unbelievable how the math that they did in college back then is what our kids learn in grade school today . It is an awesome look back into time .
Our Grandmother, Esther Lorena Anderson Barker b. 1899, of Salem, Oregon, was very proud that she had a business degree, excellent short hand skills and had been a legal secretary in a prominent Salem legal firm from about 1918 until 1920! To me, she was a smart, organized, talented woman who support education and women’s rights! We shared the fact that we were both the oldest child in our families, trained to be very responsible and to always work to better yourself and be successful at whatever you did.
I never could figure out where she went to college, I assumed she went to a business or secretarial college in Portland, Oregon somewhere. I could not find her in the 1920 census so I started looking at city directories and found her in her hometown of Salem, Oregon in 1917! I wish there was more information on this college, but at least I saw she was living in student housing on Ferry Street and that she was a student at Capital Business College! Things all started to make sense….she had worked at the Carson Law offices in Salem before she married our grandfather, Ernest Samuel Barker in June of 1920. She turned her skills after the birth of their daughter in 1921 to assisting with the business practices of Barker Construction Co.
Her life as a woman and mother was traditional in many ways, full of domestic organization, nurturing and encouragement but she took things to the next level in supporting our Grandfather’s construction business and being a wonderful, supporting, influential and talented grandmother. She knew each person’s strengths and weaknesses and she helped each child and grandchild to focus on education as a path and to seek out a future that might be tailored to their own personalities and skills. To the women in the family, it was clear that she stood to support young women to chase their futures and dreams and to reach for the stars, like she did in her time. On top of the bookcase was a picture of the first woman college graduate in our family. It was prominently displayed and we all saw her degree as something to aspire to for bettering our lives and the future. We all have done that, all the females are educated and have succeeded in life. We did it for ourselves but we did it for her and we loved to see the pride she had in each of us, even our male cousins and uncles!!!! But what we saw was the role that an education could play out in our lives and we made it happen. She did it at Capital Business College, we did it elsewhere too!
I am just elated to find this feature online about that early college. Thank you for putting the facts together and highlighting it!