Deschutes County Historical Society / Submitted photoA March 8, 1926, Bulletin photo shows the aftermath of an explosion at the Congress Apartments in what was believed to be an attempt to kill Prohibition Officer C.C. McBride for shooting and killing suspected moonshiner Vayle Taylor.

In 2015, the country responded to shootings involving police officers with civil discourse: protests were staged, federal investigations are underway and conversations about racial justice and police accountability continue in earnest.

Ninety years ago, Central Oregonians responded with one thing: explosives.

An explosion on March 8, 1926, at the Congress Apartments in northwest Bend was reportedly an act of retaliation for the killing of 25-year-old Vayle Taylor, a suspected moonshiner, in Bear Creek.

While the residents of Bear Creek raised money to help Taylor’s family lawyer up, it was the explosion that would define the region’s battle with Prohibition and eventually earn the Congress Apartments a historic designation in 2000.

On Feb. 19, 1926, The Bulletin reported that Prohibition officer C.C. McBride was exonerated after a coroner declared Taylor’s death accidental. “Desert Folk Angry,” the Bulletin proclaimed (at the time, the remote areas east of town were referred to as the High Desert).

Not three weeks later, an early-morning explosion at the apartments prompted the FBI to investigate what it thought was an attempt to kill McBride, who was believed to live there, according to the building’s current owner, Ted Wolfe, of Bend. The culprits were never caught.

In 1926, Prohibition had been the law of the land in Oregon for a decade, instituted four years before federal Prohibition became law. Officers of the peace were charged with enforcing the ban on alcohol, which many locals resented, according to Tor Hanson, a local history aficionado who is working on a book about Bend.

Taylor was shot at a remote whiskey still Feb. 17 after Prohibition officers had staked it out for more than 18 hours, The Bulletin reported. When Taylor entered the still, Officers McBride and A.F. “Buck” Mariott confronted him, a fight ensued and McBride shot Taylor in the neck with a .38-caliber pistol. He died instantly.

Police radios years from being the norm, Mariott went to Millican to telephone the sheriffs of Crook and Deschutes counties, who promptly rolled out to Bear Creek, about 45 miles from Bend. McBride remorsefully handed over his weapon, The Bulletin reported, to Crook County Sheriff Stephen Yancey. A coroner’s inquest was done, and while rural folk simmered over Taylor’s death, things seemed quiet until early March 8, when the explosion at NW Congress Street and Hood Place rocked the town.

The event prompted the state Prohibition Commissioner, W.S. Levens, to come to Bend, and drew rubberneckers .

“Hundreds of local people have visited the scene during the day, crowds being massed about the wrecked buildings, especially during the noon hour,” The Bulletin declared. “Special officers had been placed on duty to make sure that nothing was disturbed.”

The newspaper printed photographs of the damage and those displaced by the blast, one of them a Miss Alice Bush — “She Escaped Death by Miracle” — who had to be dragged out of the debris that morning. Deschutes County offered $750 for the head of each dynamiter, to no avail.

“The rumors immediately started flying around the neighborhood,” Hanson wrote in a talk on Prohibition he gave in 2012. “One told about explosives being stored in the basement of the apartment building.”

According to Hanson, the apartments belonged to well driller J.M. Perry, who according to historical records lived in the building, and vehemently denied that he stored explosives in the basement.

Neither Mariott nor his wife, who lived in Unit 5 and were asleep at the time, were harmed — though the back porches had to be replaced after the explosion, according to Wolfe, who has owned the building for 18 years. The Bulletin printed rumors that McBride “took meals” with Mariott and his wife and may have been staying there, as well.

In the days preceding the explosion, McBride had been warned. Members of the scrappy High Desert and Bear Creek gangs were out to get him and made no secret of it, according to Bulletin archives. “From the meager information given to McBride,” The Bulletin reported, “the plan was to have someone do away with him, in any way possible.”

The High Desert Gang, which Wolfe described as a kind of “mafia,” allegedly set the explosion, knowing McBride might be living there, though it didn’t have the intended effect of killing him or Mariott.

“They set one charge near the south end of the basement of the apartment,” Wolfe said in a phone interview Monday. “They assumed wrongly, thank goodness, that the Prohibition officer and his wife would be sleeping in the back there.”

The Congress Apartments were built in the Craftsman style for Perry in 1924, according to the building’s listing on the National Register of Historic Places. The apartments were built after a period of rapid growth in Bend: The city’s population leapt 910 percent between 1910 and 1920, according to “Building Deschutes County: An Architectural History, 1813-1950.”

While building permits also increased during that period — in an echo of the present — building activity wasn’t nearly enough to meet the demand for rental housing. According to “Building Deschutes County,” 400 building permits were issued in Bend in 1924. The number of permits would climb to 451 the next year and drop dramatically thereafter, not rising to 400 again until after the Second World War.

The five apartments in the building feature several small rooms and space-saving features such as drawer beds, Wolfe said, noting that his tenants would be wary of a reporter’s eye. The back porches that stand there today aren’t part of the original building: They were blown off in the explosion. While Units 1 through 4 are studios, Unit 5, where Mariott lived, had to be modified after the explosion, according to the historic register listing. The trundle bed and closet were removed and a bedroom was added onto the back of the apartment.

Perry, a veteran, was given $3,000 by a Portland veterans’ organization to make repairs to the apartment building, The Bulletin reported.

Wolfe purchased the building from Fran Franklin, the outspoken owner of several properties in the county, including the Blue Spruce Motel, which was demolished in 1999. Franklin gained notoriety for confronting Wal-Mart Stores Inc. in a series of court battles when the big-box store came to Bend in the early 1990s.

While not all his tenants may know about the building’s explosive history, Wolfe says the building does attract a particular breed.

“The apartments seem to have a certain flavor of people who are curious about history,” Wolfe said.

— Reporter: 541-383-0376,

cwithycombe@bendbulletin.com