The downtown district in Dallas, Oregon was recently added to the National Register of Historic Places. Dallas has also worked with Oregon Main Street, a program that helps cities across the state with revitalization efforts in their communities. We learn more about the work Dallas and other cities have been doing from Brian Dalton, a former Dallas mayor and Sheri Stuart, Oregon Main Street coordinator.
The following transcription was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We start today in Dallas, Oregon, 15 miles west of Salem. For years now, community leaders in the Polk County seat have worked to preserve and revitalize their city. They got a big win recently when Dallas’ downtown was added to the National Register of Historic Places. They’ve also worked with the Oregon Main Street Program. It’s a statewide program that helps cities create more vibrant communities. Brian Dalton is a former Dallas mayor and ongoing advocate for Dallas. He joins us now to talk about this work, along with Sheri Stuart. She is a coordinator of the Oregon Main Street Program. It’s great to have both of you on Think Out
Loud.
Brian Dalton: Thank you.
Sheri Stuart: Thanks for having us.
Miller: Brian Dalton, first. What does it mean that downtown Dallas has been added to the National Register of Historic Places?
Dalton: That draws attention to our great history. Dallas was platted out in 1856 and it became the county seat in 1860 when they built the courthouse here. A really vibrant town sprung up around the courthouse over the years, and most of that area around that courthouse is of the 100 year old variety and is pretty much intact. So, having a national historic district really elevates our presence and I think our visibility.
Miller: Are there particular buildings downtown that mean the most to you personally?
Dalton: Oh gosh. Within the historic district, which is 16 acres, my family, at one time or another, owned four of the buildings. So I go back a ways.
Miller: And you mentioned something about signs on the highway?
Dalton: Yeah, you can’t have those brown signs – “Visit historic such and such” – unless you actually have an historic district. And we have not had that until just now.
Miller: Sheri Stuart, we’ll talk about the work you do through Oregon Main Street. But before we even get to that, I’m just curious – if you walk around any given city or town, and you’re thinking about the vitality of a community, what are you paying attention to? What are you on the lookout for?
Stuart: Oh, there are so many things. When I go into a community for the first time, I have all of my senses open. I pay attention to what my eyes are seeing, what I experience seeing through sounds and smells. But I pay attention to the pedestrian character of the district. Is it a walkable district? Is it clean and well maintained? Does it need a little bit of love?
I look at the historic building stock and what that tells me about the evolution of the history of a community. I look at the mix of businesses and the storefronts. I look to see if there’s people on the street, engaged, and how they interact, if there are people. Does it look like a friendly and welcoming community? I look at the entrances into a downtown and [whether] that creates a sense of arrival to someplace special. So there’s all of those different elements that you’re looking at and paying attention to, to see what the assets are of that particular community, what their strengths are, and what they have to build on.
Miller: Brian, can you give us a sense for the kinds of restoration work that you have either done or championed in Dallas over the years?
Dalton: The main thing is we have an Urban Renewal District that focuses on historic preservation downtown. And through that system, we’ve been able to give a great many grants, fairly large ones in some cases, to help with that. Also, the grant system at the State Historic Preservation Office can amount to a couple of hundred thousand per grant. And we’ve gotten three of those grants over the last few years. So we help out with grants, we help out with zoning, we help out with all sorts of encouragement, particularly by the Dallas Downtown Association, which operates in the area.
Miller: What’s driven you? Why are you passionate about this?
Dalton: Oh, gosh, I grew up in downtown, I guess. We had a furniture store there for 75 years, so I kind of grew up downtown. It was just vibrant at that time, in the ‘50s and ‘60s. And then, of course, small towns in Oregon encountered lots of difficulties like big box stores, and the big cities, and better highways to get to them, and all that. So downtowns just kind of languished, I think, with more emphasis on the big cities. And I think all that’s changed. But I do think that small towns in Oregon suffered greatly from those kinds of things.
Miller: Sheri Stuart, can you give us a sense for the work that you do in Oregon Main Street to help out all different kinds of communities?
Stuart: I think that’s one of the things that I’m really proud of. We’ve grown to a network of over 109 communities, and we reach the depth and breadth of the state. Some of the things that people value, when they choose to join our network, is the ability to network with each other, to learn from each other. We have weekly convening calls and other types of activities to bring people together to share what they’re doing in their communities.
We work on supporting folks who are ready and willing to undertake a comprehensive effort to help enhance and sustain their downtown, through technical assistance and on-site support. We do some strategic planning with organizations to help them identify what their assets and opportunities are, what their local goals and objectives are, and then how to roll up their sleeves and develop specific action plans to move forward projects and activities.
There’s a lot of community-building work that happens. But fundamentally, people come to us because they care about their downtown. They want to see it survive and thrive and want to take advantage of some of those opportunities. Brian also mentioned the Oregon Main Street Revitalization Grant that they’ve been a recipient of. And that’s been a tool that we’ve been able to use to support communities in building improvement projects that spur economic development.
So that’s been a tremendous tool to help rural communities across the state be able to have some access to resources that otherwise they might not have had at their disposal, [in order] to put back into productive life some of these buildings that have been staying vacant, sometimes, for years.
Miller: Brian, is it fair to say that Dallas doesn’t have a specific attraction like Ashland’s Shakespeare Festival or an event like Mt. Angel’s Oktoberfest?
Dalton: I think it’s fair to say that we do most of what we do for our own local population because we’re not on a major highway, I-5 or something like that. And we don’t have some big event that everybody comes to, like the Pendleton Roundup or something like that, which are wonderful things. But we’re not a tourist town. So we’re doing this for ourselves by and large. And a lot of people are moving to small towns in Oregon, because they can work from home for one thing or [because] they’re retiring and want a small town life.
Dallas very much represents small town living. We’ve captured that in a bottle, I guess here, and people like to come here, live here, and they don’t want us to change too much. They’re kind of conservative in that sense. So, historic preservation and restoration, and filling up our shops with little businesses seems to really ring true with our population
Miller: Sheri, how common is [it], for the cities you’re working with, to really be focusing on their own residents as opposed to beautification projects or revitalization efforts to attract visitors?
Stuart: I’d say that [for] a large majority of the communities that we work with, that’s their focus. They want to make it a good place for people to live and raise their families, have opportunities for their folks to open up businesses, have spaces for people to gather and meet in their downtown. So I would say for a large percentage of our communities, that’s what we want to work on.
But by doing that, they’re building on their own sense of character and their authenticity. That is what makes it appealing for others to discover their community and enjoy it for the day. Whereas, Brian said a lot of folks are choosing to live in some of our smaller communities. And I think that’s because people really create that sense of community and that sense of space.
Miller: Brian, how do you think about the balance between preserving historical aspects of Dallas and evolving to meet the needs or desires of people today, and going forward?
Dalton: Oh my, as Sheri was speaking, I thought … I was president of the Oregon Mayor Association for a while. And so I got to know cities all over Oregon. And the one thing, a big thing, I took away is that almost every city in Oregon is very unique. It’s not like California where there’s sort of cookie-cutter stuff that goes around. We’re very unique here. So we do have to find our own character and march to our own tunes. And once we do that, it really shapes the environment. And folks need to be conscious of who they are and volunteer and contribute to that, not just, well I guess, live off the fat of other people’s work. And in a small town that’s possible. Everybody knows everybody here. There’s two or three degrees of separation in a town like ours. And so we’re very welcoming of involvement and friendship, and that kind of thing.
So, I think it’s that sort of character building that makes small towns and historic preservation a big piece of that. We want to preserve what we like about our history, not giving it up, tearing it down, and starting over again. That’s not, I think, our milieu here.
Miller: Sheri, in the minute we have left, what is a big success story that you can point to from the Oregon Main Street Program?
Stuart: One of the recent ones I’ll point out is the city of Maupin. This is a community of less than 500 in Wasco County. They were one of our recent recipients of our 2022 Oregon Main Street Revitalization Grant, to put back into productive use, their former city hall and library, in their downtown area.
They were pretty aggressive and they completed the project in 2023. It created a new workspace for 26 new entrepreneurs in their downtown. It created a co-working space. There’s a new coffee roaster that opened up. But not only that, it brought together the organizational capacity of multiple other nonprofit organizations. And now they work more seamlessly and cohesively together. And I think that’s what Main Street’s all about, is really helping build that community, having those common dreams and visions, and making them a reality.
Miller: Sheri Stuart and Brian Dalton, thanks very much.
Stuart: Thank you.
Dalton: You’re welcome.
Miller: Sheri Stuart is the coordinator of Oregon Main Street. Brian Dalton is the former mayor of Dallas.
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