By T.L. Petersen

Observer Staff Writer

Take a detour next time you’re driving into La Grande. Go past 1612 Walnut Drive and imagine the Stange Manor in 1924.

The then-brand-new home along with stables, gardener’s cottage, tennis courts and more occupied the entire block. The home was the pride of August and Priscilla Stange, owners of the Mount Emily Lumber Co., former Easterners, and parents of two daughters who were chauffeured to school each day in a basket-shaped horse-drawn carriage.

Jeannette and David Baum bought the large home from the Stanges in 1962. She will share memories of living there, caring for the home, and recognizing what a "great responsibility" it was to be a part of the home’s history during the Union County History Gathering Open House Saturday afternoon.

Eugene Smith and volunteer oral history interviewers from the Union County History Project are inviting everyone interested in the county’s past to the gathering at the Stange Manor between 3 and 6 p.m. Representatives from the Union County Museum Society, the Elgin Museum and Historical Society, and the Cove Improvement Club History Committee will be on hand to talk informally about the effort to preserve the area’s past.

And Baum will talk about the Manor, a home she now admits, "I didn’t really want," but that her now-deceased husband David, very much wanted when it became available.

The Baum’s bought the Stange Manor in 1962 for $35,000, and over the next years, as David Baum advanced in rank in the Oregon National Guard, entertained many well-known figures there, Jeannette Baum recalls.

"Gov. (Mark) Hatfield stayed with us, and Tom McCall stayed with us," she remembers.

Other notables included Hatfield’s assistant, Warren Nunn, whose wife later decided she hated Washington, D.C., and insisted the family return to Oregon.

"We didn’t sleep-in often, I can tell you," Baum says, laughing.

Baum remembers her years in the Stange Manor often as she moves around her own Modelaire Lane home, furnished with several pieces the Baums purchased from the Stanges. Priscilla Stange, she says, sold Baum some furniture she didn’t want because, Jeannette Baum recalls, "I wondered aloud, ‘How are we going to furnish this’?"

The Baums learned much of the history of their home directly from the Stanges. The house took two years to build, with the Pendleton-based architect moving to La Grande to oversee the construction. The house was built with an attached, but entirely separate, housekeeper’s quarters an area Baum’s son, David, "took over" as a child and called his own through college. "He wasn’t about to leave it," she says, laughing. "He had the best of all worlds."

Jeannette Baum sold the Stange Manor in 1977, after her husband’s death, to Larry Fuller. She believes it was in the 1980s, while owned by the Gary Hart family, or maybe the following owners, when it first became a bed and breakfast.

Thinking about the historic home now, and the hours it took to maintain it, Baum smiles and chuckles often at the memories of a house that was a symbol of a time gone by, even in the 1960s.

"It was too large before we ever moved in," she says. Four homes now fill in what were the Stange’s gardens, stables and tennis courts.

Historic photos of the manor, as well as photos of other once-upon-a-time landmarks in Union County such as the YMCA building in La Grande, will be displayed during Saturday’s open house, Eugene Smith says.

The open house is free, and refreshments will be available.