A concrete block referencing Jeff Davis Street sits on the sidewalk on Southeast 11th Street in Pendleton on Friday, Nov. 6, 2020. The block, and others referencing the original Pendleton street names, were removed during reconstruction of Southeast Byers Avenue.

PENDLETON — The city of Pendleton is keeping one old feature of Southeast Byers Avenue during its reconstruction.

For the past several months, city contractors have been working on the $1 million effort to rebuild and widen the crumbling street. The city also is making an effort to preserve a set of historical relics on the street: sidewalk stamps that go back to the time when several Byers cross streets were named after figures from the Confederacy.

Public Works Director Bob Patterson said contractors are removing the stamps then reinstalling them to placing them with new stamps while redoing sidewalks.

The stamps, etchings made into sidewalk corners that denote the street’s original name, are in the city’s older residential areas, such as Byers and the North Hill. Following World War II, the city changed many of its street names, but the stamps remained.

In the late 19th century, several streets intersected this section of Byers. Those streets were named after prominent Confederate figures, including Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis.

Despite never being a slave state and staying loyal to the Union throughout the Civil War, Black exclusion laws survived Oregon’s transition from a territory to a state in 1859 and stayed on the books for decades afterward.

Following the conclusion of the Civil War, Confederate Army veterans from Missouri and Illinois settled in Umatilla County, according to East Oregonian archives. Nearly all were Democrats, and the city of Pendleton was named after Ohio politician George Pendleton, the Democratic nominee for vice president in 1864 and an opponent of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery.

In recent years, activists from the Black Lives Matter movement and beyond have questioned why monuments, structures and institutions continue to commemorate figures from the Confederacy. They argue these commemorations aren’t just neutral markers of history, but instead enduring symbols of white supremacy and the Lost Cause ideology.

The street stamps along Byers are being preserved at the direction of Pendleton Historic Preservation Commission, a four-member body tasked with identifying, preserving and promoting historic properties. Commission Vice Chair Kate Dimon said the group talked about the best way to preserve the sidewalk stamps but also touched on the politics of trying to preserve them in 2020.

Dimon said the commission’s mission is to preserve history, regardless of what it depicts. As an adjunct professor at Clatsop Community College in Astoria, Dimon said she warns her students about politics interfering with the work of historic preservation.

“We have nothing left but to preserve,” she said. “People die, but old trees don’t, or old stones don’t, or pavement (doesn’t). That’s really important, I think, and I’m standing by that commitment.”