Bill Richardson, left, and Dick Wagner converse Sunday during the North Bend Show and Tell at the North Bend Public Library, as they view photographs illustrating the early history of the city, which incorporated 101 years ago this month. In the foreground is a model of the Western Shore, a clipper ship launched in 1874 from the Asa Simpson shipyard at the settlement that evolved into the town. Model builder Steve Priske also was at the event. World Photo by Howard Yune

The double door into North Bend Public Library was unlocked, as it is on most Sunday afternoons. But this Sunday the glass doors led not to the reading room, which was closed, but to tables and wall displays providing a window into this city's 101 years of existence.

Inside a quiet meeting room, dozens of black-and-white photographs lined the bulletin boards, depicting long-vanished ferry boats, holiday parades on wood-paved avenues two and three generations in the past, lumber mills long since razed.

In front of the walls, a trickle of visitors gathered around tables bearing tangible and sometimes unexpected bits of the town's past. A woman perused a silvery, slightly tarnished trophy with the engraved names of high-school debate champions of the 1910s. Beside the jug-handled trophy were a program for the 1965 Marshfield-North Bend football game and a faded two-page spread of student portraits - the only "yearbook" North Bend High School's Class of 1934 could afford during the Great Depression.

More curious relics of the city's roots were to be found two tables to the left: a case presenting myrtlewood coins, emergency money the city created in 1993 to pay bills and salaries as it waited for a bankrupt local bank to recover. As a woman glanced at the blond disks with interest, another woman with white-streaked hair - one of the organizers of this exhibit - regaled the visitor with the story behind the coins.

"These are still legal tender, which puts us in violation of the law by having our own money," Pat Choat Pierce said wryly, glancing at the pieces inked with denominations from 50 cents to $10. Chuckling, she added: "Though as far as I know, we haven't had any government agencies investigating us!"

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Eleven months of the year, the Coos County Historical Society's most visible role is to run the county Historical Museum, at the northern outskirts of North Bend. But Sunday's North Bend Show and Tell, which the society organized as part of the city's July Jubilee weekend, gave members a unique chance to share city history person to person - and, according to one of its board members, to win supporters, donations and relevance for the group.

"We want to highlight all of Coos County history," said Tom Hibbert as he sat behind a table of softcover books about the city and county's history. "Events like this help the society raise its profile and, possibly, donations." (The historical society also will put up a display at the Coos County Fair, which runs from Wednesday to Sunday in Myrtle Point.)

With the donations, Hibbert added, members plan to build a new museum in a more central location - possibly in Coos Bay - and to stage history presentations at the county's public schools, in order to involve another generation of South Coast residents in preserving the past.

Compared to the inaugural Show and Tell in 2003, which drew a large audience partly because of North Bend's centenary, Sunday's event was a quiet affair. Still, some visitors added their own insights to the display, occasionally for objects even the historical society didn't recognize.

Eighty-eight-year-old George Gebhardt walked into the meeting room with a bundle of photographs, then thumbed through them as another visitor looked on. The top picture showed a thick-sided ferry boat, for 15 years one of the links between North Bend and Kentuck until the McCullough Bridge opened in 1936.

"When the bridge was built, the ferry was sold to my cousin for $150," Gebhardt recalled. "He used the engine boiler to heat water to tan the pilchard nets for fishermen." After the pilchard fishery was exhausted, he added sardonically, the cousin sold the craft for all of $40.

"Its rotted bones are down near Millington somewhere!" he concluded with a laugh.

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"I don't know exactly what these are; from some dairy, maybe," Dick Wagner said at the other end of the room as he glanced quizzically at two half-pint glass bottles: one embossed with the words "EAGLE" and "NORTH BEND," the other with a blocky, cryptic "B." Next to him was a mustachioed man in jeans and a gray T-shirt, who gave one bottle a closer look.

"It could be the Eagle Brewery," Bill Richardson finally said. "The brewery that was here from 1895 to 1913." Nearby, Pierce remarked at the number of companies and groups whose names appear on some product or another, yet have disappeared without trace.

"There's thousands of loose ends in our local history," she said.

As if to illustrate the preciousness of the Show and Tell's artifacts, the 73-year-old Pierce turned again toward the myrtlewood coins and described how, as a young carhop, she let one of the now-rare pieces get away. The restaurant owner, unable to produce $10 for her first week's pay, instead gave her a $5 wooden token - and a European coin from 223 B.C.

"I thought, 'That's fantastic!' and that's the one I held on to," she said of the ancient trinket.

"Later, of course, I found out in Europe those old coins are a dime a dozen. It was the myrtlewood one that was valuable."

- Staff Writer Howard Yune covers the city of North Bend. He can be reached at 269-1222, ext. 240; or by e-mailing him at hyune@pulitzer.net.