12 The Oregon Surveyor | Vol. 47, No. 3 Featured Article and had three children, 15 grandchildren, and 17 great-grandchildren, and lived to be 73 years old. Claude died in 1906 and several years later Hattie married one of her childhood friends named Fred A. Bruckman. Fred was the inventor of the first ice cream cone machine. It was called Bruckman’s Real Cake Ice Cream Cone machine and was very profitable, enabling Fred’s son Merle to build the existing Breitenbush Lodge in 1927 and he continued to run it until the early 1950s. When my family lived in Idanha from 1945 to 1956, we would often go to Breitenbush to go swimming in the big, warm pool in July and August. My older sister, Cara Lee (aka “Cookie”) worked at the hotel/lodge in the late 1950s and early ’60s. I’ll always remember the huge sign that read “Welcome to Bruckmans” as you rounded Cleator Bend on the Breitenbush River. The sign was about 10 feet high and 30 feet long and was a faded yellow with big black letters. The hot springs are mainly on the south side of the river, but there was a store and some cabins, plus a few springs north of the river. I remember stopping there in the mid 1970s for gas and a fellow came out of the store and pumped the required amount of gas into a large glass tank atop the pump. That tank was graduated in gallons and showed how much was pumped in (it probably would have held about 15 gallons). The fellow then put the nozzle into the car and the designated amount would gravity flow into your rig. That pump probably dated from the 1930s. (Those glass tanks make wonderful terrariums.) I had originally intended to write only about the origin of the Mansfield Creek name. As I started to learn more about Claude, it seemed logical to also tell of his involvement in the development of the Breitenbush Hot Springs. The cabin that he and Hattie had built in 1904 was still standing in 2004, though much deteriorated, just behind the Lodge. Sadly, most of the cabins and structures were also destroyed in the September 2020 Lionshead Fire. It will be decades before the site even begins to look like the area we once knew and fondly remember. However, it still remains as the largest privately owned hot springs complex in Oregon and is slowly struggling to rebuild. Chuck Whitten graduated in 1967 from Oregon State University with a BS in forest engineering and is still a licensed land surveyor in Oregon and Washington (retired). He has lived near Battle Ground, Washington, since 1977. One of his hobbies since retirement has been recovering and maintaining original GLO section corners under a 1995 volunteer agreement with the Willamette National Forest. continued 1904 and 2021 maps of Section 20. Map provided by Chuck Whitten. Map provided by Chuck Whitten.
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