WESTON — It’s now mostly crumbling brick, collapsing floors, sinking roof and water-damaged mortar, yet Weston’s former post office building takes up a big space in Jon Clifton’s heart.

The Main Street structure, commonly dubbed “the green building,” is dangerous and beyond reasonable repair — it needs more attention than simply affection, people said at last month’s Weston City Council meeting.

Council members voted unanimously on July 15 to present the owners of the historic building with an ultimatum: Fix it up or take it down.

Demolishing the old post office would mean erasing the big picture his father drew out when he bought the property at 106 E. Main St. in 2003, Jon Clifton said.

His dad, Daryl Clifton, had grand plans for a Weston historical museum in mind. Townspeople bought into the idea and had donated all manner of memorabilia and furnishings from around the region to be displayed at the future museum.

Daryl Clifton’s unexpected death in 2008, however, left those plans unfulfilled, his son said from his home near San Francisco, especially since his dad left no will or money to carry his vision out.

The senior Clifton was a native son of the area, his family tied to Weston Mountain. Daryl Clifton graduated from Weston High School in 1961 before heading to the University of Oregon. He would stay on the west side of the state for much of his adult life.

“My great-grandparents had the ranch on Weston Mountain. It was given to my grandfather, and he raised my dad and his brothers there,” Jon Clifton said.

For now, this building and others owned by Daryl Clifton in Milton-Freewater and Walla Walla, Washington, are in probate court limbo, with no actual living owner assigned by a judge, the younger Clifton said.

Nonetheless, Weston city officials said the clock has not stopped on the deterioration of the old post office and its state of disrepair adds up to an “attractive nuisance,” ripe for a disaster or tragedy.

While the structure — which spews bricks out regularly enough to warrant a fence jutting onto the sidewalk for protection — has been on the city’s back burner for years, resident Greg Phillips demanded at July’s city council meeting that real action be taken.

His wife, Lois Phillips, is a council member.

Greg Phillips told Mayor Duane Thul and council members he’s fed up.

“I’m deeply concerned about the safety of citizens due to the green building,” Phillips said.

“It’s rotting and dangerous.”

Phillips, who directs Weston’s food bank just around the corner from the green building, and his wife have lived in Weston about 12 years.

The old post office has been an issue at least that long, he said.

Phillips initially tried to buy or rent the building to house the food bank. But Jon Clifton and his sister, Stacey Clifton, valued the building at more than $300,000, a preposterous sum in Weston, Phillips said.

Even then the doors were rotted and the floor was soft underfoot, he recalled.

Phillips said he can appreciate the emotional attachment to a father’s wish for a community museum.

“But someone is going to get hurt or killed in that building. Kids play where kids play, and those bricks are heavy. I’m not an activist, but I am responsible for my fellow man,” Phillips said, noting the city is wide open for a lawsuit if someone does come to harm in the building.

“We’re too darn nice to hurt anybody’s feelings and ruffle any feathers, so we’re going to be nice until some little kid is badly injured or killed. And we’ll say, ‘Darn, what a tragedy.’ If we just sit here eventually the roof will collapse under snow or rain. The walls will come down and who knows where it will go.”

He told the council he wants to see a timeline and benchmarks to get the failing structure taken down by year’s end, Phillips said, conceding the timeline is not very realistic given the current pandemic and the “glacial speed” of court proceedings at all times.

Complicated legacy

No part of the building’s situation is simple. For starters, Daryl Clifton’s estate owes Umatilla County $2,821 in property taxes, unpaid since 2016. If nothing is paid for another year, the county could begin foreclosure proceedings.

As well, Weston’s monthly sewage fee attached to every building and residence in town has continued to add up: Records show the city has placed an $11,000 lien on the green building’s deed to cover the fee should the building ever be sold, officials said.

Then there are state and national pieces of the puzzle.

The old post office is part of the two-block stretch known as the Weston Historic Commercial District, a designation the city applied for in 1982.

Oregon’s historic preservation office green-lighted the application that same year, slotting 14 of Weston’s historic spots into The National Register of Historic Places, one of 42 such listings in Umatilla County and more than 90,000 nationwide.

In the application documents, the building is described as Italianate architecture, a style modeled after 16th century Italian Renaissance architecture.

The structure went up in 1895, made of the local brick Weston was known for at the time. It was first a hardware store, then housed the city’s post office from 1910 to 1960. The spot has also served as a saloon, butcher shop and the office of the Weston Leader newspaper, according to local lore.

The Leader‘s printing press is currently headed to the building’s basement, via a hole in the main floor.

Sheldon Delph, a retired educator, fifth-generation Westonian and local historian, knows this and the town’s other historic buildings intimately.

As a contracted grant writer for the city of 700 or so residents, Delph began looking at Oregon’s Main Street Association for its revitalization funds to repair the commercial district’s structures about eight years ago.

Many of the buildings needed the mortar between bricks replaced, new windows, roofs recovered and floors fixed.

Every building needed its concrete roof caps replaced to stop walls from weathering away from rain and snow, Delph said.

At the time, the old post office could have been repaired for about $90,000, Delph estimated.

Now it would take at least $200,000 and that sum would probably not include fixing the floor, he said.

That’s neither here nor there at this moment. State preservation grants are funded by Oregon’s lottery games, he said, and with the COVID-19 pandemic, that source has temporarily dried up. The lottery office is saying it is unsure when there will be money to pass out for preservation efforts, Delph said.

The Wildhorse Foundation, which has donated to Weston generously a number of times, has the same issue: Wildhorse Resort & Casino was closed for a long stretch as Oregon shut down businesses in March to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

Over the past several years, the green building has slid from stately to derelict, but the city would still need the state’s permission to take down the historic structure, according to Delph — just one of the steps that would be required.

It doesn’t help the city that the approval process is stalled while Oregon’s historic preservation staff is furloughed because of the pandemic, he noted.

Delph has acted as a liaison between Weston and the state to procure state dollars for preservation. Initially, the Clifton siblings expected to use such funding to get a start on renovating the place their dad bought.

That hasn’t come to fruition and now the building is “clearly a danger,” Delph said.

Challenges of age

Some of that is homegrown trouble. Weston brick, used in many buildings all over the region starting in about 1860, was considered a “soft” product.

“It was entirely wood fired, and that doesn’t bake as hard. Not like a coal- or gas-fired kiln, which gets the bricks much hotter,” Delph explained.

“The Weston bricks tend to compress over time. And the mortar they used was purely sand, lime and water. There’s no concrete in it so when it gets wet, it erodes.”

That act of nature has allowed water to get down into the walls of the old post office, where it has frozen and thawed many times over, he said.

Thus the north wall of the building is highly distressed and bowing significantly, forcing bricks to expel in greater numbers at an increasing rate, Delph said, noting the coats of green paint applied around 1950 made the moisture retention worse.

Weston Mayor Duane Thul said he worries plenty about those bricks when they fall onto the sidewalk just steps away from city hall.

And in recent years, a person can stand on the roof of city hall and watch the rainwater pour from the dipping roof into the interior of the green building.

“I don’t like to take down old trees and I don’t like to take down old buildings,” Thul said.

“But historic buildings do reach the end of useful life. You’re throwing good money after bad right now.”

Thul said he’s been clear with Delph that he disagrees with putting more money into the old post office, especially since he doesn’t see the Clifton family investing with their own pocketbooks.

“Nothing has been done, absolutely nothing. … They appear to sit back and wait for our grant writer to find money for them,” he said.

“They’ve never done what they said they were going to do. If you’re waiting for someone else to give you money, that doesn’t always work.”

Thul and Phillips said they doubt there is enough grant money available through any organization that would save the building, given its numerous and severe issues.

The day of reckoning has arrived, Thul added.

“Either they are going to fix it up or that building is going to go. The citizens have asked for something to be done,” he said.

The mayor said he’s asked the city attorney to look into what options Weston officials have in keeping people safe from a public nuisance, given the historical registration.

Good intentions

The Clifton siblings are willing to work with the city on timelines and benchmarks, but unwilling to abandon their father’s dream, Jon Clifton said.

If nothing else, city officials should remember that Daryl Clifton loved Weston, returning to the area after decades of living in Portland.

His father’s twin brother, Caryl Clifton, still lives on Weston Mountain and works the family ranch.

“We spent a lot of time there when I was growing up, we’d come for summers. I go up there now, and I take my kids there,” Jon Clifton added.

After the elder Clifton bought the old post office in 2003, he became involved with the town’s “Heritage Wall” project, according to Milton-Freewater reporter and historian Marcia Akes.

The wall, made of memorial bricks bearing the donor’s name, helped pay for street lighting on Main Street, Jon Clifton said.

When Daryl Clifton died, city officials dedicated the wall to his legacy of hard work and local roots, Akes reported.

His son maintains that he and his sister, who is an interior designer in Portland, have made lots of plans and many visits to Weston since their father’s death. The siblings came to the annual Pioneer Days the year their father died, passing out refreshments from the old post office’s open doors, in order to begin building relationships.

“We wanted to get to know the people of Weston,” Jon Clifton recalled.

Living where they do, getting to Weston takes commitment, but the two have come for long weekends to work on the building, including tucking the donated museum artifacts safely into storage, Jon Clifton said.

In 2017, he came with a group of friends to demolish the failing porch of an apartment that had been added onto the back of the building as housing for Weston’s longtime postmistress, “Pinky” Pinkerton.

“We make several trips per year to manage our dad’s estate properties, including the building in Weston. We were both in Weston for last year’s Pioneer Picnic and we were actively working on the building and have many witnesses,” he said, noting his sister is required to submit an annual report for the court and must list what is being done for each building in the estate.

In 2019, the Cliftons made plans for restoration to begin this past spring, and plastered up banners announcing that in the building’s arched windows.

Those ideas include creating a space for local artists, writing workshops and collaborations with area libraries and schools.

Then came the pandemic, shutting down communities and pausing travel, Jon Clifton pointed out.

“We’re itching to get there … we are fully engaged. We weren’t expecting our dad to pass away at 63. If my sister and I had the funds, that building would be fixed up,” he said.

“All we have are good intentions.”

The Clifton siblings have felt a cold shoulder from Thul and others in the town, Jon Clifton said.

“Since we’ve been in Weston, we’ve had an uphill battle … we are nice people and no one has offered to help with the building,” he said. “I really wish they would value my dad’s intention to have a museum in town and his passion for history.”

If the battered old post office goes down, its witness and stories are gone forever, he said.

“That’s the last piece of my dad, when I knew what his intention was and what he wanted to do.

“I feel my dad there.”

There is one candle still burning, Delph said.

He’s applied for a grant from the Oregon-based Kinsman Foundation.

The organization funds three areas of interest, historic preservation being its principal focus since 2006.

Its officers have asked Delph to limit his grant request to $17,500 and would require the Cliftons to match it dollar to dollar.

If approved, that amount would allow the building’s roof and front wall to be stabilized, giving the project some breathing room. Jon Clifton told him this week he would find the money to meet the match, Delph said.

Clifton, who works in health care marketing, also proposed an idea for crowd-sourced funding for the remaining work, in hopes of closely restoring the building to its original state.

If these efforts fail, the second-oldest downtown building in Umatilla County’s second-oldest city will be gone, the historian said.

“It can never be rebuilt,” he said.