481 South Main Street
John & Lottie Ralston House on November 22, 2006
John M. Ralston was the son of Jeremiah and Jemima Ralston. John Ralston was a partner in the Bank of Lebanon with James L. Cowan, and went on plat additions to Lebanon in the 1880s. He built this Queen Anne/Eastlake style house on the corner of Main and Vine Streets for himself and his wife Lottie in 1887, within the boundaries of his parents’ original donation land claim. They lived here until a fire took the lives of two children, and they subsequently moved to Albany in 1889.
The house was next occupied by state senator Milton A. Miller. Miller was an Oregon state committeeman at the 1896 National Democratic Convention in Chicago where presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan gave his “Cross of Gold” speech. Miller and Bryan stayed in the same hotel and became lifelong friends. Miller was responsible for Bryan making a campaign stop in Lebanon where he spoke to a crowd of 20,000 people on the Santiam Academy campus. Bryan stayed at the Miller residence on July 12, 1896.
Nathan C. and Winifred Whitlock Lowe purchased the house from the Millers. They moved to Lebanon in 1912 from Portland, where Nathan Lowe had worked as a streetcar conductor and as an undertaker’s assistant. Lowe established his own undertaking business in Lebanon in 1912 and went on to build the Lowe Funeral Home at the corner of Grant and Park Streets in 1930.
The house was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on March 5, 1998.
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