Archives West Finding Aid

Rasmus Petersen was born in 1883 in Denmark. In 1900, Petersen immigrated to the United States and settled in the state of Oregon near the Cascade Mountains in 1906. He built a two-story Craftsman house and adjoining farm. As a personal hobby, he began collecting rocks on his land, including Oregon agates, obsidian, petrified wood, malachite, and jasper. In 1935, Petersen began building miniature buildings, monuments, and bridges out of rocks. By his death in 1952, Petersen had created a four-acre rock garden. Petersen's Rock Garden (called Petersen Rock Garden and Museum from the mid 1950s on) is a well-known Oregon roadside attraction.

Myron Symons was an Oregon photographer in the early 1900s. Symons, orginally from New York, moved to Seattle at the age of fifteen. After a three-year apprenticeship to a jeweler, he worked in a Dawson, British Columbia, jewelry store for almost two years; while living in Dawson, he gained experience in scenic photography by photographing the Yukon. Symons returned to Seattle where he was married and opened his own jewelry store but moved to Bend, Oregon, in 1915. In Bend he established the first jewelry store in the O'Kane Hotel building and became known as a local photographer. Symons photographed sawmills, local businesses, the Cascade Mountains, and other areas of interest in central Oregon. In 1920, his brother Archie became a partner in the jewelry store. Myron's photographs were sold in booklets by the Symons Brothers jewelry store. After Myron's death in 1959, the editor of The Bulletin wrote that Myron's work was the "record, displayed in pictures and slides at outdoor shows in California, that brought to the attention of thousands the little-known scenic Deschutes country of central Oregon."