The McMinnville Grand Ballroom
Near Mcminnville, Oregon
Above the storefronts at three twenty five Northeast Third Street sits one of McMinnville's hidden treasures, the Grand Ballroom. It was built in the early eighteen nineties by townspeople who wanted a proper hall for dances, lodge meetings, graduations, and grand social occasions in a growing frontier town. The room they built is remarkable, a large open floor laid in tongue and groove fir, ringed by tall windows set in brick walls and carried on rows of turned wooden pillars beneath a high ceiling.
For generations this was where the community gathered to celebrate, a second story dance floor that could hold the whole town in its finest clothes. Over the decades it fell into disuse, as so many upstairs halls did. Then the ballroom was carefully restored and later updated, bringing back the warm wood and brick of the original.
Today it hosts weddings, concerts, and celebrations once more, a rare survivor of the era when every prosperous main street kept a grand hall upstairs for its people to dance in.
