Almost 16 million years of geologic history, and 108 years of Baker City history, were loaded into trailers in the span of a few hours.

And with that, the legacy of one of the city’s venerable buildings rolled away to become benches and retaining walls and other purposes yet to be decided.

Baker Technical Institute gave away a couple hundred chunks of Pleasant Valley tuffstone on Tuesday afternoon, Aug. 20.

The remnants, ranging in size roughly from a footstool to a footlocker, and weighing in some cases hundreds of pounds, were salvaged from the Central Building.

The three-story structure, which served as Baker High School from 1917 to 1952 and later was part of the Baker Middle School campus before the school district closed it in 2009, was gutted by a human-caused fire on May 22. The fire is still being investigated, with Oregon State Police the lead agency.

The Baker School District, of which BTI is a part, hired Alpine Abatement of Redmond to dismantle the building.

That five-week, $1.1 million project wrapped up last week.

The district announced last week that it would offer the tuffstone blocks for free, up to five per trailer, on Aug. 20 and Aug. 21. The Aug. 21 event starts at 8 a.m.

Trucks hauling trailers began to line up about four hours before the noon start of the giveaway Tuesday in a field between the Baker Sports Complex soccer fields and Hughes Lane. That’s where BTI students practice operating heavy equipment.

More than 25 rigs were waiting when BTI’s Brody Charpilloz started loading stones, running the machine with almost balletic grace as he deftly placed the rock gently in trailers and a few pickup beds.

Kevin Cassidy, who attended classes in the Central Building as a middle school student in the early 1980s, said the event was “bittersweet.”

“It’s a piece of our history,” Cassidy, a former Baker School Board member, said as he waited in his pickup truck for his turn to collect stones.

Cassidy said he will use the pieces as benches around the fire pit at his house west of Haines.

The stones will augment his collection of Pleasant Valley tuffstone. A much larger chunk, quarried as part of the pieces turned into signs along the Leo Adler Memorial Parkway, serves as a table.

Cassidy said he was pleased that the stones will be used, and displayed, at places around town and elsewhere.

“It’s an opportunity for the building to live on throughout the community,” he said.

That’s not the fate for all historic structures — including one that was made from the same tuffstone, a type of volcanic ash welded into stone by the terrific heat of an eruption from a vent near Castle Rock in northern Malheur County about 15.8 million years ago, according to geologists.

Larry Pennington brought a trailer to collect rocks for his daughter and son-in-law, Andrea and Phil Stone of Baker City.

Phil Stone attended school at the Central Building.

Pennington, who recently moved to Baker City, was living in Ontario and working in construction when he helped demolish the St. Francis Academy, which stood just east of St. Francis de Sales Cathedral. That building came down about 50 years ago.

Pennington said the stone was buried at the site rather than salvaged.

Karl Schoening, who lives in St. Elizabeth Towers in Baker City, said the stones he received will be used to help repair a wall on the Fourth Street side of the historic structure, which was originally St. Elizabeth Hospital. The building is made of Pleasant Valley tuffstone, Schoening said. He said he was glad to have access to the same type of stone for the repair.

Steve Creech of Cove said he learned about the free stone around 4 a.m. on Tuesday.

He researched tuffstone and figured the blocks would work well in the retaining wall he’s building.

That the stone has historical significance is a bonus, Creech said.

“Having pieces of a 108-year-old building is pretty awesome,” he said.

Greg Woydziak has a particular connection to the Central Building.

Four of his five children attended the school, and he has lived just across Court Avenue from the building since 1987.

The view to the north, he said, is “very different” since the structure was taken down.

“I can see all of Broadway now,” Woydziak said as he stood beside his pickup truck Tuesday.

He planned to use the three blocks he collected as benches in his yard. That trio of stones will end up just a couple hundred feet from where they stood for more than a century.