I don’t have a year for this portrait of John Hammell, but I imagine it was taken around 1950. It could well have been the last portrait ever taken of him.

John was rarely without a hat, so the fact that he is wearing a hat in this portrait is entirely appropriate.

John’s wife Sarah passed away in 1941 (see yesterday’s post). He continued to live in the house at 122 N Sherman for a time. In 1942 he became groundskeeper for the Linn County Courthouse, a building he had done the masonry work on. He continued as groundskeeper until a few years before his death.

Eventually John remarried. That seems to have taken place in December 1945 (so John was 85). His bride seems to have been a widow named Charlotte Elizabeth Carty, who was 24 years his junior. Charlotte had lived in Portland before this. I don’t have any information about how they met (but John’s son Floyd lived in Portland at this time, so perhaps he was involved somehow). From what has been passed down in the family, it would be safe to say this marriage was not a success. While they never divorced, they separated relatively soon after they married. I don’t have any information about where Charlotte went after this. She passed away in 1979, about 95 years old. She is buried in Renton, Washington.

About the time of this separation (possibly there was some cause-and-effect at work here), John left the house at 122 N Sherman and took up residence at the St. Francis Hotel (another structure he had built). He lived there until shortly before his death, when he evidently moved to a nursing home.

John Hammell passed away five days after his 95^th birthday in 1955. The cause of death was toxemia due to blockage of the bile duct (a condition which I imagine would be relatively easily dealt with today).

This was his obituary in the Democrat-Herald:

Probably as fitting a tribute as any to John Hammell’s life was written in a column in the Democrat-Herald almost twenty years earlier:

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Note: There seems to be a minor bit of confusion over which hotel John Hammell lived in during his last years. The biography of him compiled by Betty Scott says he lived at the St. Charles Hotel. However the address she gives for the St. Charles Hotel is actually the address of the St. Francis. There was a St. Charles Hotel in Albany at some point. It stood where the Albany Carousel is now. Some of the readers of this blog who remember visiting John at the hotel during these years have mentioned the St. Francis specifically, so I’m inclined to believe that is the correct one.