Bend: From Sawdust to Outdoor Capital

You are in Bend, Oregon, a city that has lived two entirely separate lives. Its first life lasted from the day the post office opened, in nineteen oh one, to the afternoon the last great sawmill shut down, in nineteen eighty three. During those eight decades, Bend was a timber town, built around two enormous lumber mills straddling the Deschutes River.

Its second life, the one you see today, is built on mountains, rivers, rock, desert, and an outdoor recreation economy that has made Bend one of the fastest growing cities in the Pacific Northwest. The name Bend comes from the shape of the land. Early settlers called this place Farewell Bend because the Deschutes River makes a wide sweeping curve here, turning away from its southward run and bending through the lava plateau below.

The Post Office Department in Washington decided Farewell Bend was too many words and shortened it. Alexander Drake, a developer from New York, is generally credited with turning the loose cluster of settlers into an actual town. When Bend incorporated as a city in nineteen oh five, it had about five hundred people.

The logging boom that followed was staggering in scale. In March and April of nineteen sixteen, two of the largest pine sawmills in the world opened side by side on the Deschutes, south of downtown. Shevlin Hixon opened on the west bank and Brooks Scanlon on the east.

Together they employed more than two thousand workers each and at their peak turned out more than five hundred million board feet of lumber in a single year. Log booms stretched across the river to separate the two companies' timber. Shevlin Hixon closed in nineteen fifty when its timber supply ran out.

Brooks Scanlon followed in nineteen eighty three. The mill sites fell into ruin. Then a developer named William Smith bought the land in nineteen ninety three and spent years transforming it into the Old Mill District, two hundred and seventy acres of shops and restaurants along the Deschutes, using the surviving smokestacks and turbine halls as the bones of a new kind of place.

Around Bend, the landscape the loggers once worked now drives the economy. Mount Bachelor for skiing. The Deschutes for kayaking and fly fishing.

Smith Rock for climbing. Newberry Volcano and its lava tubes for hiking. The forests for mountain biking.

Bend did not just survive the end of the timber era. It remade itself entirely.