Old Mill District: From Ruin to Renewal

When one of the last great sawmills on the Deschutes closed in nineteen eighty three, it left behind two hundred and seventy acres of rusting machinery, crumbling buildings, and contaminated riverbank. For a decade the old mill site sat largely abandoned, a monument to the industry that had built Bend and then run out of trees. In nineteen ninety three, a developer named William Smith purchased the property and began one of the most ambitious redevelopment projects in Oregon history.

Rather than level everything and start over, Smith kept the most striking industrial structures and wove them into a new mixed-use district. The smokestacks stayed. The old powerhouse building that once generated electricity for one of the mills was converted into a retail space.

The machine halls became restaurants and offices. The Deschutes River runs along the western edge of the Old Mill District, and the redevelopment included riverbank pathways and parks, reconnecting the city to the water that had powered the mills for six decades. The Old Mill District opened in stages in the early two thousands and became one of the most visited destinations in central Oregon.

It is an unusual kind of success: a place where the industrial past was not buried or disguised but celebrated and reused. You can eat dinner fifty feet from the same smokestacks that once poured smoke over a town built on cutting down the forest. The mill era and the outdoor recreation era share the same ground in the Old Mill District, which is as honest a summary of what Bend has been and what it has become as any in the city.