The Bandon Fire: A City Burns in Three Hours

Gorse is a shrub from the heathlands of Western Europe, bright yellow flowers in spring, dense thorny growth year-round, and oil in its stems and foliage that makes it extremely flammable. European settlers brought gorse to Oregon's coastal communities in the late nineteenth century as ornamental hedging and windbreak. It spread easily and grew thick in the wet coastal climate. By the nineteen thirties it was everywhere in and around Bandon.

September twenty-sixth, nineteen thirty-six was dry. A fire started in the gorse and moved with the wind through the shrub and into the wooden structures of the town. Bandon burned in approximately three hours. Eleven people died. Approximately two hundred buildings were destroyed, most of downtown. The fire swept from one end of the town to the other faster than people could organize to stop it.

Bandon rebuilt on the same site. The rebuilt downtown, now called Old Town Bandon, is the commercial and tourist center you would walk through today. The cranberry industry that defines the local agricultural economy came into its own in the postwar years, giving the rebuilt town an economic foundation the pre-fire town had not had in the same form.

The gorse was never fully eradicated. It remains a dominant plant in the coastal dunes and hedgerows around Bandon, as it does in many parts of the Oregon Coast. It is still flammable. The nineteen thirty-six fire is a case study in the slow, specific consequences of a landscaping decision made half a world away: a plant imported for its utility, adapted to conditions it found better than its homeland, and eventually, on a dry September afternoon, expressing its full nature.