Location, Location & Location

Location, Location and Location. Two of the Greatest Lumber Companies in the World. , The bustling marketplace you see today, filled with shops, theaters, restaurants, entertainment and recreation was once the site of the largest pine sawmills in the country. Back in the 1920s, they were busy, noisy and dusty mills, each producing over 300,000 board feet of lumber a day. , The first lumbermen were from Minnesota. However, once the mills were in production, people from all over began migrating to Bend. A sleepy town of 536 people in 1910, Bend grew to a bustling city of 6650 by 1921. Working at the mill meant that you were part of something more than a lumber company, you were family. The lumber companies employed over 1500 people each, and by 1944, produced more than 250 million board feet of lumber annually. The lumber industry was the community's largest employer for over six decades. , Two Great Lakes lumber firms built on opposite sides of the Deschutes, upriver from Bend. Brooks-Scanlon built Mill A on the East side and Shevlin-Nixon built on the West side. Both sawmills opened within a month of each other in 1916. Because this was such an ideal location, Brooks-Scanlon decided to build the bigger, more modern Mill B in 1923. You can see remnants of Mill B when you look at the building with the three smoke stacks. Originally, those brick buildings, the powerhouse with the stacks, the generator shop in front and the fuel building next to it, were all part of the Mill B complex. , As times changed, so did the needs of the country. Mill A closed in 1938, Shevlin-Nixon sold their holdings to Brooks-Scanlon in 1950 and, Mill B was finally closed in 1993. Over the years, the mills produced billions of board feet of lumber. The final closing of the lumber mills brought an end to an amazing era that not only created the town of Bend, but furnished the country with a superior grade of lumber for over 80 years.