By 1916, two sawmills had opened on opposite banks of the Deschutes River — Shevlin-Hixon on the west, Brooks-Scanlon on the east — and at their peak each employed more than 2,000 workers, turning out more than 500 million board feet of lumber a year. By 1950, the forests were depleted and the mills were finished. Developer Bill Smith purchased the land in 1993, preserved the three signature smokestacks and nine original buildings, and restored 14,000 lineal feet of riverbank that had been closed to the public for close to 80 years. That reclaimed ground is now the Old Mill District. Meanwhile, the Bend Skyliners Mountaineering Club had been fundraising since the 1950s to build a ski area on Mt. Bachelor, which opened in 1958. The timber town had remade itself around the mountains and the river it once used only for industry.
