Local favorite Shevlin Park a legacy from lumber mill

Published 5:00 am Sunday, July 27, 2008

What: Shevlin Park

Where: On Tumalo Creek, just west of Bend.

While Bend’s Drake Park has its attractions — ducks and swans and impeccably manicured lawns — for many Bend residents, it’s Shevlin Park that captures the natural beauty and wild openness of Central Oregon.

The park long has been a favorite for hikers, cyclists and junior explorers in the summer, and cross-country skiers, snowshoers and snowball-throwers in the winter. Shevlin Park stretches about five miles north to south, with a 4.7-mile loop trail weaving through its pines, another 2.5-mile trail running along the creek and a paved road stretching for 1.8 miles from the parking lot south of Shevlin Park Road to Fremont Meadows at the park’s southern end.

In 1919, a trout hatchery opened on Tumalo Creek on a piece of land owned by the Shevlin-Hixon Lumber Co., one of Bend’s two powerhouse lumber mills, according to historical reports. The company, which owned some 200,000 acres of timberland on the Deschutes plateau and in the eastern Cascades, gave the hatchery land to Deschutes County. When the first 400,000 trout eggs were about to hatch, Bend leaders and residents began looking for parkland near the hatchery.

In 1920, Shevlin-Hixon granted their wish by donating land for a memorial park to honor Thomas L. Shevlin, the company’s former president and the impetus behind Shevlin-Hixon’s presence in Bend. The idea of setting the land aside for a park came from T.A. McCann, Shevlin-Hixon’s general manager, according to Lewis McArthur in his “Oregon Geographic Names.” McCann had seen an entire lumber district in the Midwest logged to the ground for the mills and did not want to see the same thing happen in Central Oregon. He argued for preservation of the timbered area.

On Dec. 22, 1920, Shevlin-Hixon deeded the park site to the city of Bend, stipulating that it must always be called Shevlin Park and used and maintained as a park only. The park is now owned by the Bend Metro Park and Recreation District.

Today, the park is home to many native animals, trees and plants. Cougars, deer, eagles, beavers, otters and trout live in Shevlin Park. Ponderosa pines, some 300 years old and 200 feet tall, grow in the canyon, along with aspens, larches and lodgepole pines. Shrubs such as elderberry and snowberry also thrive in the moist, creekside climate.

One more thing: Thomas Shevlin, the namesake of the park, was a famous football player known as “Tom Shevlin of Yale,” according to Phil Brogan in his book “East of the Cascades.” Shevlin was an end on the Yale University team, and it was said that no opposing player ever got around the end he guarded, Brogan wrote.

Shevlin graduated from Yale in 1906 and headed to the Deschutes country, where he spent six months “cruising” timber, or calculating how much lumber stood in Shevlin-Hixon’s forested land. In 1912, Shevlin became president of the company, and he visited Bend to survey preliminary construction on the company’s mill.

But on Dec. 29, 1915 — just three months before the mill he helped establish in Bend started operations — Shevlin died of pneumonia in Minnesota. He was 33.

— Julie Johnson