Walking into the Mohawk Restaurant and Lounge in Crescent is like stepping through a time portal into a 1930s hunting lodge: Just about every wild creature to ever roam or fly across Oregon — from bison, cougars and wolverines to pheasants, hawks and a golden eagle — are preserved by taxidermy and mounted on the knotty pine walls.

It started out as a hole-in-the-wall tavern, built along the old military stage coach road in 1933 after prohibition ended, one block east of its present location. The restaurant was added in 1946 when the tavern was moved west to make way for Highway 97, and the original building was combined with the local Grange hall, according to Brian and Cindy Koch. They purchased the Mohawk in 2001 from Cindy’s parents, Ken and Marge Curbow, who bought it in 1984 and moved from Puyallup, Wash., to Crescent to run the business.

The Kochs said the Crescent area was a great place to work, live and raise a family, but with their sons graduating from nearby Gilchrist High School over the next three years, they’re looking for a buyer for the Mohawk.

“We had it listed for the last couple of years with no luck, so we dropped the listing,” said Cindy, who turned 44 this year and has been working at the Mohawk off an on in one capacity or another since she was 17.

After all those years working part time after school, then full time, and later owning and running the restaurant and lounge, Cindy and her husband Brian, 45, would like to sell the business and move on.

Unfortunately, Cindy said, the slow economy and declining populations in Crescent and Gilchrist make it tough to sell a business. But she’s hopeful the right person will come along and recognize the Mohawk is a special place — a slice of American history akin to a museum, with its huge collection of taxidermied animals and antique bottle collections in a historic building with knotty pine walls.

The area around Crescent is known for its forests, lakes, parks, gardens and outdoor recreation opportunities, but despite those assets, the population of Crescent fell from 1,289 to 731 from 2000 to 2010, while Gilchrist’s population dropped from more than 640 to 438, due largely to the area’s shrinking timber industry, according to the Kochs and statistics from the Population Center at Portland State University.

Crescent is located along Highway 97, less than 5 miles south of Gilchrist, near the Klamath and Deschutes County border.

The road to Crescent

Cindy said the business was a dream come true for her father, but it took awhile for her to adapt to the remote rural setting lacking the shopping malls, movie theaters and other elements of city life she was accustomed to growing up in Puyallup.

“My dad drove a delivery truck for Hostess in Puyallup. We called him the ‘Twinkie Man,’” said Cindy. “His dream was to own a business of his own.”

An uncle driving through Crescent saw a for sale sign on the Mohawk and called her father, who fell in love with the place and immediately bought it, said Cindy.

“I was 17, and I had six weeks left my junior year in high school when my dad bought the Mohawk,” said Cindy. “When we moved here I drove down a couple hours ahead of my parents. I remember seeing the sign for the Gilchrist Mall. I was excited to see they had a mall.”

The excitement faded, however, when she turned off Highway 97 to check it out and saw the “mall” consisted of a restaurant, market, pizza parlor, visitors center and cabinet shop.

“I sat down on the curb and cried. It didn’t have a Gap, Old Navy or any of the stores like the malls in Puyallup,” said Cindy.

“It was culture shock,” she said of the move from Puyallup and a high school with 1,200 students to the tiny town of Crescent and Gilchrist High School, where the enrollment in 1984 was around 130.

The Gilchrist Mall has even less today than it did in 1984, with the closing of the pizza parlor, cabinet shop and restaurant.

For the first few years in Crescent, Cindy, her sisters Debbie and Jody, Grandpa Curbow and her parents lived upstairs over the Mohawk, which at one time reportedly housed a barbershop and brothel, according to stories relayed to her family by old-timers who frequented the Mohawk, Cindy said.

“The guys would go upstairs and come back down with a haircut,” she said.

When she was 21, she was working as a waitress and doing a little bartending when Brian, who was 22 at the time, started coming in for lunch and dinner while he was working on a logging crew for a contract logger out of Roseburg.

Within two years, the couple got married.

“In those days I figured I could always get a logging job,” Brian said of his decision to quit the Roseburg logging contractor. He put away his overalls and cork-soled logging boots and tried working in the restaurant for Cindy’s parents.

When that didn’t work out, he took a logging job in Wallowa County, where he and Cindy lived from 1992 to 1998, and where both of their sons were born.

In 1998 Cindy’s parents made them an offer to buy the Mohawk that they couldn’t refuse. It took more than two years to complete the deal.

Years of collecting

Over the years, the Mohawk has gone through a succession of five owners that the Kochs know of, including the original owner, Red Wilson (1933-1946), followed by Mansey and Irene Biden (1946-1960), Blackie Milani and wives Helen and Nita (1960-1980), Carl and Clara Doan (1980-1984), Cindy’s parents and then her and Brian.

History buffs can find a more detailed history of the Mohawk in a book titled “People, Places and Things in Klamath County,” Cindy said.

Animal displays in the restaurant range from bison, wolverine and beaver to wolf, bear, alligators and iguana, as well as a two-headed lamb and a two-headed calf.

“Most of the animals were here when Dad bought the place,” she said. While they don’t know for sure where they came from, the Kochs surmise that previous owner Mansey Biden may have been responsible for most of the animal collection, since he was also a taxidermist.

During the time her family has owned the Mohawk, people have donated a black bear hide, a zebra hide, a wolf hide, mounted elk and an anteater, said Cindy.

“People come in for the first time and tell us they have been driving Highway 97 for years and never knew all this was in here,” said Cindy.

Besides the large collection of stuffed or mounted heads of wildlife and livestock collected and displayed in the restaurant over the decades, the Mohawk restaurant also features a wall-to-wall collection of more than 1,500 antique Avon bottles, whisky bottles depicting loggers, miners, cowboys, hunters, fishermen, athletes and other collectable figurine bottles.

“My grandfather was crippled with arthritis, and he enjoyed having the Avon lady come around so much that he collected just about every Avon bottle there was,” said Cindy.

Small-town life

With the populations of Crescent and nearby Gilchrist shrinking, the restaurant doesn’t bring in as much business as it once did, so in addition to running the business and keeping the books, the Kochs wind up working long hours taking shifts cooking, waiting tables, or working as cashier, dishwasher and janitor.

Despite the economic downturn, the Kochs continue to open the restaurant for fundraising dinners to help sports teams at Gilchrist High School raise money for new uniforms, and to help student groups such as the Future Business Leaders of America raise money to compete in the National FBLA Leadership Conference June 28 to July 3 in Orlando, Florida.

“We have four kids from Gilchrist going back to the national championships in Orlando. To me, that is quite a feat,” Brian Koch said.

Today their sons, Taran, 16, and Trinton, 14, are in their sophomore and freshman years at Gilchrist, where enrollment has dropped nearly 50 percent since 1984 and is now less than 70, said Cindy.

Both sons work at the restaurant summers and other times when needed, with Taran preferring to cook while Trinton likes raking in the tips waiting tables. But Brian and Cindy said neither one of boys has any interest in taking over the family business.

Taran and Trinton said they have enjoyed the advantages of small-town, small-school life, such as the abundance of outdoor recreational activities, riding horses, playing on the school basketball team and friendships with their close-knit classmates, but they don’t see any future in staying in Crescent after they graduate from high school.

Taran said he’s planning on leaving for college and a career training reining horses, possibly in Oklahoma or Texas. Trinton said he’s planning to pursue a career as a firefighter in a town large enough to have a professional fire department.

“We always told the boys that the key to success is finding your passion and following it,” said Cindy Koch. “I’m still hoping to experience that.”

The basics

What: Mohawk Restaurant and Lounge

Address: 136726 N. Highway 97, Crescent

Phone: 541-433-2256