A Short History of The Park’s Original Cabins

By Scott B. Shephard

 (NOTE: the following is an short excerpt from a historical narrative of the history of the cabin located on lot #146 in Haner Park West. The cabin originally was a Shevlin-Hixon lumbar shack, as was their 10’ X 20’ outbuilding to the north. The original cabin was expanded in 1960 by a previous owner, adding two rooms and a bathroom. This was made possible with the abandoning of the outhouse and an installation of a primitive septic tank and drain field. The 1960 remodel was the first one permited on County record for lot #146, and it included the removal of the iron Betty cookstove and the erection of a stone fireplace in the center of the expanded cabin. Many of the Elk’s members who had Haner Park leases would bring in timber shanties in the late 1940s. This excerpt is shared with members who might also have cabins that started as a Shevlin-Hixon structure, to give them information on how their cabins came to be).

Joseph H. Haner moved to Oregon in 1901 as a representative of the Gilchrist Lumber Company. According to a 1980 article in the Elks’ National magazine, Mr. Haner lived in Prineville and in 1911 joined the Elks Lodge in The Dalles. When the national fraternal organization opened a branch in Bend, he would then transfer his membership to the Bend chapter. 

In 1942, the Bend Elks had the option to buy a piece of land on the Metolius River but couldn’t obtain adequate funding. In the same year he had observed, on his family’s annual camping trip to Crescent Lake, that the shores were becoming more and more crowded. It was becoming harder to find a place to escape. Haner was disappointed by the failed attempt to purchase the Metolius property but once again, he got back on track to find a private landholding for the Elks.

Long before Haner was on the hunt for a new plot of land, the Deschutes parcel was a Federal Government holding. Public to Private land transfers have historically been rare and it took an act of Congress, spearheaded by some type of special relationship or a benevolent swipe of a wand to get it done. The transaction typically was nurtured by a Governor, Congressman or a Senator. In the case of the Haner Park property, in the beginning it started as a 160-acre Public-to-Private land transfer to Oregon businessman Neil Smith. This official transfer was finalized by Theodore Roosevelt on March 13, 1905. The transaction and land document would be held-up in the county assessor’s office for 2 additional years, but the land sale would be finalized in 1907. Not much is known about what Mr. Smith did with the property. We do have one piece of evidence however, resting on tract 146, that being an old steam shovel bucket. It suggests that either mining or dredging of the river (to float logs) did occur. Sometime early in the 20th Century, Shevlin-Hixon Lumber Company purchased the property from Neil Smith. The history of the lumber company’s virgin ponderosa harvesting is well known. The Shevlin-Hixon mill was erected and opened in 1917 and ran through 1950 where it was sold to its competitor Brooks-Scanlon because the regional forests had been ‘logged out.’ It has been calculated that the Shevlin-Hixon mill processed 200,000 acres of Ponderosa forests during this time period and it is also estimated that the 160 acre parcel originally procured by Neil Smith was included in this campaign.

What we do know is that in 1943, the Shevlin-Hixon lumber company sold Joe Haner half of the plot, 80 acres along the Upper Deschutes for $1. Haner in turn would donate the property to the Bend Elks Lodge. This was at the end of the mill’s run and likely the majority of the virgin forests were gone. Given that Shevlin-Hixon at the time were employing no sustainable forestry practices, the mill likely had no use for the property. It has been theorized that this would explain the ‘fire sale’ price.

Joe Haner and fellow Elks leadership wasted no time getting the acreage surveyed, forming a grid with 58 tracts total. There would be 37 tracts on the Eastside of the river and 21 tracts set on the Westside. The criteria for leasing a new tract was being a Bend Elk’s Lodge member in good standing. Buildings erected on the one acre lots would be legally owned by the members but the land remained principle to the Bend Elks. When the parcels were divided up amongst the order, members drew straws to determine who got river front lots. 

Although Haner Park would have to wait 5 more years before the Wickiup Reservior project would be complete, BPOE lease holders nevertheless knew that they would eventually have the security of flood control and a measured flow of river water for recreational fishing. The dam was a significant technological advancement for the day, and the Elks lot holders would become one of the indirect beneficiaries. 

The Bend Elk’s Lodge now allowed its members to begin building on their lots. Many of the Elks chose to purchase pre-built abodes that were available locally. This method provided a fast and affordable way to establish a camp, instead of building a cabin from the ground up. These small one or two room shacks were brought in on flat bed trucks and block & tackled off onto their new log footings. These portables were small line shack type abodes that, in earlier decades, had been loaded onto trains and transported from logging site to logging site.

Author Finn John wrote about Shevlin-Hixon’s temporary logging towns in an article in Offbeat Oregon History: in 2013:

“Shevlin, you see, was a town built entirely with railroad rolling stock. It was, depending on how you looked at it, either a very small company town, or a very large and elaborate logging camp. And the company that owned it did not practice sustainable forestry, so when all the trees were cut over, the town would simply move on . . . (The town of) Shevlin moved three times, each time going farther south, away from Bend. Company planners would scout a new location, and roads and lots would be bulldozed, and latrine pits would be dug. Then, over a few days, the entire town, some 400 structures, would be hauled in and the homes set in place. Outhouses brought from the old townsite would then be set down over the top of new latrine pits, and everybody would move right back in.”

In 1943 it was a case of perfect timing for new Haner Park residents. Namely the fact that the park’s grand opening coincided with the demise of the transient timber town of Shevlin. Also, the fact that Shevlin had moved three times over twenty years, described by Finn John as ‘further South of Bend’ and ‘deeper into the woods,’ meant for those that had secured a plot with the Elks, that the timber shanties likely weren’t far away--not to mention that they could be available at a discount.

Also of interest in Finn John’s article was under his postscript: ‘My personal note.’ He tells about buying a home in Lebanon, Oregon and discovering that it was actually a modified timber shanty. This sounded identical to our experience in 2021 when restoring the cabin on lot #146:

”Back in 2008, I bought a fixer-upper house in Lebanon, a little boxy thing on the outskirts of town, that needed help. As it turned out, it needed a lot more help than I had envisioned (funny how that happens); one of the things it needed was to be jacked up so that a proper foundation could be poured under it. In the process of doing this, I discovered that the underside structure of the house was very unusual. It appeared to have started out as a small shoebox-shaped structure, 22 feet long and 14 feet wide, but built very stoutly; the rest of the house had been added onto that box, apparently in three separate phases, until the house was 27 by 20 feet in overall size. The central shoebox comprised the living room and bedroom; the add-ons were a porch, a bathroom and kitchen, and a short hallway accessing two more bedrooms. But the central “shoebox” part of the house had some odd characteristics. The floor joists were rough-sawn 2x10s, which is insane overkill for such a tiny building; the ceiling joists, 2x8, ditto. But the weirdest thing was the floor joists ran not side to side, as is usually done when building a house, but lengthwise -- they ran 22 feet from one end of the house to the other. It wasn’t until I started doing the research for this story that I realized that the house I bought was one of the family residences from the town of Shevlin.”

Originally the cabins were either set on the ground or placed on log footings. Many Haner Park lease holders would eventually jack-up the cabins, remove the log footings, and build proper foundations. This exact same type of hoisting up and retro-pour was done in 1960 with the cabin on lot #146.

The history of Haner Park’s start in the early 1940s is one of a modest and frugal inception. From the $1 sale price given to Joe Haner for 80 acres, to the $150 clearance price for a used Shevlin-Hixson shack, this was a wilderness get-away created on a budget. By the end of the war, it was the end of the line to one of the region’s largest timber-towns, coinciding with a unique land sale that provided the basic elements to Haner Park’s start. The early Bend Elk members were most fortunate to have had the opportunity created by Mr. Haner to lease a small slice of heaven. This achievement was all the result of his vision and persistence.