HISTORY
A place blessed by water and cursed by fire, the city of Bandon has a deep history thanks to its location along the Oregon coastline.
Its history includes shipbuilding, shipwrecks, beach life, Native American heritage, the Coast Guard, disastrous fires, dramatic floods, gold, wind, golf, cheese, trees and cranberries.
Jim Proehl, volunteer with the Bandon Historical Museum, said other aspects of the town’s past includes its scenic location which includes the Coquille River, a beach, majestic offshore rocks, dunes and deep forests, as well as a welcoming climate and thousands of years of human occupation.
While Native people had several named villages on the lower Coquille River, Proehl said Bandon takes its name from Bandon in County Cork, Ireland.
An immigrant, George, Lord Bennett, an Irish lord, helped his neighbors get politically organized and in 1874 suggested they adopt the name of his home town as a legal place name.
“A city named Averill was later platted along the harbor but Bandon was already in such common usage that the Bandon name prevailed,” Proehl said. “The signature event in more recent history is the forest fire that swept through Bandon in 1936, It destroyed 80 percent of the buildings in town and devastated surrounding farms.”
This period of history in Bandon is often referred to as AF or BF, after the fire or before the fire.
“Post-fire Bandon, aside from the beaches, was not very attractive to tourists,” Proehl said. “The fact that businesses had to cater to locals as much as visitors gave the town a character that set it apart from other beach communities. We are still rebuilding.”
Gold Fever & Hospitality
A brief, but vivid “flash in the pan,” in Bandon was the 1800s
gold rush.
“Miners found gold in the black sands of the beach north of Bandon along Whiskey Run Creek,” Proehl said. “The mining boomtown may have had as many as a thousand residents about 1853, but was a ghost town by 1856. Conflict with the miners led to the removal of the local Indian population to the Coast Reservation in the mid-1850s. Today, Whiskey Run Creek runs through the Sheep Ranch course of the Bandon Dunes Golf Resort.”
“In an earlier era, people went to the coast to restore their health,” Proehl said. “Bandon was a healthy place.”
Bandon was tricky to get to, he added, which made it a bit of an exotic destination.
“It was a popular place for excursions and conventions,” Proehl said. “Bandon was a fully self-contained beach resort, with lots of hotel rooms, an indoor, heated, saltwater natatorium, dance halls, campgrounds, auto-courts and a golf course. That all burned in 1936.”
After the fire, the economy centered around lumber, farming and commercial fishing but the beach remained beautiful.
In the 1980s, Proehl said Bandon began to turn its attention again to hospitality, renovating storefronts and reshaping the waterfront.
While the opening of the Bandon Dunes Golf Resort in 1999 opened a new era of tourism that still leans on the idea that Bandon is just a bit hard to get to, Proehl said a walk on the beach is still at the heart of a trip to the locale.
Proehl said Lord Bennett, founder of Bandon, introduced gorse, also known as Irish furze, into the landscape.
“It is an invasive plant that is highly flammable, unpleasant to touch, and difficult to get rid of,” he said. “However, it does add a ‘touch of the old world courses’ to the golf environment.”
Agricultural Heritage
Thanks to Bandon’s climate, area farms are home to cows. Once the home to a dozen creameries, the last one standing was the Coquille Valley Dairy Co-op, better known as the Bandon Cheese Factory.
“For several decades, a stop at the cheese factory was a must for travelers,” Proehl said. “While it closed in the early 2000s, The Face Rock Creamery opened in the same location in 2013, part of a new wave of hand-crafted cheese production.”
Thanks to the need for a long, slow-growing season and sandy soil, Bandon is the Cranberry Capital of Oregon, extending nearly to Port Orford. Proehl said Ocean Spray uses Bandon berries for juice because of their deep red color. Bandon has hosted an annual Cranberry Festival since 1947.
Native American Influences
In June 2024, members of the Coquille Tribe celebrated the 35th anniversary of tribal restoration in Bandon.
“The tribe is an important economic player in Coos County and makes special contributions in the areas of health care, forest restoration and work to restore fish runs to the Coquille River,” Proehl said. “The tribe operates The Mill Casino in Coos Bay. The Coquille Tribal Community Foundation is an important source of grant income to entities in Southwestern Oregon.”
Bandon’s History Museum is at the heart of Bandon. Located in a historic City Hall constructed immediately after the 1936 fire, Proehl said it’s an easy walk to the waterfront boardwalk and the Face Rock Creamery.
For more information, persons interested may visit bandonhistoricalsociety.org, follow the museum on Facebook or call 541-347-2164.
Did You Know
The Beachmen were a band of caped crusaders who worked to promote Bandon in the 1920s. The Western World described what the Beachmen wore — “an original costume consisting of a bathing suit, a cape and a turban and the whole topped by a parasol.” Though officially “The Beachmen,” the group was more popularly known as the “Sons of the Beaches.”
The Wecoma Baths was a heated, indoor, salt water swimming pool. Opened in 1925, the natatorium was part of a resort complex on Coquille Point that included ocean view cabins and the Silver Spray dancehall. All burned in the 1936 fire.
Bandon’s first golf course, opened in 1927, was named Westmost, because at that time it was the western-most golf course in the United States.
Tanglewood Resort, south of town on Bradley Lake, was a frequent stop for big name bands touring between Portland and San Francisco in the 1950s.
Washed Ashore, art to save the oceans, and Circles in the Sand, intricate labyrinths traced on the beach that disappear at high tide, are two recent attractions drawing world-wide attention to Bandon.
The Coquille River Lighthouse, the symbol of the City of Bandon, is the community’s most photographed man-made landmark.
