Bend's first school was an abandoned cabin. This building was the answer to that.
The first schoolhouse in Bend opened in 1887 in an abandoned cabin by the Deschutes River, on ground that is now Drake Park. It was replaced in 1904 by a three-storey wood-frame building at the north end of downtown, near where the Deschutes County Court House stands today, and Ruth Reid became its first principal.
In 1913 the people of Bend passed a school bond providing 23,000 dollars to buy land and build a modern school. The district bought several downtown lots at the corner of Wall Street and Idaho Avenue from The Bend Company, plus one more from a local family, making a 1.9-acre site. The three-storey building that went up there in 1914 was the first modern school building in Bend, and it was named for Ruth Reid.
It stayed with the public school district until 1979, when ownership passed to Deschutes County for use as a local history museum. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places for its architecture and its place in the town's history.
It is now home to the Deschutes Historical Museum, run by the Deschutes County Historical Society, whose stated mission is to preserve, promote and celebrate shared local history, and whose vision is a museum and community centre for education and research.
The society also publishes a land acknowledgement naming the Klamath, Molalla, Northern Paiute and Warm Springs tribes on whose ancestral homelands it operates, and describing their story and their sacrifices as the beginning of the story of Deschutes County. That is the right note to start a county museum on.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
