232 NW Congress Street

Old Bend is where the city started. It is bounded by the Deschutes River to the west, Drake Park and Franklin Avenue to the north, Highway 97 to the east, and Arizona Avenue to the south, roughly 1 square mile, and it is the smallest of the city's neighborhood association districts. Alexander M. Drake subdivided the land in 1910 through the Pilot Butte Development Company, selling the original lots for $100 to $250. The Oregon Trunk Railroad reached Bend in 1911, and the Shevlin-Hixon and Brooks-Scanlon mills opened within a month of each other in 1916, Shevlin-Hixon in March and Brooks-Scanlon in April. Bend's population went from 536 people in 1910 to 5,414 by 1920, and most of Old Bend's housing stock was built to hold that growth: small lots, alley-loaded garages, homes sized for millworkers rather than for show.

That history is why the neighborhood looks the way it does. The Drake Park Neighborhood Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places on June 3, 2005 (NRHP reference 05000380), covers 17 city blocks and 83 residential lots inside Old Bend, with 82 percent of the homes built between 1910 and 1954. Fourteen architectural styles show up across those lots, led by 25 Craftsman bungalows and 17 homes in the various Colonial styles, with English Cottage, Tudor, Dutch Colonial, Spanish Colonial Revival, Georgian Revival, and California Ranch in smaller numbers. Four houses were individually listed on the National Register before the district designation: the Putnam House at 606 NW Congress (1911), the McCann House at 440 NW Congress (1915), the Moore House (1921), and the Hamilton House (1923).