The story of Brooks Resources Corporation is the story of Bend and its transition from a frontier settlement to a timber boomtown and then on to a diverse city in the heart of Oregon’s high desert. On August 18, 1915 The Bend Bulletin broke the news that “Brooks-Scanlon Will Build Here at Once.” By spring of 1916, both the Brooks-Scanlon Lumber Company and a competitor, the Shevlin-Hixon Company, were operating sawmills on opposite sides of the Deschutes River. These lumber mills, made possible by the railroad’s arrival in 1911, sparked a boom that fueled the town’s growth for the next half century.

Bend grew from a sleepy western village of 258 pioneers in 1903, to a bustling town of 5,414 by 1920, the fastest growth of any city in the United States. For the next several decades, both Brooks-Scanlon and Shevlin-Hixon mills operated as the largest pine sawmills west of the Mississippi. But in 1950, realizing that the long-term timber supply could not provide both mills with enough logs to meet their combined capacity, Shevlin-Hixon sold out to Brooks-Scanlon. This consolidation compelled both Brooks-Scanlon and the Bend community to consider a more diverse economic base. By the late 1960s, Brooks-Scanlon diversified into real estate development, and Brooks Resources was born.