We’re Paige and Mason. The Bend Banner is our way of keeping tabs on this wild, beautiful place we call home. To the mornings that start with coffee and mountain air, the trails that somehow always lead to a brewery, and the kind of small-town stories that remind you why you chose to live here in the first place.

The School That Became Bend’s Living Room

We were waiting on a table at McMenamins Old St. Francis School a few weeks back when we finally noticed the chalkboard mural tucked into the building, the one with all the little painted figures scattered across it. We had walked past it a dozen times. Turns out almost every person on it is real, and almost every one of them has a story that has nothing to do with beer.

Everybody in Bend has been to Old St. Francis. Almost nobody stops to think that this building spent its first 64 years as a school, and that the man who built it never lived to see it open.

Father Luke Sheehan was a Capuchin Franciscan priest from Cork City, Ireland, called to Bend in 1910 to establish the St. Francis parish. He founded St. Charles, Bend's first hospital, and spent the rest of his life building up the Catholic community here. In 1936, in the last year of his life, he saw the completion of St. Francis School, Central Oregon's first parochial school. There is a room named for him inside the building today, the Father Luke Foundation Room.

For the next 64 years, the school ran kindergarten through eighth grade on this spot. Teaching sisters led their students on hikes through the valley, ran a baseball field day every year against the backdrop of the Cascades, and marked the Feast of St. Francis each fall by releasing monarch butterflies. One nun, Sister Kathleen Hepner, taught sixth grade here from 1979 to 1982, then came back from 1997 to 2008 at the school's new campus. She was the last nun to ever teach at St. Francis.

By 2000, the school had outgrown its downtown building and moved to a new campus in northeast Bend. A few years later, the Archdiocese called two brothers who had already made a habit of saving old buildings nobody else wanted, the same guys who had already turned a poor farm and an old distillery into places people wanted to spend their evenings. Mike and Brian McMenamin took this one on too. The building reopened in November 2004 as a pub, brewery, and hotel.

Look closely now, and the school is still everywhere. The old lunchroom and nursery are the brewery basement. Classrooms are guest rooms, and the tall windows and proportions give it away if you know what you're looking at. The Broom Closet, that tucked-away bar everyone eventually finds, was never meant to be anything more than a crawlspace. Even the paneling in the hotel hallways has a past life; it came out of an old Jim Beam distillery barn in Kentucky before it ever saw Bend.

And that mural, painted by artist Eona Skelton in 2016, is the whole history rolled into one chalkboard. Father Luke stands in the center. The sisters play baseball in front of the mountains. We won't tell you exactly where it is. Half the fun is finding it yourself.

None of this is exactly hidden. McMenamins has never pretended the building was anything other than what it is, and plenty of longtime locals already know. But it's worth a second look next time you're here. A building that spent 64 years shaping this town's kids didn't get torn down when that job ended. It got a second one instead.

So next time you're waiting on a pint at the bar, look up. You might be standing where somebody's grandmother learned long division, or where a nun once drove off in a station wagon to pick up her students in the snow.

A Recent Bite Worth Mentioning

If you’ve been to On Tap, then I’m sure you’ve seen Aina, the Hawaiian food truck. The owner, Ian, is a Kauai native and makes some of the best Hawaiian dishes in town. Try the Poke or Katsu next time you're looking for a bite to eat!

This Week’s Conditions
☀️ Sunrise: 6:04 am
🌅 Sunset: 8:15 pm
High Temp: 84°F
AQI: 168 this morning :/
Local Person of the Week: Weather Max

🐾Bend’s Best Good Boys & Good Girls 🐾

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She's blind from a congenital eye issue and may not hear well either, but she gets around by nose and has already picked up more than anyone expected. She needs a calm house where the couch stays put, and the routine doesn't change much.

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He's active and full of energy, so he does best with real daily exercise. He will need training and plenty of stimulation to keep him out of trouble in his puppy days.

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