City of Bend Historical Surveys
These documents are currently filed in the flat files of our Engineering Vault and were given to Deschutes County by the City of Bend in 2005*. We have now indexed and scanned these files to make them more accessible to those of you who have relied on them.
To help navigate these documents, we generated four PDF index files in which the data is sorted by document number, date, plat name (if any) and township/range/section. The township/range/section index is probably the most useful to search for documents near a given project.
These surveys were filed at the City of Bend in flat file drawers 25, 38 and 39. Bend’s filing system is preserved in both the documents numbers (file “25-02 RAILROAD SIDING 1931.pdf” = Drawer 25, survey #2) and in the structure of the online directories. The root directory contains the indexes for all the documents, which are found in separate subdirectories for drawers 25, 38 and 39.
Some of these files are extremely large, so each subdirectory contains a text file which lists the files and their sizes to give you an idea how long a download is going to take. You are always welcome to peruse the actual maps here at our office if the digital scans are too unwieldy for your computer or if the scans lack in detail.
Whereas many of the surveys are inconsequential or trivial, some of them are extremely informative:
- Many of the early to mid-1900s documents show the locations of found and/or set monuments that are not documented in any surveys filed at our office.
- Many of these documents are work sheets which early surveyors (R.B. Gould in particular) used for constructing their subdivision plats. These work sheets have some extremely valuable information on them, including monumentation. Gould’s work sheets occasionally contain references to his private field books (i.e. "F.B. 49. P.4") and calculation books (i.e. "C.B. 9. P. 59"), which are also on-line in our Miscellaneous Records pages.
- These un-filed maps are not shown on our survey indexes. If you are doing any work in Deschutes County, you should take a moment to examine the indexes for not only this collection, but ALL of the Miscellaneous Records indexes.
- There are surveys in this collection that are well outside the City of Bend, ranging from T14S R10E to T20S R11E.
- Some of these surveys contain other historical data that may be helpful to your clients such as building locations, riparian boundaries and topography.
- A few of the plats were from the City’s "Dead Plat" pile. They were never finalized, approved or recorded, but are being preserved for any PLSS monumentation information they may contain.
If you chose to cite one of these maps as a reference on a survey, you can use wording such as: Survey 25-02, Great Northern RR survey dated 7/22/1931, City of Bend Historical Records filed at the Deschutes County Surveyor’s Office.
See the City of Bend Historical Surveys at the Deschutes County Public Records Center Now
