Millican
Millican, which lies amid the sagebrush 21 miles east of Bend on the Bend-Burns highway, was once listed in Ripley’s Believe It or Not as the smallest town in America.
It may still be.
Founded in 1913 during a last, optimistic wave of homesteading in the American West, Millican — pretty much a one-horse town, and one-everything-else as well — was owned for years by Billy Rahn. Rahn lived here alone from about 1922 to 1945. It was in the 1940s that the town and its owner were listed in Ripley’s Believe It or Not, a popular syndicated newspaper column.
A fellow named Bill Mellin bought the town in 1946 and lived here for years after. When we met him in 1984, Mellin had hung a “town for sale” sign in the window. He said he had found love letters in the store from random women around the country who wanted to marry Billy Rahn after the newspaper pieces ran. Mellin, whose wife had died and whose kids were grown and gone, said he would take the first $50,000 cash that walked in the door. It never did. He continued to scrape by, making his living serving tourists and visitors to nearby Pine Mountain Observatory.
Mellin was murdered by a hired hand in 1988 — perhaps the only time half a town’s population murdered the other half — and Millican passed to his granddaughter, a Stanford graduate, who never lived there and sold it a few years later. In the past few years a handful of people have tried to make a living here and none has succeeded. The last time we stopped by, Millican appeared deserted again.