Laurence Dyer loves calling Sisters home
By Jim Cornelius

A lot of water has rolled down the Metolius River since Laurence Dyer first cast a line into the stream in the late 1930s. The years have brought many changes, but Dyer still finds the Sisters/Camp Sherman area the only place in the world where he wants to be.

Dyer first visited the area as a boy in the 1930s, when his uncle was a sawyer at one of the local sawmills and his aunt was a cook for logging crews.
“My brother and I used to come out in the summers and visit with them,” Dyer recalled.

Those visits were curtailed by gas rationing during World War II, but after the war he started coming back. That’s when he met his future wife Betty, whose parents owned a resort in Camp Sherman where the Kokanee Café now stands.

The couple married in 1951 and moved permanently to Camp Sherman. Laurence worked as a caretaker and assistant for Leonard Lundgren, who owned property in Camp Sherman and a lumber mill in Sisters.
In those days there was no electrical power to Camp Sherman; everything ran off water turbines. Laurence remembers the march of electrical power lines across eastern Oregon in the 1950s — a development that changed the region.

“I don’t know how in the world they did so much line construction in such a short time,” he said.

Dyer did business with all of the pioneering families in Sisters. He recalls buying supplies at the Leithauser General Store, which is now Sisters Bakery.

“We bought all our groceries from Pete (Leithauser),” he said. “That was a huge store at the time.”

Dyer, who later became prominent in Sisters’ real estate market, recalls having to pass on an opportunity in the 1960s. He was offered an opportunity to buy a lot in the heart of downtown Sisters “for $220 or something like that.”
He had to pass on what is now a prime piece of real estate because “we didn’t have any money.”

Dyer’s job working for the Lundgren family wound down just as Sisters’ mills were closing down. The only real business centered around the Forest Service.

Dyer marks the creation of Black Butte Ranch as a watershed moment for Sisters.

“From the time Black Butte Ranch came into existence is when Sisters really changed,” he said.

Sisters created its Western theme and a tourist-oriented community started to evolve.

In 1980, Dyer and several of his children obtained real estate licenses and started what would become a new family business. The family eventually established Ponderosa Properties in 1991.

Dyer is now basically retired from the business. He lives on several acres of Sisters with his children’s homes nearby. He and Betty consider themselves unusually blessed to have family so close that they get to see their grandchildren every day.

Laurence devotes considerable time to woodworking, creating exquisite chests and furniture pieces that he often donates to fund-raising auctions for various causes in Sisters. He never sells any of his work.

Each day, he can walk out to his shop and take in the magnificence of the Three Sisters and remember why he decided to build a life here so many decades ago.

He’s seen a lot of change and development in Sisters. He doesn’t much like the higher-density development that has occurred inside the city limits in the past eight years or so, but he understands why it has happened.

“There’s tremendous pressure on all the cities for development,” he said.
Of course, that’s mainly because so many people want to live here and partake of the beauty and quality of life the area has to offer. Dyer notes that a world-traveling client of his has told him more than once that “there’s no place like Central Oregon.”