Tiny Town Is Not For Show, Says Sole Owner

MILLICAN, Ore. - A retired Alaskan who bought this tiny desert town on U.S. 20 east of Bend says he's remodeling but is quick to add he has no plans to turn it into a tourist attraction.

Erle Cooper wants ``to make the place more presentable, but I don't want to end up with a McDonald's or a Disneyland. We'll be happy just maintaining the Millican City Park.''

Cooper says the tiny city park was what first charmed him and his wife, Virginia, when they visited Millican. And he plans to keep it just as it is.

``It's amazing how many people will use the park,'' Cooper says. ``They'll come in the store and buy a picnic and walk over there to eat it, or they'll drive up and already have their picnic.''

The park is a 6-by-15-foot bare patch with a single picnic table shaded by a lone gnarled juniper tree. It's bracketed by the store and a two-room motel at the center of Millican, 80 acres perched on a knoll amid the sagebrush, rabbit brush and isolation of Oregon's high desert.

Cooper, 62, retired last year after 40 years running a trucking and boating business in Homer, Alaska. He was living in Prineville when he heard the town of Millican was for sale.

For 42 years, the town was owned by Bill Mellin, its sole resident and mayor. His body was found March 8, 1988, the victim of a shooting. David Ray Wareham, a 41-year-old drifter who was working at the store after his parole from the Oregon State Penitentiary, was

later arrested and convicted of Mellin's murder.

Mellin's will gave the town - the 80 acres, the store, the motel, three gasoline pumps and a collection of weathered outbuildings - to his granddaughter, Valerie Cornford. She sold the town to Cooper late last year for an undisclosed amount.

The town was established by George Millican in the late 1800s as one of several outposts that dotted the route from Bend to Burns.