Submitted photoLogging trains like the one pictured here carried fallen timber from the remote stretches of forest thatt surrounded Central Oregon to mills operated by companies like Brooks Scanlon and Shevlin-Hixon.

Brian Whitcomb and his partners unearthed more than 100 steel nails, railroad spikes and wooden ties when they started clearing some land off China Hat Road to build the Lost Tracks Golf Club and its 700-yard, par-72 golf course about 10 years ago.

“(Some people) told us they logged this area in 1947,” said Whitcomb. Lost Tracks was the site of an old logging camp the Shevlin-Hixon Timber Co. used to harvest trees from what is now the southern tip of Bend.

More than 60 years ago, this short-lived logging camp and China Hat Road — which was a railroad right of way before it was paved — were part of a 3,000-mile network of tracks the region’s timber companies used to transport trees and the workers who fell them to their mills at the center of town.

They were also part of a much bigger network of rail lines in the state’s rural areas that historians like Edward Kamholz, founder of the Oregon Historical Railroads Project, say made it possible for people to live in towns like Chemult, Chiloquin, Gilchrist, Hines, Klamath Falls and La Pine.

“The first vehicles that really penetrated the forest were trains,” Kamholz said. “They basically brought the settlers to the woods.”

Because of the role these logging lines played in the state’s development, Kamholz — who grew up in Vernonia, where the Oregon American Lumber Company had a mill — is working with groups like the Oregon Historical Society and the Oregon Department of Forestry to preserve their memory by mapping the routes they took on his project’s website www.ohrp.org (See How to help, Page D4.)

The network

During the heyday of Central Oregon’s logging industry, timber companies like Brooks Scanlon and Shevlin-Hixon cleared about 55 acres of trees each day by running operations that stretched out to Bull Springs, Chemult, Indian Fork, La Pine, Seventh Mountain and Silver Lake.

“Everything was portable,” local rail historian Martin Hansen said as he explained how the companies were able to cover such a wide area. “Everything was built to be transported by rail.”

Hansen said each of these companies built long rail lines like the one that ran past Whitcomb’s golf course so they could carry timber from far-flung forests to mills on the Deschutes River at what is now the Old Mill District. They built a series of smaller spur lines — some of which were just a half-mile long — that crisscrossed these main lines and were ripped up as soon as an area had been cleared.

“Every quarter- or half-a-mile you’d see a spur line take off,” Hansen said, explaining the cleared rights of way for many of these spur lines have since been converted into forest service roads like the ones that turn off China Hat Road and end in the middle of nowhere. “Their grades are everywhere.”

Hansen said these rail lines also transported a series of logging camps that provide the company’s workers with a place to stay and buildings that housed the services they needed for their survival and comfort. These camps ranged from small operations that housed 100 to 200 workers to full-scale operations like the “town of Shevlin,” a camp managed by the Shevlin-Hixon company, that had 700 residents and a post office.

But while most of these camps disappeared as soon as their surrounding tress had been cut, Kamholz said, others grew into small communities that had their own schools, sawmills, shops and markets and would eventually become some of the dozens of small towns that dot Central Oregon’s landscape.

Kamholz said none of this growth would have been possible without the network of logging and later common carrier rail lines that connected these communities to places where they could buy and sell goods. The rails also laid the foundation for the network of state and federal highways that connect them today.

“Virtually every square mile of the state had a rail line of some sort running through it,” Kamholz said as he described the size of the network he’d like to record. But he also knows it’s not going to be an easy project and will likely take him several years.

The project

Kamholz said his first goal as project leader for the OHRP is to build a skeleton rail-network map by gathering as many logging and common carrier railroad and railroad right-of-way maps as he can find and scanning them into a single digital file. He said some companies like Shevlin-Hixon kept detailed records of where they laid the track for their main and spur rail lines, while others did not.

“Most of these companies were not intended to be long-lived,” Kamholz said, explaining these short-lived logging companies were structured so they could be dissolved and disappear immediately after the particular area they sought to harvest had been cut.

Adding to his frustration is that many of the companies that did keep detailed records suspended their operations decades ago when the state’s timber industry started to fade away. Kamholz said he’ll be relying on organizations like the Deschutes Historical Society — which has a few Brooks Scanlon maps in its collection — and private collectors like Hansen to help build his collection.

Once he’s gathered these rail line maps, Kamholz said he plans to study aerial photos from the 1940s that might show an open swath through the forest that had been cut to house a main or spur line, property records documenting the creation and eventual sale or dissolution of the rights of way used to build the network, and other sources of information that could help fill in the gaps,

He said his long-term plan is to incorporate all the information he’s collected into the Oregon Geographic Information System so members of the public can study it if they’d like to know more about how their town grew or why there’s a narrow, level path that cuts through the woods just outside the ninth hole of their favorite golf course.

“There are people who have been studying this information for decades,” Kamholz said as he explained why he wants to map out the state’s railroad network. “If we don’t preserve it now, my fear is that it’s going to be lost forever.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7816, mmclean@bendbulletin.com