Taking a page from his father’s example of the Minnesota mineral lands, Louis Hill turned his timber lands in Oregon into a trust. Louis, however, wasn’t as generous as his father. Instead of making Great Northern Railway stockholders the beneficiaries of the trust, he created the trust to provide a continuous income for his family. Actually, he made six trusts: one for each of his children, one for his wife, and one for himself. Each had a one-sixth undivided ownership of the timber lands. While the trusts were created in 1917, the lands earned no income for another two decades.

Congress’ policy of granting only every other square mile of land creates a distinctive checkerboard pattern. The dark green on this Google map is the Willamette National Forest while most of the light green squares are Hill trust forest lands. Highway 20 closely follows the route of the Santiam wagon road. Click here to see the same map in satellite view showing clearcuts on the Hill forest lands.

Shortly after Louis Hill acquired those timber lands, a forestry professor at UC Berkeley quit his job to start a forestry consulting firm in Portland. Dave Mason was a prophet of sustained yield forestry, which he described as “limiting the average annual cut to the production capacity” of a forest. This was in contrast to most timber land owners of the time, who generally bought land, cut the timber, and then let the land go for taxes. Continue reading →

Before the Willamette Valley and Cascade Mountain wagon road was built, or not built as the case may be, a number of families had started farms near the route of the road in the Prineville area. They planned to claim their lands as homestead as soon as the federal government did a land survey. But once the survey was done, about three dozen of them found themselves on odd-numbered sections that were automatically given to the road company.

This 41-page document published by the House Committee on Military Affairs contains W.F. Prosser’s report on his examination of the wagon road. Click image to download an 11.7-MB PDF of this report.

The wagon road company offered to sell them the land for $1.25 an acre. This, said the company, was the same price the government sold its land for, but homesteaders only had to pay a filing fee that worked out to less than 20 cents an acre. Angered, the settlers sent an 1880 letter to the Department of the Interior arguing that “has never built or con­structed any road as the laws of this State requires roads of that character” and that in the 300 miles from Smith’s Rock to the Snake River “there has been no attempt to open or construct any road by the above named com­pany or anyone else.” Continue reading →

The recent posts about the Northern Pacific land grant and Red River Valley lands provides a good segue to some research I’ve been doing about a land grant in Oregon. This has no passenger train content and is only peripherally related to railroads, but the subject interests me because some of the land grant in question is just a half mile from my home and because one of the major players in the later part of the story was Great Northern Railway president Louis Hill.

This 1939 report from the Department of the Interior lists 105 railroad, wagon road, canal, and river improvement land grants made by Congress in the 19th century and how many acres various transportation companies ended up receiving for those grants. A few of the grants, including the massive Northern Pacific grant, were still open with the grantees hoping to get several million more acres. Click image to download a 4.7-MB PDF of the report.

Today I’m going to introduce the topic by describing the history of federal land grants. These land grants have been praised for playing a key role in the development of the nation and derided for being a huge giveaway to corporate interests, but I’ll show that neither of these are really true. Posts tomorrow and the next day will go into the history of the Oregon land grant, followed by two more posts on what happened to the land in that grant. After that I’ll get back to railroad memorabilia. Continue reading →