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26-735: The 11 miles (18 km) of the Albany-Lebanon mainline were built by the newly founded Albany and Lebanon Railroad in 1880. The A&L was shortly thereafter bought by the Oregon and California Railroad , which ran from Portland to the Oregon-California border. In turn, the O&;C was bought by Southern Pacific in 1887. The Albany-Lebanon line became one of several branches off the main route from San Francisco to Portland, which went through Albany. New branches were also constructed as

52-551: A spur of their passenger Oregon Electric Railway , and eventually acquired by BNSF. The railroad spun it off into the Albany and Eastern in May 1998. Five years later, in 2003, AERC bought the Albany-Lebanon and Lebanon-Mill City lines from WVR, completing the current network. In 2007 a revamping of its aging infrastructure began, with new rails, ties, and rebuilt crossings. By 2011 all three lines had been refurbished. Starting in 2014,

78-572: Is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Oregon and California Railroad The Oregon and California Railroad was formed from the Oregon Central Railroad when it was the first to operate a 20-mile (32 km) stretch south of Portland in 1869. This qualified the railroad for land grants in California, whereupon the name of the railroad soon changed to Oregon & California Rail Road Company . In 1887,

104-823: The 19th century remained in the East. The federal government eventually gave away much of this land through the Homestead Acts . The first grants were given to the Mobile and Ohio and Illinois Central Railroads in 1850. Additional grants were made under the Pacific Railway Acts between 1862 and 1871, when they were stopped because of public opposition. In total, 79 grants were made, totaling 200,000,000 acres (810,000 km ), later reduced to 131,000,000 acres (530,000 km ). Checkerboarding also occurred with Native American land grants, where native land

130-714: The East Portland terminal. The original ferry service, established by Ben Holladay , was near the present-day location of the Steel Bridge ; in 1879, Henry Villard put the O&;CRR Ferry #2 into service, near the present-day location of the Burnside Bridge . The O&CRR Ferry #2 was rendered obsolete by the construction of the Morrison and Steel bridges, and ultimately relocated to San Francisco, where it

156-502: The O&C Railroad for its costs of construction. Construction efforts were sporadic, finally reaching completion in 1887 after the financially troubled O&C Railroad was acquired by the Southern Pacific. The land was distributed in a checkerboard pattern , with sections laid out for 20 miles (32 km) on either side of the rail corridor with the government retaining the alternate sections for future growth. By 1872,

182-461: The Oregon and California Railroad Act, which made 3,700,000 acres (1,500,000 ha) of land available for a company that built a railroad from Portland, Oregon to San Francisco , distributed by the state of Oregon in 12,800-acre (5,200 ha) land grants for each mile of track completed. Two companies, both of which named themselves the Oregon Central Railroad , began a competition to build

208-658: The United States. As timber revenue on the O&C lands has declined over the years, counties have faced financial difficulty as they struggle to fill the revenue gap. Checkerboarding (land) Checkerboarding refers to the intermingling of land ownership between two or more owners resulting in a checkerboard pattern. Checkerboarding is prevalent in the Western United States and Western Canada because of extensive use in railroad grants for western expansion , although it had its beginnings in

234-638: The Willamette Valley industrialized, including a 36 miles (58 km) route northeast from Lebanon to the booming lumber town of Mill City built in 1910. SP leased both branch lines to the Willamette Valley Railway in 1993, and sold them outright to WVR in 1996 shortly before its acquisition by Union Pacific. The 17 miles (27 km) Lebanon-Sweet Home branch was built by the Spokane, Portland, and Seattle Railway in 1930 as

260-496: The canal land grant era. Checkerboarding in the West occurred as a result of railroad land grants where railroads would be granted every other section along a rail corridor. These grants, which typically extended 6 to 40 miles (10 to 64 km) from either side of the track, were a subsidy to the railroads. Unlike per-mile subsidies which encouraged fast but shoddy track-laying, land grants encouraged higher quality work, since

286-640: The company at an amount equivalent to what it would have received had it abided by the $ 2.50 per acre limit. Counties with O&C land also received revenue from timber and land sales to make up for the loss of local and state taxation revenue from the land. The law was modified in 1926 by the Stanfield Act, by the 1937 O&C Act, and most recently, by the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act of 2000 which has been renewed several times and includes other rural counties in

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312-500: The federal government kept even-numbered plots. The federal government believed that because the value of land surrounding railroads would increase as much as twofold, granting land to private railroad companies would theoretically pay for itself and also increase the transportation infrastructure throughout the nation. The U.S. government was not able to sell much of the land that it retained because settlers willing to move West were not wealthy. The wealthiest United States citizens of

338-545: The grant lands from the railroad not actually part of the right of way for the railroad line itself. In 1915, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the railroad had been built as promised, so the railroad company should not be forced to completely forfeit the lands, despite having violated the terms of the grant. Congress responded in 1916, with the Chamberlain-Ferris Act . This law put the O&C lands back in U.S. federal government control, and compensated

364-580: The hands of Native Americans to private railroad companies and homestead grantees resulted in conflicts on more than one occasion. One notable location of conflict is the Chambers Checkerboard – a region occupied by Navajo people before railroad companies were granted the land to construct the transcontinental railroad . Tension grew between the Navajo tribe and the settlers of the region because of unexplained deaths, which each party blamed on

390-634: The line was completed over Siskiyou Summit , and the Southern Pacific Railroad assumed control of the railroad, although it was not officially sold to Southern Pacific until January 3, 1927. This route was eventually spun off from the Southern Pacific as the Central Oregon and Pacific Railroad . As part of the U.S. government's desire to foster settlement and economic development in the western states, in July 1866, Congress passed

416-448: The other. These tensions led to further violence after a white settler was suspected for murdering a Navajo youth without rightful punishment. Checkerboarding can create problems for access and ecological management. It is one of the major causes of inholdings within the boundaries of national forests . As is the case in northwestern California , checkerboarding has resulted in issues with managing national forest land. Checkerboarding

442-563: The paper reported that more than 75% of the land sales had violated federal law. Newly elected President Theodore Roosevelt , as part of his plan of progressive reforms, vowed in 1903 to " clean up the O&C land fraud mess, once and for all! " Over the following two years, Roosevelt's investigators collected evidence, and over 1,000 politicians, businessmen, railroad executives, and others were indicted. Many were eventually tried and convicted on charges including fraud, bribery, and other corruption. The federal government sought return of

468-670: The railroad had extended from Portland to Roseburg . Along the way, it created growth in Willamette Valley towns such as Canby , Aurora , and Harrisburg , which emerged as freight and passenger stations, and provided a commercial lifeline to the part of the river valley above Harrisburg where steamships were rarely able to travel. As the railroad made its way into the Umpqua Valley , new townsites such as Drain , Oakland , and Yoncalla were laid out. From about 1870 to 1888, ferry service connected Downtown Portland to

494-681: The railroad has offered excursion and charter trains, the Santiam Excursion Trains , particularly with Santa Maria Valley Railroad 205 and Southern Pacific 5399. Polson Logging Co. 2 may join after its lease to the Oregon Rail Heritage Center . As of 2022, the AERC roster consisted of the following: This United States railway company-related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . This article about transportation in Oregon

520-535: The railroad, one on the west side of the Willamette River and one on the east side. The two lines would eventually merge and reorganize as the Oregon and California Railroad. In 1869, Congress changed how the grants were to be distributed, requiring the railroads to sell land along the line to settlers in 160-acre (65 ha) parcels at $ 2.50 per acre. The purpose of these restrictions was to encourage settlement and economic development, while compensating

546-553: The railroads could increase the value of the land by building better track. The government also benefited from the increased value of the remaining public parcels. Railroad land grants split the land surrounding the area where train tracks were to be laid into a checkerboard pattern. The land was already divided into 640-acre numbered sections (260 ha) according to the Public Land Survey System ; odd-numbered plots were given to private railroad companies, and

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572-458: The right of access. Corner crossing is not explicitly legal or illegal in any state, but legal opinions and enforcement differ by state. Checkerboarding may make public land inaccessible when it is surrounded by privately owned land. In 2021, hunters in Wyoming were charged with trespassing on private land they never actually set foot on when they crossed between two parcels of public land at

598-622: Was converted to an oil-fueled ferry the "Vallejo" and, later, a famous houseboat , still in use as of 2013. While construction was still ongoing, multiple charges of land fraud arose. The company was accused of rounding up individuals from saloons in Portland's waterfront district, and paying them to sign applications to purchase 160-acre (0.6 km ) parcels of O&C lands as "settlers," then selling these fraudulent instruments in large blocks to corporate interests through corrupt middlemen. That elaborate money laundering and land fraud scheme

624-742: Was intermingled with non-native land. Many Native American tribes opposed checkerboarding, because it broke up traditionally communal native settlements into many individual plots and allowed non-natives to claim land within those settlements. The Dawes Act of 1887 created the most Native American checkerboarding. The act was intended to bolster self-sufficiency and systematically fracture native cultures, giving each individual between 40 and 160 acres (16 and 65 ha). Native Americans were also negatively affected by federal government checkerboarding policies because railroad land grants were not prevented from running through land previously occupied by Native American tribes. This act of unrightful land transfer from

650-407: Was only the beginning: Southern Pacific Railroad eventually abandoned the pretense of nonexistent settlers, and sold lands in large parcels directly to developers for as much as US$ 40 per acre. By 1902, with land prices soaring, the company declared it was terminating land sales altogether. When the scandal broke in 1904 through an investigation by The Oregonian it had grown to such a magnitude that

676-570: Was previously applied to these areas during the period of western expansion, and they are now commercial forest land. Conflicting policies establishing the rights of the private owners of this land have caused some difficulties in the local hardwood timber production economy. While relieving this land from its checkerboard ownership structure could benefit the timber production economy of the region, checkerboards can allow government to extend good forestry practices over intermingled private lands, by demonstration or applying pressure via economy of scale or

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