1.The Train Depot.

Before the railroad came to our part of the world (offically referred to as the West Cedar Creek District of Washington County), the Cedar Creek District's most important destination was the same one that inspired people to migrate west in the first place: The Territorial Capital, Oregon City. That was where a settler went to pick up his mail. Portland did not become our gateway to the outside world until the railways conquered the rivers and swamps and hills that had always presented a considerable obstacle for farmers in every part of the Tualatin River Basin (Also Known As: Washington County). To describe travel conditions back then, we have no less an observer than Rudyard Kipling. He stumbled across the scene in 1889, the same year James Christopher and Mary Ellen Smock platted the town that would become Sherwood. In the following passage, Kipling is traveling from Portland to the Clackamas River to do some fishing:

A railway ran between us and the banks of the Willamette, and another above and through the mountains. All the land was dotted with small townships, and the roads were full of farmers in their town wagons, bunches of tow-haired, boggle-eyed urchins sitting in the hay behind. The men generally looked like loafers, but their women were all well dressed.... Then we struck into the woods along what [one guide] called a "camina reale" —a good road,— and [another guide] a "fair track." It wound in and out among fire-blackened stumps, under pine trees, along the corners of log fences, through hollows which must be hopeless marsh in the winter, and up absurd gradients. But nowhere throughout its length did I see any evidence of road-making. There was a track,— you couldn't well get off it,— and it was all you could do to stay on it. The dust lay a foot thick in the blind ruts, and under the dust we found bits of planking and bundles of brushwood that sent the wagon bounding into the air.

—American Notes by Rudyard Kipling (1889).

The technology of steam would provide visitors like Kipling a much more agreeable ride through the greater Portland landscape. Regular train service began in 1889.

There was another technology at work in those days, and that was the technology of information. The trains in the Pacific Northwest would have traveled from Nowhere Much to Nowhere at All (Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes) unless there was a vision that was shared by a vast number of people. That vision spawned one of America's most remarkable enterprises, the advertising industry. Some of Madison Avenue's biggest players today (e.g. R. Walter Thompson) began as publicists for the railroads. The most effective promoter for the greater Portland region was railroad magnate Henry Villard, a German born financier who started out as a member of Abraham Lincoln's campaign team. Villard's success in wooing emigrants from northern Europe caused the San Francisco Chronicle to grouse about "..a strange fondness of immigrants for the wet slopes of the Cascade Mountains and the banks of the great Columbia." (Quiett, Page 370.)

Train depot on far left, with Rail Road Street on right.

The vision of America which colorful songs and brochures and lectures inspired on both sides of the Atlantic created a vision of a truly united United States of America— united North, South, East and West by its railway system. It was an imperfect vision— the corruption and scandal that accompanied the building of the railroads is legendary— but the vision enchanted citizens of Old Sherwood Town no less than it did citizens of New York and Berlin and London. All across America, the term "depot loafer" described people who hung out around the train depot, far more interested in what was happening in the outside world than in their own little communcalities. Some newspapers even carried a "Depot Loafer" column. The news might come from train passengers or it might come from the most popular man in town: the telegraph operator. Baseball scores were a hot item. The Minutes of the Old Sherwood Town Council have much to say about the depot loafer problem (an ordinance was passed preventing them from boarding trains without a ticket), along with other conflicts between the railroad and the town, such as the congestion caused by farm and lumber wagons on Railroad Street, or the refusal of the railroad company to respect local pedestrian crossings.

The Sherwood Historical Society still possesses the ticket window through which railroad employee Dora Young nee. Smock serves a customer in 1901. Note telegraph machine on the window ledge. The Southern Pacific Train Depot replaced the one that was nearing completion when flames from the Great Fire of 1895 swept across Rail Road Avenue and burned it down. The depot was about the width of a one car garage and four times as long.