On the Back Roads by Bill Graves Page A

edge of town is where the nineteen miles of Prineville’s railway starts. It’s proof that the gutsy pioneers of the American West were still running things here in the early 1900s. It seems that they could not persuade the mainline railroad to come to them. So they built their own railroad to the main line.
    It was a cattle town then. Farmers and ranchers from a hundred miles around came here for their supplies and entertainment. All Prineville needed to secure its future was a railroad. So in 1916, the town voted 358 to 1 to build it for an estimated $100,000. Despite volunteer labor and food and wagons provided free by farmers, the cost of construction tripled. Still, they got it done. Freight and passenger service was running by 1918.
    Then came the motorcar and the Great Depression. Had it been privately owned, the railroad probably would have gone under. But the town continued to back it, confident that someday sawmills would be built here to tap the area’s timber, one of the largest stands of ponderosa pine in the country.
    They were right. The rail line became very successful. So successful that Prineville was called “The City of No City Taxes.” Railroad profits paid for everything governmental, including a new city hall. The line still operates every day, makes jobs for people here, and makes money for the town. It is the oldest municipally-owned and operated rail system in the country.
    Jerry Price is the general manager of the railroad now.
    â€œOn weekends we operate dinner trains that can be mystery-theater or maybe western-hoedown trains. Sunday mornings we have a champagne-brunch train. During the week, we haul freight, timber products almost exclusively. Outbound, it’s all wood chips that move to mainl ine paper mills.”
    â€œWood chips?”
    â€œYa, like what’s left after you cut trees into boards.”
    â€œBut I thought trees here are like endangered species and cutting them is prohibited.”
    â€œYou are partially right.”
    Then I got a course in the facts of life and real-world economics in the lumber business. It seems that the sawmills in this Oregon town—in America’s vast Northwest with millions of acres of standing timber—are importing trees from faraway Mexico, Chile, New Zealand, wherever they can be bought. It’s is not that foreign timber is cheaper than trees cut locally. That would be easy enough to understand. It’s that special interest groups in our country, protecting owls and other things, have been able to prohibit tree cutting in vast areas of the Northwest. Instead, as Jerry put it, “The sawmills do what they have to do to stay in business.”
    At the corner of Third and Main Street is Prineville’s rotating-time-and-temperature building, the Bank of the Cascades. Across from it is Bank Drug, which once was a bank. And across from it is the Bowman Museum, which was once two banks. First it was the Prineville Bank, later the Bank of Prineville, or vice versa. No one was too sure.
    Behind the counter of the Bowman Museum, I found one of those important and dedicated ladies to whom we back-road dawdlers are indebted. What would the museums of small-town America do without them, these unselfish volunteers who open thousands of museums for us every day? They all seem to share deep feelings for their heritage and an out-and-out disgust for daytime TV Built in 1910, the interior of this building is like new. The teller cages are marble and mahogany, the windows faced with thin bars of bronze. WhenI was told that it’s made of the same black/gray basalt as the courthouse, I looked at my watch. It was 3:20.
    Fred was waiting for me. We rode the elevator to the third floor of the courthouse.
    â€œWhen there is a jury trial going on, I don’t even come up here to wind the clock. Too many people. It will run six days. I wind it on Mondays and Fridays,” Fred told me.
    I followed him up some steep