Shedd: The Town That Moved for the Railroad

Shedd's story is really the story of two towns, one that failed to get the railroad and one that did. In eighteen fifty-eight, settlers built a gristmill community they named Boston, after one founder's Massachusetts hometown. Boston platted its streets and got a stagecoach stop and a post office. But when the Oregon and California Railroad came south from Albany in the early eighteen seventies, the tracks bypassed Boston entirely and instead ran through land donated by a Civil War veteran named Captain Frank Shedd.

Shedd's Station became the economic magnet. The old Boston community slowly emptied out. The new town took the name of the man who gave it its ground. It is a common Willamette Valley story: geography mattered a little, but railroad right-of-way mattered more.