Forest was built on land swaps

Recent controversy surrounding a Multnomah Publishers proposal involving a swap of Forest Service land has a lot of people asking questions about the practice of exchanging public land to private interests.

Many of those skeptical about the swap seem to consider Forest Service lands to be inviolate wilderness bastions in perpetuity.

In reality, National Forests sometimes bear more similarity to banks than hereditary real estate holdings.

Like a bank -- where dollars bills withdrawn are usually different dollars than those actually deposited -- National Forest holdings have been in a constant state of flux for nearly a century.

In fact, the National Forests of today are the result of countless trades, acquisitions and land deals.

According to a USDA document released two years ago, one-third of the present Deschutes National Forest was acquired through land exchanges.

During the latter half of the 19th century, the U.S. Government was in the land business in a big way. The primary goal was to give land away in order to encourage expansion and settlement.

Millions of acres were parceled out to ordinary citizens under the Homestead Act, and millions more were granted to railroads and road companies as inducements for construction.

Although the first federal forest can be traced to a single Wyoming holding in 1891, the Forest Service was formally established in 1905. At the dawn of the 20th century, expansion had run its course, and President Theodore Roosevelt was among those who saw the value in holding back some of the nation's land as public domain.

In a 1906 Executive Order, Roosevelt dedicated nearly a million and a quarter acres as the Fremont Forest Reserve.

Two years later, a portion of that preserve was carved out to form what we now know as the Deschutes National Forest.

Today, the Deschutes -- at 1.5 million acres -- is bigger than all of the original Fremont Reserve, from which it was formed.

Roosevelt's Executive Order did not affect existing ownership -- as evidenced by numerous private land holdings that still exist inside the National Forest boundaries.

What it did affect, however, were land exchanges and future homesteading within the boundaries.

At the time of Roosevelt's declaration, the mixed ownership of lands inside the forest boundary looked more like a patchwork quilt than the solid green preserves seen on maps of today.

Because of that, the federal government attempted to consolidate its holdings by trading other federal lands for private lands inside the boundaries.

The first land exchange in the Deschutes National Forest took place in 1916.

Today, land trades continue to play a role in redefining the boundaries of private and public land.

Two years ago, a huge swap -- dwarfing the tiny 20 acre Multnomah proposal -- was brokered with Crown Pacific. Forest Service documents show that the deal between the Deschutes National Forest and Crown Pacific involved over 65,000 thousand acres of land.

The Sisters Ranger District received about 9,200 acres and had to give up only 57 acres.

On a forest-wide basis, Deschutes added more than 34,000 new acres and gave up about 31,000 to Crown Pacific.

Generally, Crown Pacific traded their own scattered holdings inside Forest Service boundaries for disconnected federal lands adjacent to other Crown Pacific holdings. Both parties in the trade benefited by geographic consolidation, making land management easier.

Some valuable habitat was also picked up by the Forest Service in the deal.

"That was a really big exchange," said Jeff Sims, Lands Forester for the Sisters Ranger District. "Most land exchanges are much smaller."

Sims said that much of the land added to the Sisters Ranger District lies to the east of Three Creek Lake Road, south of Sisters.

Three sections of land north of Indian Ford Road were also added to the local National Forest as part of the exchange.

Sims is responsible for managing some of the interfaces between public and private concerns in the Sisters Ranger District.

In the process, he's become a bit of an historian on some transactions of the past.

In a 1949 land exchange, for example, Sims noted that the Forest Service acquired land near Sisters from the Sweet Home Land Company.

The site recently conveyed to the City of Sisters for the sewer treatment plant was originally obtained in that exchange.

Further illustrating the fluid nature of the forest preserve, Sims said that much of the land traded by the Sweet Home Land Company was originally acquired from federal road-building grants.

In the case of the sewer treatment site, the land went from federal to private ownership, then back to federal -- and now it's back in local hands again.

Similarly, the land on which Sisters High School now stands was traded by the Forest Service to the county. But that land, itself, had once been in private hands.

The Forest Service acquired that property in an exchange with local timberman, S.O. Johnson, in 1940.

The 20 acre piece proposed for the Multnomah project has a similar history, also having previously been private land.

That land, which also included the site for the Sisters Ranger District's administrative complex, was acquired from Brooks-Scanlon in 1947; so the proposed return to private ownership is hardly unprecedented.

Sims said that another common method of federal land acquisition in the early days was to trade federally owned standing timber for cut-over private land.

In that way, both new and existing lands were woven into the federal system.

Sims emphasized that the Multnomah proposal is in the "very early stages," and that no one from Multnomah or the city has approached him with a specific trade proposal.

As part of the Deschutes Forest Plan, the Forest Service maintains an existing "wish list" of privately owned lands in the area that they would like to get their hands on.

Generally, properties on that list would add to forest recreational opportunities or provide additional key plant and animal habitat.

Sims said that a trade for better land is always preferable to a sale. The money, he said, is quickly gone; but the land is always there.

In the final analysis, the land originally incorporated into the National Forest system was territory that the government couldn't even give away.

Today, those "leftover" lands seem to be very much in demand.