Recently, someone asked about the Sumpter Narrow Gauge Railroad. Several years ago, I received printed pages of data about this railroad which ran between Baker City, Sumpter, Whitney and Tipton, Oregon. The town of Sumpter is located 29 miles west of Baker City in the east central part of Oregon. In 1862, three South Carolinians settled in the area of Sumpter. They were so happy that Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor had fallen to Confederate forces, that these three men named their cabin Fort Sumter. Later the name was changed to the Sumpter spelling. The town was quite small until to the Sumpter spelling. The town was quite small until the advent of modern mining equipment. In 1890 the Sumpter Valley Railroad was organized by a group of Utah Stockholders who were seeking a method of getting their company's lumber out of the valley. The section of the Sumpter Valley Railway from Sumpter to Baker was opened in 1897, a distance of 80 miles. Businessmen of all types were going to the goldfields of this area and soon it was necessary to run 4 trains a day from Baker City to Sumpter. In June 1901, the railroad was extended to Whitney, eleven miles southeast of Sumpter. In 1904, it was again extended to Tipton, ten miles by rail from Whitney. By 1908, to Austin in Grant County, Oregon. By 1910, it was extended over Dixie Pass and down to Prairie City. By this time, the railroad was not only transporting lumber and ore,but was popular for passengers, freight and even shipping livestock to market. The decline of the railroad began in 1933 when the section from Prairie City to Austin was abandoned. Passenger service was discontinued 4 years later and the last scheduled run was in April 1947. Great piles of cordwood were stacked along the right-of-way and everyone, passengers and crew, helped at each stop to load the wood onto the train. The grades were steep and the engine needed every bit steam pressure to climb the grades. The roadbed was extremely rough. Old timers in the area nicknamed the train the Stump Dodger because the ride was so rough. This has been a brief history of the Sumpter Valley Railroad taken from a printed book titled "Oregon's Golden Years." Jane Sumpter Malone-George