Sam
BoardmanSam
BoardmanSamuel H. Boardman was born in Massachusetts in 1874. He attended public schools and Wayland Academy in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. Subsequently he worked as an engineer for the Denver Union Water Works, Denver and Rio Grande Railroad, Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, and Great Southern Railroad. In 1903 he moved to Oregon, where he worked as an engineer for the Spokane, Portland and Seattle Railroad and the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company.
In 1904 Boardman left engineering to homestead a dry, forbidding tract along the Columbia River east of Arlington, for he had learned that a federal irrigation project was to bring water to the site. Others did the same, but as “the years went by with no water the settlers kept dropping out until there were only five of us left…Thru thirteen sand-snuffing years Mrs. B and I fought that shifting desert.” As a part of his struggle, Boardman began planting trees – poplars and locusts to provide “the green coverage of the creator’s awning.” When water finally arrived, new settlers followed, and a town bearing Boardman’s name sprang up. His original grove served as a source of cuttings for others. He also persuaded local authorities to establish a tree nursery on the public school grounds, to institute an Arbor Day program in which the students set out trees around the school and along the rights of way of local roads, and to provide free trees for schoolchildren in nearby communities. The area fast became a tree-studded oasis.
Although the area prospered, the Boardman’s did not. Their savings were used up before the advent of irrigation, and Boardman’s wife left the homestead to take a teaching job. Boardman himself took employment as an engineer when he could find such work. Then in 1919 he went to work for the State Highway Department. But his interest in trees continued. In his new position he pushed for planting along the highway rights-of-way throughout the arid reaches of eastern Oregon.
In 1929, Boardman’s interest in trees and parks resulted in him being selected by the Highway Department for the new post of parks engineer. There was widespread public support for his mission, because trees were an important part of the scenery that lured tourists to Oregon. Boardman worked hard to persuade the Forest Service to reserve timber fronting on highways; to get landowners to trade roadside tracts for stands away from the highway; and when all else failed to get the Highway Commission to purchase selected strips of timber. Indeed, up to 1938 timber acquisition accounted for a third of the commission’s total expenditures for scenic purposes.
But Boardman’s enthusiasm for natural beauty was too great for him to restrict his work so narrowly for long. He soon gave as much attention to park sites as to timber along highways, and by 1931 parks had assumed a primacy that they maintained thereafter. Soon after his appointment to this position, his title was changed to state parks superintendent. During the 1930s a gulf emerged between those who wanted to “improve” parks to increase recreational use and those who would protect them insofar as possible in their natural state. There was no question as to where Sam Boardman stood in the conflict between recreationists and nature lovers. Early in his career Boardman had blasted a trail in an Oregon park so that sighseers could reach a spot of beauty between two falls. After it was completed, He was appalled by what he had done: "The very foundation upon which depended the beauty of the entire picture now has a great gash across it" he lamented. "This taught me that man's hand in the alteration of the Design of the Great Architect is egotistice, tragic and ignorant. Later he wrote: “There is little left today that may be called primitive." "Strange as it may seem, the more the world civilizes the primitive, the more barbaric we become.” Through the state’s parks, Boardman sought to maintain “a haven of primitiveness… preserved in all its naturalness.” After a tour of California’s state parks he was critical of what he saw there: “In park after park I observed the lines of the technician’s blueprint intertwining and overpowering the living designs of the great Architect. Maybe the times call for this but it seems sacrilegious to me. To me a park is a pulpit. The more you keep it as He made it, the closer you are to Him.”
Throughout the Depression, Boardman sought to take advantage of federal funds without opening the way to excess development. Doing so was not easy. Most available money came though the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). Boardman was suspicious of its planners and those in the National Park Service, which advised the CCC on parks projects. He complained that they liked “to hang the garland on the crag, festoon the stars and moon,” and were “never down to earth where practicable things… are build.” Their landscape architects were a special anathema: “A blind man scattering seeds at night could do a better job of beautifying,” Boardman maintained. Nevertheless, he was able to use access to CCC labor to further his goals and he observed that their accomplishment in parks and planting would have taken the state 50 years to accomplish without the CCC. The CCC inaugurated a new era for Oregon’s parks.
Protecting the naturalness of parks and waysides was not the only guiding principle behind Sam Boardman’s efforts. Gradually three others emerged: (i) early acquisition of sites before desecration crept in or prices become prohibitive; (ii) utilization of federal and private funds for acquisition and development wherever possible; and (iii) maintenance of high scenic standards for sites acquired for parks.
Farsightedness seems to have been the biggest factor behind these policies. Boardman saw himself as responsible not just to the Highway Commission, or to contemporary Oregonians, but to “generations yet unborn.” He believed he was preserving natural areas for a time when they would be needed even more than they were in his own day. Nothing illustrates this better than his purchases of cutover lands along highways. Unable to buy roadside timber in the quantities he desired, Boardman bought many acres of comparatively valueless cutover. It would be decades before this land could yield another crop of timber, but when that time came Boardman wanted to be sure that Oregon would have timbered strips fronting on its highways. Boardman also planned ahead by insisting that the limited available state funds be used to acquire additional acres rather than to develop those already owned.
Nowhere did Boardman’s approach to park building come more clearly into focus than on the Oregon coast. Soon after assuming leadership of the state’s parks, Boardman came to recognize that the 430 miles of beaches, rugged headlands, and spectacular vistas represented a very special opportunity. The new Coast Highway (later U.S. 101) – which closely paralleled the shoreline through much of its distance – provided easy access to potential park sites, little development had occurred, and property values were still low. Boardman sought to insure the opportunities thus presented did not slip away.
Bit by bit Boardman arranged donations, transfers of federal land, and state purchases. Much of the cutover land the commission bought was along the Coast Highway. The cumulative effect was great, but Boardman was dissatisfied. There was too much land, and his piecemeal acquisitions were too slow. He proposed a radical alternative. The issuance of $500,000 of state bonds to acquire coastal lands whose value had been driven down by the Depression. He wanted to secure all the land between U.S. Highway 101 and the coastline whenever the two were closely parallel. Never again would the land be so cheap he said. Unfortunately, it received no political support, but he continued to inspire others with his vision so they made donations of land and the Highway Commissioners continued reluctantly to provide funding some limited support.
As time passed, Sam Boardman felt, increasingly inhibited by the limitations of the Highway Commission’s central control of the purse strings. It was a continued battle to persuade the Commissioners to spend funds on roadside parks and planning, and if was almost impossible to persuade them to invest funds in preserving historic monuments, creating parks paths or protecting scenic attractions away from the highways. Accordingly, Boardman campaigned for a separate parks department, but his campaign received no political support.
Boardman continued as parks superintendent until 1950 when he reached mandatory retirement age. In 1927, at the start of his career, Oregon had 4,070 acres in 46 small state parks. When he retired 23 years later the number of parks had increased to 181 and the acreage to 57,195. The substantial increase was due largely to his personal zeal and commitment. Lacking publicly supplied resources, he demonstrated what could be accomplished with resourcefulness, infectious enthusiasm and vision. At the time of his retirement, the Highway Commission named in his honor as the Samuel H. Boardman State Park, the 14 mile strip of ocean frontage in Curry County south of Pistol River. This is one of the most dramatic and picturesque state parks on the Oregon coast. It contains 1,650 acres of remarkable scenic and inspirational beauty.