Living most of his life in the neighborhood where early Medford entrepreneur Spencer Burris once operated a trolley line, Euclid Avenue resident Joe Henry admits to an unusual enthusiasm for seeing work crews arrive to tear into city streets.

Nostalgic about Medford’s early days, and a fan of railroad history, Henry knew that a recent waterline project on East Main Street might unearth some old trolley tracks.

He was right.

Grinning from ear to ear, the 62-year-old recently showed off a 100-pound, nearly 4-foot chunk of trolley line, procured from the corner of Academy Place and East Main one day last week.

Henry acknowledged his wife was slightly less enthused about the new addition to the family’s front lawn, but he reasoned that he’d been waiting decades for his own “piece of Medford history.”

Henry’s chunk of trolley was once a tiny part of a six-year effort at running a passenger rail into the hills of east Medford, once dubbed “Siskiyou Heights.”

Henry said his late father, Hank Henry, was friends with Seth Burris, son of Spencer and a contributing builder of the trolley system who went on to serve in various capacities around the city.

The Medford Water Commission this summer has been replacing old water lines in conjunction with a city of Medford sewer main replacement. Henry knew they’d likely run into the trolley tracks.

“I’ve always known it was down there. I happened to get off work when they were throwing it into the rubbish bin,” he said with a smile.

Southern Oregon Traction CompanyPresident of the Rogue River Canning Company, Spencer Burris was also a railroad builder, lumber dealer and a miner in the early 1900s.

According to the Oregon Encyclopedia project, hosted online by the Oregon Historical Society, Burris organized the Southern Oregon Traction Company July 15, 1913, for the operation of street cars in the city of Medford.

Three years later, the company incorporated the Rogue River Valley Railway’s line (founded in 1891) between Medford and Jacksonville.

The first trolley to meander its way up Main Street was a single-truck Birney, which arrived March 16, 1914, ran east on Main Street from the Southern Pacific Railroad mainline to Eastwood Drive. After a crossing of the Southern Pacific tracks was completed, the line was extended west through downtown to a terminus at Oakdale Avenue.

A line was also built eastward to Siskiyou Heights, but it was removed when that development proved slow. Rails from the Siskiyou Heights Line were salvaged to extend the Main Street tracks to a connection with the RVRR at Eighth and Elm streets.

Trolley to nowhereHenry marvels at the forward-thinking concept, however poorly timed, of a neighborhood trolley line.

“The amazing part is this was a guy’s private money that paid for it. It wasn’t some city project. He had this idea, and realtors convinced him that if he put a train track up here that people would use it,” said Henry.

“What he didn’t anticipate was the Model T Ford and cars. … Why would you spend a quarter, which was a lot of money, to go ride a trolley to nowhere? So, it only lasted for six years, but it went all the way up Main, turned on Keene Way, went across to Highland and then it went up to Modoc.”

Henry said reminders of construction of the trolley line — which began 110 years ago this month — are sprinkled around Medford.

“A lot of people don’t realize the reason why there’s a curve at the top of Main. It’s because the trolley couldn’t go straight up the hill,” he said.

“And the reason Kensington is so wide — the trolley went down the middle.”

Another relic from Burris’s trolley days, bad track sections were repurposed and used for signposts in the mid-1900s. At least one remains, between Eastwood Drive and Keene Way.

“When I was a kid, all of the stop signs on the west side of Medford were hung on old train tracks from the trolley system,” Henry noted.

“I used to throw the Oregon journal — a morning newspaper that later went defunct. I remember all the signs back then were from the old tracks.”

Surveying his own small piece of track, Henry ran his hand over a jagged edge of the line, inflicted by roadwork in the 1990s.

“Apparently, the reason why the trolley didn’t make it was that where I live, by Roosevelt (Elementary), was out in the sticks. They thought that there was going to be a large amount of growth in what they called Siskiyou Heights, at the top of Main Street. … But it really didn’t take off until after World War II or slightly before,” Henry said.

“In November, I’ll be celebrating 60 years of living in Medford. I grew up on Terrace Drive, not far from where I currently live on Euclid. … That old trolley system has always sort of weaved in and out of my childhood memories.”