It was a most peculiar and unworkable site for a railroad switching yard: atop a steep hill overlooking a river, with a picture-perfect volcanic mountain rising starkly on the eastern horizon 50 miles away. But the price was right. The property had been purchased site unseen, for a nominal sum, by the Oregon-Washington Railroad and Navigation Company. Over 130 years later, one of the nation's most vibrant, picturesque, and upwardly mobile academic medical centers is the beneficiary of that ill-thought-out purchase.