Shaver Transportation Company

The Shaver Transportation Company is an inland water freight transportation company based in Portland, Oregon, United States. The company was founded in 1880 and played a major role in the development of freight transport in the Portland area and along the Columbia.

As of 2008^[update], Harry L. Shaver is the chair of the company's board, and the company employs about 90 workers.

In the 1860s and 1870s, the Oregon Steam Navigation Company (OSN) had obtained monopoly power over riverboat navigation on the Columbia River system. This was before the extensive construction of railroads in Oregon and what was then the Washington Territory, so the only way that goods could be shipped to market was by way of the rivers. Many companies arose to compete with the OSN, and one of the few survivors was the Shaver Transportation Company. Founders of the company included steamboat captains James W. Shaver and George M. Shaver.

Shaver Transportation was begun by James W. Shaver, whose family were pioneers in Portland, Oregon. They owned a woodyard business which supplied firewood for trains, powered then by steam locomotives. They also supplied wood from a dock for steamboats. In 1880, James W. Shaver went into the steamboat business with two partners, Henry W. Corbett and A.S. Foster, both prominent members of the early business establishment in Portland, Oregon. They bought out Captain Edward Bureau and began doing business as the People's Freighting Company. Their first vessel was the steamboat Manzanillo, which they put on the route down the Willamette and Columbia rivers from Portland to Clatskanie, Oregon.

Shaver Transportation Company was known as the "Red Collar Line."

The next two steamboats owned by the company after the Manzanillo were the Sarah Dixon (named after the mother of company founder James W. Shaver) and G.W. Shaver, named after George Washington Shaver, the father of James W. Shaver. The Sarah Dixon had a reputation as a luxury boat, and in the early 1890s, she was placed on the profitable run on the lower Columbia River from Portland to Astoria, Oregon. On that run she competed with the T. J. Potter, another luxury boat owned by the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company (ORNC). This competition was resolved in about 1896, when Shaver Transportation took its boats off the Portland/Astoria run in return for a monthly subsidy from ORNC.

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