In my conquest to keep my Rails applications organized, I have backported changeset 6212 (http://dev.rubyonrails.org/changeset/6212) to Rails 1.1.x. This plugin allows code in files in the RAILS_ROOT/ config/initializer directory to be executed as if was in RAILS_ROOT/ config/environment.rb.
The formal announcement on my blog is at http://smartic.us/2007/2/26/rails-initializer-directory