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City of Ashland, Oregon / Electric / City News
ASHLAND, AN HISTORICAL OVERVIEW (Pt. I)
Tuesday, March 30, 1999
<i>(excerpted from the City’s Comprehensive Plan)</i>
During the winter of 1851-1852, there were settlements in the Willamette Valley, and gold was being mined in northern California. Two pack train operators who were passing through the southernmost part of the Oregon Territory discovered gold at Rich Gulch, a tributary of Jackson Creek. News of the strike spread, and soon there was a tent city <i>(the place we know today as Jacksonville)</i> on the banks of Jackson Creek.
Up until this time, the Bear Creek Valley, a flat fertile valley protected on the west by the Siskiyou Mountains and on the east by the Cascades, had been inhabited only by small, scattered bands of Takelma Indians. They found this a hospitable place, with abundant fish, game and edible vegetation. The Indian bands moved from place to place in the valley gathering food and materials for their livelihood.
Their peace was disturbed by the miners who flocked to the Jacksonville/Applegate area, and then by the farmers, who were either newcomers or discouraged miners who found a new wealth in the rich fields and creek valleys. Families from all parts of the country, encouraged by the Donation Land Claim Act of 1850, came to make their free claim up to 320 acres, build homes and till the land. Many of Ashland’s earliest settlers came for this reason, the Walkers, Dunns, and Hills among them.
Jackson County was so designated by the Oregon Territorial Legislature on January 12, 1852. Six days earlier, Robert Hargadine, and his partner, a man named Pease, had taken up a Donation Land Claim and built a log cabin in the narrowing end of the Bear Creek Valley <i>[in what is now the Railroad District].</i>
They were soon joined by Abel Helman, Eber Emery, Jacob Emery, James Cardwell, Dowd Farley and A.M. Rogers who also decided to stay. Helman filed on a Donation Land Claim adjacent to Hargadine’s.
There was need for sawed lumber in the valley, so the men built a water-power sawmill on the banks of Ashland Creek. Then they built a flour mill in what is now the entrance Lithia Park. Business grew around the open space in front of the mills and people began to call it the Plaza.
Settlers came to the Plaza from neighboring farms to trade their wheat for flour, or to purchase lumber for improved cabins and homes. The California-Oregon Trail route passed through the little community and travelers bumped over ruts in the summer and tracked through mud in the winter to pass in either direction. Gradually stores and small businesses appeared on the Plaza and some individuals, who made their living by them, built homes nearby. The earliest homes were built on Main Street, then on Granite and Church Streets.
Ashland developed gradually during this time, and, perhaps then, got its roots as a solid community where people came to stay, to live their lives. Unlike neighboring Jacksonville, which began as a boom town, and later Medford, which developed with the coming of the railroad, Ashland grew slowly as people moved into the area or as generations of families grew up.
<u>The First Twenty Years</u>
Ashland was named after either Ashland, Ohio, or Ashland, Kentucky, in both of which the early settlers had ties. The Ashland Mills Post Office was established in 1855 - <i>it took six months to get mail from the east</i> - and the town became official. In 1871, the word "Mills" was dropped.
Ashland, a growing community of 50 by 1859, was a stopping point on the California-Oregon Stage Company’s route. A hotel was built to accommodate travelers, then a school on East Main Street near where Gresham Street now intersects. A sawmill and shop were set up, then a planing mill and cabinet shop. In 1867, the Ashland Woolen Mills were built on the banks of Ashland Creek where B Street now intersects with Water Street. Underwear, hosiery, shawls and blankets were all made from wool produced locally. Nursery stock, brought to Jackson County by Orlando Coolidge and his wife, Mary Jane, and planted on "Knob Hill" is credited by many as stimulating the fruit industry of Southern Oregon. W.C. Myer brought imported stock to his farm just north of town. The barn still stands in a field near the railroad overpass on North Main Street.
The Methodist Episcopal church, organized in 1864, held a conference here in 1869 and it was suggested that Ashland would be a "remarkably fine" place for an institution of higher learning. The Ashland College and Normal School, that was housed in a building on the site where Briscoe Elementary School now stands, was the forerunner of today’s Southern Oregon University.
<u>Growth and Incorporation</u>
Ashland grew faster than any other Oregon town south of Portland during the 1870s and 1880s. As the shallower mines in Jackson County were worked out and abandoned, agriculture became the main industry. The production of wheat and oats, corn and hogs, sheep, hay, honey and potatoes made farming profitable and this in turn brought more people.
Ashland, population 300, was incorporated on October 13, 1874.
Release Date: 3/30/1999
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