In April 1911, a paving crew worker in Ashland, Ore., 20-year-old George Gabriel Geil, fell in love with 23-year-old Lorena Belletta Mingus, who was staying with her grandmother in Ashland. Their romantic correspondence traces the pace of the courtship.

A wandering black bear spent six hours on Christmas Eve 1999 between two buildings in an industrial zone of Klamath Falls, Ore. The bear apparently wandered down from KAGO Hill, on the town’s west side.

In the 1890s and early 1900s, Halloween sprouted merry pranksters. Among their tricks were removing gates from their hinges, reversing street signs, and scattering moveable objects all over town.

The rather destructive pranks of the 1800s’ Halloween revelers, like hoisting buggies on top of barns, tipping over outhouses and putting gates in the nearest lake, gave way to more genteel parties later in the century. These house parties had decorations of jack o’ lanterns, sheet ghosts, paper witches, fortune-telling, popcorn, and pumpkin pie.

Northern California’s Crescent City has had its share of turbulent wind and sea weather. It doesn’t normally take the form of hurricanes or cyclones, but in April 1925, terrifying weather blew into town. People first noticed a waterspout swirling out in the ocean, where waterspouts usually stay.

A headline in the Aug. 31, 2019, edition of the Medford, Ore., Mail Tribune declared, “Jackson County dodges lightning strikes.” An adjacent headline read, “Homing Pigeons To Aid Planes Fighting Fires.” The story about the pigeons was drawn from the Mail-Tribune’s archives from 100 years ago.

The winter of 1920 in Siskiyou County, Calif., was destined to become a severe one.

In the 1950s, businessmen in Nevada and Southern Oregon envisioned a highway link from the sage brush of Winnemucca to the seashore of Crescent City, Calif. They called it the Winnemucca to the Sea Highway.

William Albert Massie settled with his family in 1885 on 100 acres on the Rogue River and moved the next year to 160 acres on Louse Creek in Merlin, Ore.

In October 1881, a distinctive gravestone arrived in Port Orford aboard a ship from San Francisco for delivery to the town’s founder, Capt. William Tichenor.