Three special rail cars brought people to Ashland when, as the local newspaper described it, “Helen Keller Took Ashland by Storm.”

The Camp White Army training base and prisoner-of-war camp east of Medford during the Second World War had a population of 35,000 desperately in need of a newspaper.

By the mid-1860s, lack of gold reduced the raucous mining camps and towns enough to attract a different kind of adventurer to the wilderness. One such man was William Henry Brewer, of the California State Geological Survey.

Present-day residents of Ashland, Ore., are accustomed to weekly garbage collection. There was a time when it was an annual event.

In 1936, the gold miner Slim Damon accidently shot himself while prospecting in Curry County’s Mule Creek Canyon in Southern Oregon.

More than 160 years ago, 19-year-old Francis Carr of Ireland and his younger brother, James, landed in New York City, where Francis taught school for 15 years and studied law. He also lost a wife and one son in childbirth and three children to smallpox.

In 1920, the journal of the Oregon Growers Co-operative Association reported (in these words), “What was perhaps the oldest apple tree in the state died the past winter near the site of old Fort Umpqua just across the river from Elkton. This tree was probably planted about 1845 and continued bearing until last year.”

What is now known as the Elk Camp Ridge Trail, a steep, rocky 8-mile hike out of Gasquet, began as an indigenous trade route to the coast called the Cold Spring Mountain Trail. After gold was discovered at Sailor’s Diggings in the Illinois Valley west of Grants Pass, the trail became a supply route to Paragon Bay, present-day Crescent City.

A graduate of the Atlanta Medical College, Charles Wilber Nutting, became an eminent doctor in Etna, Calif., in the 1880s. Nutting had not only graduated from medical school in two years, but also remained another two years to teach anatomy, dissection and other surgical procedures.

Hailstorms frequently threatened Southern Oregon orchards in the early 1900s, damaging fruit every year but one between 1910 and 1948. By 1951, farmers decided to do something about it.