In 1923, Grants Pass claimed to have invented the auto camp, based on Chamber of Commerce records showing the first camp opened in May 1915.

It was late January 1881 when a woman who had imbibed “too much tangle-foot” became the first occupant of the jail in the new city hall in Jacksonville, Ore.

In March 1965, the owner of Novelcraft Plastics in Gold Hill, Ore., Lew Trickey, ordered 3,500 pounds of coconuts from San Francisco said to be “fresh from the tropics.” Trickey wanted the coconut husks for his craft business.

The first large hydroelectric facility on the Klamath River entered service 100 years ago, providing an abundant source of power for residents of Northern California and Southern Oregon. The dam, known as Copco 1, generated 11 megawatts of electricity.

Elmer Bankus was a land developer, businessman, and philanthropist who rebuilt the Brookings community after its mainstay employer, the C & O lumber mill, shut down in 1925.

When the Applegate family moved to Yoncalla, Ore., in 1848, they made friends with Chief Halotish, or Halo, leader of the regional Kalapuya tribe. He and his family helped the Applegates farm and cared for their livestock.

Most of the stories from the old mining camps of Waldo and Allentown died with the miners who lived there, but John Eggers remembered a few.

William Powell and his family came to the Oregon Territory after the Civil War and settled in the little town of Ashland, consisting of small woolen and flour mills and a Southern Pacific railroad depot.

Does natural mineral water cure rheumatism? Early southern Oregonians believed it did. At one point, the Ashland area had five spring-water spas, one of them on Ashland pioneer Abel Helman’s property near today’s Lithia Park.

The advance of the California Northeastern railroad from Weed, Calif., toward the Upper Klamath Basin in 1908 brought an end to hauling freight by pack trains or in wagons during the long winter months.