Early fur trapping companies established outposts, known as forts, before the Oregon Trail opened. One example was the rendezvous point along the Umpqua River known as the “Old Establishment” or “McKay’s Old Fort,” built in the early 1820s by the North West Company, a Canadian firm active in the fur trade from the 1780s to 1821.

Maude Walker was born in 1881 into a not-so-ordinary childhood at an isolated homestead overlooking Pistol River, on Oregon’s South Coast.

A year before the United States entered World War I, cars were already making an impact on the country. It was 1916 and the three-day Fourth of July celebration in Ashland drew 60,000 visitors.

For settlers along the upper Coquille River in the 1800s, mail delivery was tenuous. The closest post office was in Empire City, a present-day district of Coos Bay, Ore. The round trip took about four days, and generally depended upon the generosity of local farmers who sporadically sailed downstream to sell their produce.

In the 1880s, Sterlingville, Ore., was a busy town of several hundred people working in the mines, farming and running businesses. The town had a post office, school, shops, several saloons, and the largest hydraulic mine in Oregon.

Travel writer James Mason Hutchings, known as the “Father of Yosemite,” complained about Southern Oregon roads when he visited in 1855.

Serving as either Medford mayor or Jackson County judge between 1948 and the 1970s, Earl M. Miller believed a healthy community must have good schools, good roads, and good water.

On Sept. 7, 1951, the Siskiyou County Historical Society celebrated the 95 th birthday of Yreka stone worker James B. “Dad” Russell.

James Mason Hutchings, born in Towcester, England, in 1820, was a son of a carpenter and expected to become one, too. But at age 23, George Catlin’s paintings of North American Indians excited Hutchings and he left for New York.

Baseball drew people together on Oregon’s South Coast in 1916, as people from all over took advantage of a rare opportunity to gather and become acquainted. A game between Gold Beach and Brookings drew a big crowd in August.