The Rogue Valley’s orchard boom went bust after 1912. A letter sent to the New York City Daily Worker in 1939 said land scams continued with slick guys deceptively promising riches through fruit-land speculation to strangers arriving at the Medford train station. The writer enclosed a poem written by Mary Agnes Daily for the Ashland Tidings in 1918, which reads:

During its 1900 July Fourth celebrations, Medford featured a hot air balloon daredevil, Professor Chris Nelson. For a fee of $125, Nelson said he would ride a trapeze attached to the balloon to an elevation of 5,000 feet, jump from the balloon and parachute back to earth.

Mary Adams was born at Waldo, Ore., in 1861. When she grew up, she moved to Grants Pass to start a dressmaking business while working as a housekeeper to make ends meet.

Medford, Ore., quadrupled in size from 1900 to 1910, one of the fastest growing towns in America. Its second elementary school was built in 1906 on rabbit scrubland just north of town. Two nearby subdivisions sprang up with small houses on small lots and were annexed to the city. The area became known as the Liberty Park neighborhood.

In the mid-to-late 19 th century, the Northern California Shasta tribe faced frequent attacks by Modoc Tribe warriors seeking slaves.

Close inspection of the tombstones in the cemetery located next to the church in the Josephine County ghost town of Golden reveals that none of them have legible markings on them. It’s impossible to know who is buried there. That’s because no one is.

Finding safe places for people to enjoy ice skating in the early 1900s was a real preoccupation of community leaders in Klamath Falls. The smooth, expansive frozen surface of Upper Klamath Lake continued to lure young skaters, despite drownings beneath the ice.

The arboretum of 40 trees established at the Southern Oregon Experiment Station in 1961 was a joint project of the Siskiyou District of the Oregon Federation of Garden Clubs, Jackson and Josephine County Extension Services and the Southern Oregon Agricultural Experiment Station. Extension Agent John W. McLoughlin managed the project.

Frank Colvin once said, “If I could be remembered for anything, it would be fishing.”

In the 1850s, a fortified ranch house doubled as a fort near Selma in Josephine County, Ore.