Present-day Tokay Heights is a meandering street in the hills of Grants Pass, Ore., between Interstate 5 and Foothill Boulevard. In 1908, it was a 350-acre tract of land owned by vintner W.B. Sherman, known at the time as the “Grape King.”

When the North American fur trade reached its peak in the 1800’s, European and American trappers encountered an abundance of sea otters, especially on the Oregon Coast. It wouldn’t last long.

They’d been talking for at least 10 years about the need for a free public library before the 11 women appeared before the Grants Pass City Council in May 1913.

In Southern Oregon, the sound of a helicopter often heralds another season of logging in the Cascades and Siskiyous. Before the 1970’s, logging in the Pacific Northwest was primarily the province of earth-bound men and machines. There had been interest in using helicopters for logging in the 1950’s and 60’s, but until the development of heavy-lifting copters for military use in the Vietnam War, the aircraft couldn’t handle the weight of heavy timber.

The sinking of the steamer Brother Jonathan in 1865 just north of Crescent City, Calif., resulted in a change of steamship shipping laws and the construction of the St. George Reef Lighthouse, one of the most costly and dangerous lighthouses in the United States.

All that remains of many early Southern Oregon and Northern California boom towns are charcoal, rotting timbers or dust. One of them was Ayers, also known as Ayers Spur or Mistletoe, home during the early 20 th century to the Ashland Box & Lumber Manufacturing Co.

In the 1920’s, hundreds of men with horses and wagons excavated rough, back-country terrain in the Southern Oregon Cascades to create the Fish Lake irrigation reservoir. Today the lake, 35 miles northeast of Medford, Ore., provides year-round recreation and water for Rogue Valley farms and orchards.

Jacksonville, Ore., hosted a music festival long before The Britt Festival began in the 1960’s. In 1889, more than 2,500 [twenty-five hundred] people attended the town’s band festival. All-day bands played on the balcony of the U.S. Hotel to crowds below in the street.

Blinded in the prime of life, George Spencer could no longer work as a logger or gold miner. In 1922, when paralysis of the optic nerve rendered him sightless, he opened a newsstand in a shack on Sixth Street in Grants Pass.

In the summer of 1878, the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey sent Benjamin Colonna to place precision instruments on the 14,179-foot summit of Northern California’s Mount Shasta. He spent nine days and nights there, subsisting on cold food, except coffee and some toasted cheese. He lost 15 pounds and yearned for hot soup.