Grants Pass was once known in Southern Oregon as The Land of the Flaming Tokay, largely through the efforts of a timber and land dealer, W.B. Sherman.

Music lovers in Medford were entertained in 1902 by an enterprising businessman, H. S. Coss, whose Piano House store offered a series of musicals featuring local men and women performing vocal selections and piano pieces.

It was a bumper huckleberry year in 1908 in the Cascade Forest Reserve just west of Southern Oregon’s Crater Lake National Park.

In 1921, unruly sheepherders derisively known as the “wild Irishmen” led their flocks into the newly added lava beds section of the Modoc National Forest, often without permits. The forest rangers responsible for removing the prohibited sheep did not carry firearms and relied on persuasion to get the herders to cooperate.

A small parcel of land facing California Street in Jacksonville, Ore., has played a major role in the town’s history.

Actress Edna Skinner and her friend Jean Fish retired in the 1970’s in Coos Bay, Ore, where Skinner built a 6,000-square-foot, boat-shaped house designed by Fish. The Coos Bay newspaper, The World , has described the house as “one of the South Coast’s architectural marvels.”

For 11 years, skiers participated in the Crater Lake Wilderness Race. Twenty-four competed in the first, 42.6-mile course in 1927 that followed the Crater Lake highway from Fort Klamath to Crater Lake Lodge and back with a 2,200-foot elevation change.

On Nov. 16, 1967, the Medford Mid High School auditorium rang with the music of Schubert, Bach, Bizet and Tchaikovsky, performed by the brand-new Rogue Valley Symphony.

Lake of the Woods in Klamath County, Ore., has been a popular vacation spot since the U.S. Forest Service opened a campground there in 1920.

Diaries, journals, and letters provide a glimpse into the realities of life among the early miners and settlers. Hiram G. Ferris came West at age 24 in 1846 and settled in Yreka, Calif. His letter home on Dec. 29, 1850, read like this: