Ashland (pop. 5,050, alt. 1,868 ft.) occupies a plateau overlooking the valley of the Rogue River and surrounded by the curving ranges of the snow-capped Siskiyou Mountains. The dominating peak is Mt. Ashland, or Siskiyou Peak, situated on the state boundary at a height of 7,662 ft. An auto road leads to viewpoints high up on its flanks. Its twin peak is Mt. Wagner, 7,000 ft. high. Another lofty summit is Sterling Peak, 7,377 ft. high. To the northeast rises Grizzly Peak, a pile of lava 6,000 ft. high.
    Ashland has numerous mineral springs owned by the municipality, whose waters show a higher mineral analysis than those of Saratoga, N.Y. Reaching the main business portion of the city, there is found a little plaza with a drinking fountain surmounted with a statue of the Pioneer, a gift to the city by one of its residents. To the left of the Plaza, about 100 yards, is Lithia Park, especially maintained for tourists. The "original" automobile campground is maintained here, and auto parties are welcome to camp with no other cost than 25¢ a day for the gas used for cooking purposes. The camp is well lighted with electric lights, has modern sanitation, private table and benches for each camping party and individual gas plates and lockers for food. A visit to this park would not be complete should the tourists fail to drive up Ashland Canyon, crossing and recrossing a swift-running mountain stream to a point where a signpost says to turn off. This is the upper end of the scenic drive, and continuing on this driveway will give the tourists a splendid view of Rogue River Valley and the city of Ashland.
    Like most of the mountain-walled towns of Oregon, Ashland's summer days are excessively hot, but the nights are always cool. It is a comfortable town and a good touring base for the Marble Caves, Crater Lake and the Klamath Basin. In the vicinity fossil flora has been found that is totally different from any living flora in Oregon. According to the U.S. geological reports, flora of the same type, and hence presumably of the same age, is found in the rocks of northern California about the big bend of the Pit River and on Little Cow Creek east of Redding. These flora are evidently closely related to the plants that lived during the period when certain of the gold-bearing gravels of the Sierra Nevadas in California were being deposited. The geologic age of these gravels has been determined in part by the aid of these fossil plants.
Automobile Blue Book, vol. 8, 1919, page 247


    Medford, with a population of 10,000, is located near the center of the Rogue River Valley, in Southern Oregon, on the main line of the Southern Pacific railroad. It is also the terminus of the Pacific & Eastern railroad and the Rogue River Valley railroad. Medford is the largest city, and the most important financial, trade, and shipping center of the district. It is also the gateway to Crater Lake. The chief developed industry tributary to Medford is fruit raising, and some of the most highly developed apple and pear orchards of the valley are nearby. A variety of smaller fruits, berries and market garden products are also grown, and large yields of alfalfa. Other industries are dairying, stock raising, farming, mining, lumber, etc.
    The 1910 census credits Medford with the most rapid growth, with two exceptions, of any city in the United States, during the past census decade. The population increase during the period was 393 percent.
    Medford receives an annual average rainfall of 25 inches, and the altitude is 1377 feet. It is located on Bear Creek, which is a tributary of Rogue River and which drains the greater part of the tillable area of the valley.
    Few if any cities the size of Medford have a greater length of first-class paved streets, there being a total of twenty-five miles; also twenty-eight miles of cement sidewalks, and a twenty-three-mile gravity water system. The water is brought from a natural lake reservoir in the Cascade Mountains. The city has gas and electric light and power, a public park, a $20,000 public library, a new $140,000 hospital, a four-story federal building, a $50,000 passenger depot, several first-class hotels, four banks, a large new opera house, a sanitarium, five fruit packing plants supplemented by pre-cooling houses and storage warehouses, two box factories, three lumber mills, two fruit and vegetable canneries, a large fruit dryer and evaporator, two large creameries, two ice plants, flour mill, sash and door factory, cabinet and office fixture factory and several other factories.
    Medford has a modern-equipped high school and four other public school buildings, with first-class schools, business college, Catholic school, music conservatory, eleven churches, and two newspapers, the Mail Tribune and the Sun, both of which have leased wire Associated Press news. There are about 30 lodges represented, a number of women's clubs and a University Club.
    Medford is headquarters for the Crater Lake national [park,] Forest Service, and the offices of the county pathologist and the U.S. Weather Bureau for Southern Oregon are located here.
    Medford brags of her beautiful streets, elegant homes, and modern business houses.
    Ashland, with a population of 6000, is located in the upper end of the Rogue River Valley, among the foothills of the Siskiyou Mountains. It is the second city in size in Jackson County, and is the division point on the main line of the Southern Pacific railroad. It is noted as a home town and health resort. It has a number of mineral springs, including hot and cold springs, sulfur, lithia and soda springs, and also for its beautiful park, one of the prettiest on the Pacific Coast, that cost $175,000. It has maintained a Chautauqua for a quarter of a century and has a new auditorium that seats 4000 people.
    Ashland is also quite a fruit shipping point, and dairying and farming are important industries. It has gas and electric plants, creamery, flour mill, ice plant and many other industries.
    Ashland has a high school building and a public school system second to none. It has a number of churches, splendid homes, nice streets, many of which are paved, and good business houses. Most of lodges are represented there and [it] has a number of women's clubs, the Tidings, a semi-weekly, and the Record, a weekly, are both published there.
    The other towns in Jackson County are Central Point, Butte Falls, Eagle Point, Gold Hill, Jacksonville, Phoenix, Rogue River and Talent, which vary in size from 200 to 1500. They have modern conveniences, such as electric lights, gas, water systems, etc., [and] are shipping points for fruit, grain, stock, lumber and other products of Southern Oregon. They have good churches, splendid schools, lodges, women's clubs and in fact are strictly up-to-date in every way. All the towns are connected by good roads, part of which are hard surfaced, and all will be in a few years. Most of them are also on one of three railroads.
    Gold Hill has a weekly newspaper, the News, and Jacksonville a weekly, the Post.
    Grants Pass, with a population of 6000, [is] located in the lower end of the Rogue River Valley, just over the Jackson County line. It is the county seat of Josephine County, is one of the leading towns of Southern Oregon, with paved streets, electric lights and power, gas and other modern conveniences. It is on the Pacific Highway which is partly hard-surfaced through the county, contracts let and work being done on the balance. Fruit raising, dairying, farming, lumber and mining are the chief industries. It has splendid schools and churches, several active women's clubs, and many of the lodges are represented.
    It is located on the Southern Pacific main line and on the famous Rogue River. The Courier, a daily newspaper, and the Observer, a weekly, are published there.
Medford Mail Tribune, August 12, 1919, page B2


    The clock has stopped. It was a quarter after 4 on the 26th of October of a year that is gone when it ticked its last. Dust, gray and deathlike, has settled on the old chronometer and upon the gay feathers of the stuffed China pheasant that seems to watch with its bright, but beady, eyes for the timepiece to begin its rhythmic measure of the passing hours.
    Softly on the battered counter, too, the dust has laid its mantle as though it would shield from indifferent touch the marks that half a century of frontier business and banking have carved indelibly there.
"NEAR MEDFORD" NOW
    But the signs and notices that hang on the walls of the ancient bank at Jacksonville may still be read as clearly as when C. C. Beekman, the financial genius of a Southern Oregon frontier, presided with careful hand and unerring eye over the gold scales that weighed most of the treasure that came out of the washings and the mines in the hills that tower above Jacksonville.
    It was while the trade extension special of the Chamber of Commerce was touring the cities of Southern Oregon that opportunity came to visit the quaint old town which was once the center of all enterprise in Jackson County, is still the county seat, but is now spoken of as "near Medford."
    With E. A. Welch of Medford at the wheel, we had circuited the beautiful orchards in the valley of the Rogue. We had heard the repeated stories of success or failure in fruit growing. Success near Medford has seemed to depend upon whether your money was carelessly left to do the work while you played absentee landlord, or whether you stuck everlastingly by the stuff and watchfully caught old Senora Success detainingly by the skirts whenever she tried to dodge down the lane.
TIME TURNED BACKWARD
    We were illy prepared for Jacksonville after the scenes of modern, bustling, motor-energized agriculture. It was like stepping from a crowded street into a dimly lit home of the colonial period where the spinning wheel, the distaff and the blue Delft dishes still have their respective places of honor and use.
    It was like turning the motion picture reel backward and seeing that which is gone appear again, but in inverse order.
    The shaded streets were quiet and almost deserted. Much of the business had sought brisker centers, and stores gaped like eyeless sockets. Some of the houses that a busier day had built had outlived their usefulness, for their former occupants had either passed away or gone on to other places of residence, scarcely leaving a "For Rent" or "For Sale" poster on the sagging picket gates or the leaning pillars of mouldering porches.
    It was a place where one expected, involuntarily, to meet the wraiths of yesterday and to hear the echoes of voices that belong with the dead.
    On one of the corners was the old United States Hotel, where General U. S. Grant once wrote his name on the register and stayed overnight. [Grant never set foot in Southern Oregon. It was Gen. Sherman who stayed a night in the hotel.] Now the old hostelry is vacant and bedraggled, as unnecessary as the stage coaches that once dashed from in front of its doors before the railroad came.
BEEKMAN NOT FORGOTTEN
    Opposite is the little frame building known as the Beekman Bank. I cannot give from the experience of that flitting visit any authentic interpretation of the old banker's life, but I do know that if ever a town was eloquent of a departed spirit and seemed to languish for lack of his presence, that place is Jacksonville.
    An aged caretaker came at our call from the carefully tended Beekman homestead and turned the key in the old-fashioned lock that we might pass through the door of the bank.
    We stepped into the place where the banker is said to have begun business in 1852, and where on May 1, 1863, he was appointed agent of the Wells-Fargo Express company.
    One of the notices that caught my eye was this, "Heavy letters not fully covered with postage will not go forward." Another advertised the California Stage Company. Others spoke of Wells-Fargo drafts on Paris, of guarded gold dust shipments to the "Atlantic States," and to Europe.
BACK AFTER 15 YEARS
    The express company warned its patrons that "We will not recognize any claim for coin short in packages unless examined before leaving the counter."
    To judge from the comment, this was a disregarded warning. The miners, we were told, brought their winnings from the obdurate hillsides to Beekman and he weighed, gave accounting and provided custody with scarcely so much as a scratch of the pen to confirm his responsibility. An incident was related of a miner who brought a bag of gold dust worth $15,000 into the bank one day.
    "I'd like to leave this a little while," he said.
    Beekman dropped the buckskin sack into a corner, expecting the miner to return after he had had a drink or two. But it was 15 years before a man stepped again into the bank.
    "You don't know me?" he asked.
    "No," answered the banker.
    "Well," I left a bag of gold here 15 years ago."
ACCOUNTS BALANCED
    "Oh yes, I recollect you now," Beekman replied, "and here (swinging it out from the corner of its long repose) is your gold."
    Depositors in the bank are said to have rarely carried a passbook. When they wanted money they would ask if they had any balance and draw accordingly. Their confidence in the old man was implicit, and he never betrayed that confidence, it is said, either to the extent of a hair's breadth of his gold scales or a cent's discrepancy in his accounts.
    It is, however, related that when a youth the banker was quite a sprinter. He won all the races of the neighborhood. A race was scheduled for a certain Fourth of July celebration, and the miners smuggled in and kept out of sight until the day of the race a famous runner.
    The time for the big event drew near. Interest ran high. Betting was fervid. Most of his fellow townsmen placed odds on Beekman.
    But when the race began the stranger drew away to an easy lead, which far outclassed the local youth. Hearing the disgruntled shouts of his townsmen, Beekman decided that his room was better than his company, and continued up the mountainside. But presently he reappeared, dashing headlong down out of the chaparral bushes, and close behind him an angry female bear.
    "Give me room, Give me room," he yelled, "and don’t you people dare think I'm trying to throw this race!"
    The story has not the seal of authenticity, but truth is secondary in a good anecdote.
    You have seen a river run full with a heavy burden of logs upon its bosom. In an eddy one of the logs will be edged upon the bank. Receding water or changing channel will leave it there. Thus I thought of Jacksonville as I left it.
    In its quaintness, its quiet, its soft repose, its tradition, I think of it now as a town that has become a tomb--the mausoleum of memory.
Oregon Journal, December 7, 1919, page C12