Ashland: Mills, Rails, a Failed Spa, and Shakespeare
Near Ashland, Oregon
Ashland sits at the northern foot of the Siskiyou Mountains, cradled at the headwaters of Bear Creek, a tributary of the Rogue River in southern Oregon. It is not a large city, its population never having exceeded twenty five thousand, but for a town its size it has accumulated an improbable weight of history and reinvention. Ashland began as a sawmill village, grew into a railroad and orchard town, made a celebrated attempt to become a mineral spa resort, and eventually became one of the most recognized arts destinations in the American West.
The town was established in eighteen fifty two when Abel Helman built a sawmill and a flouring mill on what he called Mill Creek, later renamed Ashland Creek. Helman was a native of Ashland County, Ohio, and he named his settlement after his home county, with some accounts adding a secondary connection to Ashland, Kentucky, where other founding families had roots. The sawmill processed timber coming down from the Siskiyous; the flouring mill turned the grain of the surrounding valley into flour for the region.
Helman and the settlers who followed him laid the practical foundation of a working town at a place where mountain and valley met. Ashland grew steadily through the second half of the nineteenth century, aided decisively by its position on the route north from California. The town sat just north of Siskiyou Pass, the natural mountain crossing where the California-to-Oregon wagon road, the stagecoach line, and eventually the Southern Pacific Railroad all had to funnel through the mountains.
That geographic bottleneck made Ashland a mandatory stop for commerce moving up and down the Pacific Coast. When the Southern Pacific completed its line connecting Sacramento and Portland in the eighteen eighties, Ashland became the largest and wealthiest city in southwestern Oregon. Ashland's greatest ambitions, however, lay in a different direction.
In nineteen oh seven a lithia spring was discovered near Emigrant Lake to the east, with an exceptionally high concentration of lithium in its water. The town borrowed heavily, hired the famous landscape architect John McLaren to design a park around the springs, and dreamed of becoming a great mineral spa resort. The water tasted like rotten eggs.
The resort never materialized. What remained was Lithia Park, McLaren's design of creek-side paths and meadows, and in the ruins of the old Chautauqua building at the park's edge, the future site of a theater festival that would eventually make Ashland famous in a way the spa never could have.
