Central Point: Named at the Crossroads
Near Ashland, Oregon
In eighteen fifty-two a settler named Isaac Constant stood at a spot where two roads crossed and named what he saw: a central point, where the route west to Jacksonville and Butte Creek met the north-south track of the Oregon-California Trail. The crossroads grew slowly. A store appeared around eighteen seventy.
A post office opened in eighteen seventy-two. When the Oregon and California Railroad came through in eighteen eighty-three, it bypassed Central Point by half a mile, building its depot on land to the south that became Medford. Central Point refused to disappear.
It built its own depot in eighteen eighty-eight, incorporated in eighteen eighty-nine, and has since grown into a genuine small city in the heart of the Rogue Valley, still at the intersection Constant named more than a hundred and seventy years ago.
