How Ashland Eclipsed Jacksonville
Near Ashland, Oregon
For a brief period in the eighteen fifties and sixties, Ashland was not the most important town in southern Oregon. That distinction belonged to Jacksonville, about twelve miles to the northwest, where gold had been discovered in Rich Gulch in eighteen fifty one. Jacksonville erupted almost overnight, became the county seat of Jackson County, and for a time looked like the permanent commercial center of the region.
Ashland had a different foundation. Where Jacksonville was built on gold, Ashland was built on mills, farming, and its position as the natural gateway through the Siskiyou Mountains. When the Southern Pacific Railroad came through the Rogue Valley in the eighteen eighties, it bypassed Jacksonville and ran through Ashland.
That decision was driven by topography rather than politics: the railroad needed to cross the mountains through Siskiyou Pass, and Ashland sat at the foot of that crossing. The railroad's arrival transformed the competitive geography of southwestern Oregon. Orchards that had been difficult to market suddenly had access to the whole Pacific Coast.
Businesses serving the flow of commerce through the mountain pass clustered in Ashland. By the turn of the twentieth century, Ashland had grown into one of the largest and wealthiest cities in the county, before Medford overtook it. Jacksonville's gold was long spent and its railroad had never come.
Ashland's geography kept paying long after the gold in the hills was gone, and that geography is still the reason the town exists at all.
