A Brief History of the City of Ashland

Ashland has long been a natural place of assembly.  Indigenous peoples of nomadic hunting-gathering tribes convened on the site of the current town for thousands of years before European-American settlers first arrived in the mid-nineteenth century. 

The “Donation Land Act” of 1850 was a strong impetus for pioneers to settle in Oregon.  The federal government allowed early settlers a claim of 320 acres for a single male and 640 acres for a married couple to establish working farms in what was then the Oregon Territory.  Robert Hargadine and his partner Sylvester Pease arrived on January 6, 1852 and laid the first claim in the area on what was later to become the yards of the Southern Pacific Railroad.  They were followed five days later by Abel Helman and Eber Emery, both from Ashland County, Ohio.   A large group of settlers arrived late in 1853 bringing the first cattle, sheep, and agricultural tools to the valley.  Many others followed these early pioneers, traveling by wagon into the Rogue Valley from the north or from the east via the Applegate Trail, a southern branch of the more-northerly Oregon Trail. 

Helman and Emery, seeing the need for lumber to supply the growing community, built a water-powered sawmill on Ashland Creek.   Later in 1854, together with M.B. Morris,  they built the Ashland Flouring Mills on the site of what is now the entrance to the Lithia Park.  Helman donated twelve building sites adjacent to the mill for the creation of a permanent town.  By 1855 the settlement was small but well-established enough to have its own post office and the little settlement of 23 persons officially became known as “Ashland Mills”  [The name was shortened in 1871.].

The town grew rapidly.  A school was started in 1857 in the home of Eber Emery with a roster of 22 students and in 1858 a schoolhouse was built on land donated by Robert Hargadine.   Statehood was granted to Oregon in 1859.  By 1870 the Ashland was large and prosperous enough to support the Ashland Academy, the precursor of what is today Southern Oregon University.  

Life grew steadily easier through the 1870’s and 1880’s.  Ashland attained a new level of civilization with the first edition of the Ashland Daily Tidings in 1876.  A  railroad line built from the north reached the town in 1884 and was later connected to a line from the south in December of 1887, an engineering achievement which completed a full circle of rail around the nation.  Electricity was added to the town’s infrastructure with the organization of the Ashland Electric Power and Light Company in 1888.

A Chautauqua center was first based in Ashland in 1893.  Chautauqua, a nation-wide traveling program named after its origins in Chautauqua, New York, provided entertainment and instruction for local people with a series of lectures, seminars, and performances for two weeks or more every summer.  Many famous names of the period appear on the early programs:  William Jennings Bryan, John Phillips Sousa, and Susan B. Anthony, to name but a few.  The first Chautauqua was housed in a wooden dome built on the site of what is now the Elizabethan Theatre of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.  Two other structures replaced this first one as the town grew and the program gained popularity with people living all over the region.

By 1900 the town of 3000 was the largest in the Rogue Valley.  The Ashland Public Library opened in 1912, one of the many hundreds of small libraries built all over the country with money donated by the industrialist Andrew Carnegie.   Landscape designer John McLaren, known for his design of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, was retained to lay out a park for the town, and in 1916 Lithia Park was dedicated on the site of what had been the Ashland Flouring Mills.   Town leaders, hoping to establish Ashland as a health spa along the lines of famous European spas, put up considerable funds to have a mineral water piped from its source many miles away.  Thus was born the famous (or infamous) Lithia Water.

The town fell on hard times in the first half of the twentieth century.  The Southern Pacific Railroad dealt a huge blow in 1927 with the rerouting of its main line further east, thus closing most freight and passenger traffic.   Chautauqua had died out after World War I and its auditorium was abandoned and razed by 1931 when Angus Bowmer arrived to teach at the Southern Oregon Normal School (now SOU).  Through his efforts the community staged the First Annual Oregon Shakespearean Festival on July 4-6, 1935 with three performances on a hastily built stage (shown at right) within the circular wall of the old Chautauqua building. 

Ashland remained a relatively small town through the 1940’s and 50’s, but what began as a simple community-theatre effort gradually grew into the internationally famous Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the principal engine driving the local economy.  Construction of Interstate 5 reached the town in 1966, and the opening of the Bowmer Theatre in 1970 brought increased numbers of tourists and new residents.  The town has thrived ever since, developing a culture of depth and diversity surprising for it size, and continuing its long history as a gathering place of people from all over the country and the world. 

wb  4/2008

 Sources for this article include Ashland, the First 130 Years  by Marjorie O’Harra, the City of Ashland, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.