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The cul-de-sac off E. California Street in Jacksonville now known as Beekman Square was originally the site of St. Mary’s School. Established in 1865 by three members of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, it operated as a 12-year boarding and day school for the daughters of the more well-to-do pioneer families. It graduated its first student in 1871. St. Mary’s moved to Medford in 1908 and became co-educational in the late 1920s. It’s currently serves middle and

The cul-de-sac off E. California Street in Jacksonville now known as Beekman Square was originally the site of St. Mary’s School. Established in 1865 by three members of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, it operated as a 12-year boarding and day school for the daughters of the more well-to-do pioneer families. It graduated its first student in 1871. St. Mary’s moved to Medford in 1908 and became co-educational in the late 1920s. It’s currently serves middle and

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to ride in a stagecoach? An 1865 traveler between Jacksonville and Yreka wrote about the “luxury” of travel in a stagecoach, or “mud wagon,” as they were called. Picture a covered wagon. “Inside there are three seats, cushioned with leather cushions, more solid in feeling than the boards beneath, while the floor has several good large cracks, suitable for the free circulation of cold air, and which are highly instrumental in maki

Before the Jacksonville Trolley began offering narrated history tours, visitors and residents alike could board a stagecoach operated by George McUne for a 15-minute tour of the town. After traveling in a covered wagon from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon as part of Oregon’s 1959 Centennial Wagon Train, McUne had sent to the Smithsonian for original Wells Fargo stagecoach plans and handcrafted a replica. In 1961, he began offering stagecoach tours of Jacksonville. The coach

If you’re feeling cooped up these days, the Sterling Ditch Trail just 8 miles south of Jacksonville offers year-round intermediate level hiking, mountain biking, and equestrian opportunities. But silver was never mined here, so where does the name come from? With warm weather and sunshine, most of us are just itching to enjoy outdoor activities, so how about a hike on the Sterling Ditch Trail. Just 8 miles south of Jacksonville, the trail offers year-round intermediate leve

Both John Cantrall and Patrick Fehely, featured in our last 2 History Trivia Tuesdays, mined in Sterlingville, located about 6 miles south of Jacksonville. An entire town sprang up after miners James Sterling and Aaron Davis struck gold in 1854 in nearby Sterling Creek. With the gold miners came boarding houses, saloons, general stores, a casino, a dance hall, a barbershop and blacksmith shop and many houses. Within 2 years Sterlingville was home to over 800 people; at its pe

Did you know that Stonewall Jackson helped build the 1883 Jackson County Courthouse (now Jacksonville’s New City Hall)? No, not the Confederate general. This Stonewall Jackson was a half breed Indian. His father, a native of Tennessee, had come soon after the Mexican American War to part of the Oregon Territory (now Washington) where he married a Yakima Indian girl. Stonewall came to Jacksonville with a relative, obtained a job with George Holt, a building contractor, and

Historic Jacksonville, Inc. has reached the last of our series of Jacksonville, Oregon, “firsts”! The streetlamps that light many town intersections are reproductions similar to the originals. However, according to Chris Kenney, the town’s original lighting was mounted on buildings (and may have been mounted on poles depending on the definition of “posts”). Chris was the grandson of Daniel M. Kenney who had opened the town’s first trading post in 1852, a tent structure at the

The small house now located at 415 East C Street is not only one of Jacksonville’s oldest wooden buildings, but also one of the most frequently moved. Constructed some time in the late 1850s, the house “built by Strickland” was purchased in September 1859 “for the County Clerk’s office, Sheriff’s office, and jury rooms…and removed to the Court House block” where it stood at the corner of 6th and C streets. For 25 years, all the daily business of Jackson County’s Clerk and She

The Table Rock Billiard Saloon, constructed in 1860, was also Jacksonville’s first museum. Saloonkeeper Herman Von Helms collected fossils and oddities to attract a clientele that then stayed for his lager. For many years the saloon also functioned as an informal social and political headquarters, home to business deals, court decisions, and even trials. Fire gutted the building in 1960, leaving only the façade. The restored structure now houses the Good Bean Coffee House.