History Snoopin': Weeds of history

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by Bill Miller for the Mail Tribune

Monday, April 27th 2020

Commemorating local historical events can get quite dicey at times. Memories fade, people forget, and too often good intentions and efforts get lost.

On Oct. 19, 1952, a group of about 50 historically motivated people gathered in the Dardanelles Restaurant, on Highway 99, just across the Rogue River from Gold Hill.

This was the 100th anniversary of the official opening of Jackson County’s first post office in

Dardanelles, a small community of very few people that never rose to prominence.

William T’Vault registered his 640-acre donation land claim here in March 1852. He named the area

Dardanelles, built a cabin, and sent a letter to Washington, D.C. requesting an appointment as postmaster at a post office he would operate from his home.

T’Vault had more than enough experience for the job. He had led his family and a 300-person wagon train from Missouri to Oregon in 1845. Two years later, Congress authorized the establishment of post offices in the Oregon Territory, and, by the end of the year, Oregon had two post office locations. The first was at Astoria, and the second, in Oregon City, where T’Vault was postmaster and also editor of the state’s first newspaper, The Oregon Spectator.

William T'Vault

In June 1851, he scouted for Colonel Kearny who was traveling through the Rogue Valley on his way to a California army camp. The colonel stopped to defend local miners from Indian unrest. After a skirmish within today’s Shady Cove, Captain James Stuart was wounded and died. Some said T’Vault was the person who marked a tree in Phoenix near Stuart’s temporary grave.

T’Vault’s post office was a popular place. James Howard, self-proclaimed father of Medford, said, “A very attractive young lady, Miss Lizzie T’Vault, was the postmistress. There were more calls to see the young lady than to get mail.” Lizzie was one of T’Vault’s daughters.

T’Vault’s life ended in 1869, a victim of Jackson County’s smallpox epidemic.

In 1952, Frank DeSouza, a former Medford postmaster, led the 100-year commemoration event. He told of the great struggle to get mail to the settlers in those early days; how many private carriers carried the mail for as much as a dollar a letter.

DeSouza also announced that as soon as ODOT laid out an updated Highway 99 across the Rogue River from Gold Hill, a permanent plaque commemorating T’Vault’s post office would be installed on a concrete foundation.

It doesn’t appear that the plaque was ever installed, but if it was, I’m sure I’ll be the first to hear about it.

It was Labor Day, Sept. 7, 1959, when a commemorative marker was placed and dedicated at the rest area near the updated Highway 99.

The one-year-old Siskiyou Pioneer Sites Foundation had paid for a bronze plaque and invited Chris Kenney, a great-grandson of T’Vault, as their special guest.

With the opening in December 1962 of the I-5 freeway between Medford and Rock Point, the grass began to grow, and as cars zipped past Gold Hill, the 1959 marker slowly vanished from almost everyone’s memory.

However, this story has a happy conclusion. In 2008, dedicated members of the Umpqua Joe E Clampus Vitus Outpost, as they call themselves, “the protectors of the heritage of the American West,” went on safari.

They searched through the brush and brambles until they located the almost forgotten plaque and arranged for a rededication at a new location.

Pulled from the weeds of history, the plaque now stands near Dardanelles Store & Gas, west of the Laurel Hills Golf Course. Good work, boys!

Writer Bill Miller is the author of five books, including “History Snoopin’,” a collection of his previous history columns and stories. Reach him at newsmiller@live.com.

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History Snoopin': Banishment of the hated mask

Banishment of the hated mask

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by Bill Miller for the Mail Tribune

Monday, April 20th 2020

“We’re trying to save human lives here,” said Councilman John Carkin. “This council should be commended instead of getting senseless opposition.”

The crowd of at least 40 masked men hooted and booed. “It’s a highhanded outrage,” said a furious Councilman James Keene. “It smacks of the Bolsheviks.”

Medford City Council had just voted 4-3 to leave the decision of whether to abolish the mask requirement to the best judgment of the city’s board of health, a board composed of the four council members who voted in favor of keeping the masks.

It was December 1918. Jackson County was still fighting against the threat of the 1918 flu pandemic that was racing around the world and had already brought death to at least two county residents.

Mayor Charles Gates fired back at the agitators, reminding them that the flu epidemic had steadily decreased since the mandated wearing of masks had begun just three week earlier.

“There are only two classes of people opposing the masks,” he said, “those too dignified to wear them, and those who place the almighty dollar above human life.”

It had begun in early October, when Mayor Gates received a letter from Medford Dr. Elias Porter, who was studying in a Massachusetts hospital when the pandemic struck with a vengeance.

“It is the most terrible epidemic ever visiting America,” he warned, “and is very fatal. The disease appeared in Boston early in September. On the 14th of that month there were 21 deaths, and from that date until noon, Oct. 5, there have been over 80,000 cases and 2,270 deaths.”

Mayor Gates announced that starting Oct. 14, 1918, “We have decided to close all places of amusements, theaters, moving pictures, churches, lodges, schools and all public meetings of every description where people congregate, until the epidemic has subsided.”

Within days, William Barnum, one time boy-conductor on the Rogue River Valley Railway, was dead, and residents were getting sick.

Gates ordered a mandatory quarantine of anyone suffering from the flu and required a sign be posted on their door to warn the public.

By November, with 50 cases known in the county, the upper floor of Medford’s Sacred Heart Hospital was turned into an influenza ward.

Red Cross women began sewing flu masks, selling them to local stores and the public for 15 cents each.

On Nov. 24, when new cases had slowed, merchants who had lost most of their customers were delighted when the bans on gathering groups and closures were lifted.

However, two weeks later, with four deaths in four days and 150 cases of influenza, the council reinstated the gathering ban and the closures.

Also, everyone was now required to wear a mask everywhere they went, even inside where they worked. Violating the mask requirement meant a $5 fine for each offense, and over 20 men eventually were cited.

A Mail Tribune editorial supported the move. “The flu mask has been proved the best preventative, and while it entails considerable inconvenience, it is a question of safety first.”

Some merchants circulated a petition asking that the mask measure be repealed.

“The businessmen,” said City Health Officer Dr. Elijah Pickel, “are injuring their own cause. With flu masks, the individual can shop downtown without danger. Without them there would be danger on every side.”

On Jan. 4, 1919, the ban on gatherings and the mask requirement were lifted.

From the beginning, there had been 531 cases in the county, two confirmed deaths, and 26 deaths from pneumonia brought on by the flu. Sixteen deaths were in the county, outside of the cities.

“The schools reopen and all social activities will be on in full swing,” said a Tribune columnist. “It is expected that churches will be crowded again. 

Lovers of moving pictures will now be able to enjoy a show in comfort, thanks to the banishment of the hated mask.”

Writer Bill Miller is the author of five books, including “History Snoopin’,” a collection of his previous history columns and stories. Reach him at newsmiller@live.com.

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History Snoopin': A Tenderfoot Remembers

A tenderfoot remembers

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by Bill Miller for the Mail Tribune

Monday, April 13th 2020

A hundred years ago, just about everyone knew that the county seat was going to move from Jacksonville to Medford, and not everyone was happy about it.

Chandler B. Watson, better known as C.B., had come to Southern Oregon in 1871, nearly 50 years earlier than his conversation. He said the courthouse move was heart rendering, just as sad as if a member of the family had been taken away.

 

Chandler B. Watson

“Old Jacksonville, as I first saw it, comes before me now,” he said, “a moving picture of animation and energy. I am living again in retrospect, in the presence of that picture, such a one as will never again be seen except to memory.”

Arriving when he was barely into his 20s, C.B. had been an active resident. In those 50 years he had been Jackson County district attorney, Ashland city attorney, editor of the Oregon Sentinel newspaper, a local historian, and so much more. He had abandoned his Illinois home and fell in love with Oregon.

 

California St., Jacksonville, Oregon

“For one who had recently arrived as a tenderfoot,” he said, “a new world was opened and his young blood was made to tingle as he tried to come into correspondence with his environment. To such a one there are memories not to be obliterated, and sentimental preferences he would not suppress.”

C.B. understood that moving the county seat was in the public’s interest, “in the interest of the great majority,” he said. Jacksonville’s population had been falling for years. His only worry was whether the old, brick courthouse would remain standing.

“If you take away the courthouse, some suitable monument of lasting character should be erected at the old site.”

He remembered when Jackson County ran all the way from Goose Lake in today’s Lake County, through Klamath and Jackson counties, and up to the Josephine County line.

He admired the resident’s sense of duty and how they responded to a summons or subpoena “with less complaint than they do today.”

Those were days when a visit to the county seat might require days and nights of travel and camping. “A cheerful and uncomplaining attitude was maintained,” he said. “All were neighbors, though separated by forests and mountains of great extent.”

The county courthouse in 1871 was a simple wooden structure standing where the brick courthouse still stands. “The jail was little more than a dugout banked with dirt,” he said.

He was also amused that Medford would be the new county seat, remembering, “50 years ago jackrabbits and coyotes held high carnival and sole possession where Medford now stands. At that time there were not more than two farm houses within what is now the corporate limits of the present metropolis.”

There were vast open spaces and only a few tiny villages. Phoenix was second in population to Jacksonville, and miles of desert separated Central Point from Eagle Point, where the foundation of a flour mill was being laid.

“There were no thoughts of railroads,” C.B. said, and the passing of the overland stagecoach was the chief daily event.

“Roads were little more than trails. Kerosene lamps and tallow candles furnished the only light at night and special messengers on horseback performed the duties now obtained from telegraph and telephone.”

They were all fond memories for C.B. as he entered his 70th year, but he never was a prisoner of the past.

“The world is moving with accelerated speed,” he said, “and we are bound to keep pace with it. Changes are constantly required in the interest of the great majority, and we are bound to bow when demands are made.”

 

Courthouse, Jackson County, Oregon

The county seat moved to Medford in 1927, three years before C.B. died. He would be happy to know, the brick courthouse still stands.

Writer Bill Miller is the author of five books, including“History Snoopin’,” a collection of his previous history columns and stories. Reach him at newsmiller@live.com.

https://mailtribune.com/lifestyle/a-tenderfoot-remembers

History Snoopin': The rationing of panic

The rationing of panic

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by Bill Miller for the Mail Tribune

Monday, April 6th 2020

It was the middle of March, just a few weeks ago, when panic struck.

A long line of shopping carts twisted around a corner at Costco and ended somewhere back in the middle of the meat cases. A frazzled two or three employees were tossing jumbo packs of toilet paper into each basket; baskets pushed by equally frazzled and even more frightened customers.

Panic and hoarding are nothing new in times of stress and emergency; however, toilet paper, as important as it certainly is, certainly seems like an unusual choice in the grand scheme of things.

Then again, I’d bet you couldn’t tell me the very first item customers cleared from the grocery shelves when Pearl Harbor was bombed and the country went to war.

Waiting for it—sugar!

Within a week of the bombing, the government began its first rationing order. Because rubber was a

war necessity, purchasing new tires for the old jalopy was virtually banned, and just forget about riding home in a brand new 1942 automobile. Unless you were in one of 12 employment categories beginning with physicians, nurses and veterinarians, and ending with my favorite, “persons delivering newspapers,” you were out of luck. The serious joke that was going around said, “Be careful with your tires when you’re driving around, Bob, cause you ain’t gonna get no more.”

 Now, let’s get back to sugar.

Rumblings of a sweet ban started right around New Year’s and, boy, did those rumblings get serious attention from the panicky portion of the Greatest Generation. Store shelves were as bare as — dare we say it? — an empty toilet paper roll.

It was hoarding in the extreme. There was plenty of sugar produced in the county, yet officials reported many consumers were “buying in excess of need” and storing the extra sugar in case of a future shortage or price increase.

On May 5, 1942, when sugar became the first rationed item after cars and tires, it was apparent that those panicky sugar folk were actually on to something.

Sugar was also a critical war necessity. Experts said over a million tons of sugar would be diverted from consumers each year to make industrial alcohol, a material needed in the manufacture of explosives. “This is the sugar that can mean more fire power for our fighting men,” said one sugar company. “So long as we need sugar to get enough explosives, every American man, woman and child will cheerfully and gladly accept the sugar ration.”

In addition, there really was a shortage. Sugar production in the Philippines and Hawaii dried up, and Cuban and Puerto Rico sugar was shared with the war allies, Great Britain, Russia and China.

Ration stamps were issued, with each civilian adult allowed 1 pound of sugar per week and children a 1/2 pound. Anyone found hoarding could face a fine of up to $10,000.

There would be more rationing during the duration of the war, including shoes, butter and meat. Even coffee was rationed in November 1942 to just 1 pound per person every five weeks — about a cup a day. That’s a thought that still panics the heck out of us who wake up and just can’t wait to smell the coffee.

Gas rationing began Dec. 1, 1942, allowing four gallons a week. The day before it went into effect, gas stations across Jackson County reported “a heavy run on gasoline in order to start the rationing period with a full tank.”

Not until the end of the war in 1945 did rationing begin to fade away.

Gas rationing ended Aug. 15, and everything except tires and sugar ended Nov. 25. Tire rationing ended Jan. 1, 1946.

Because of a world shortage of sugar, it took until June 11, 1947, before the Mail Tribune could print above the page one masthead, a large, warlike headline, “Sugar Rationing Ends Tonight.”

Here’s hoping toilet paper doesn’t take that long.

Writer Bill Miller is the author of five books, including “History Snoopin’,” a collection of his previous history columns and stories.

https://mailtribune.com/lifestyle/the-rationing-of-panic