Jacksonville and the Britt Gardens

Peter Britt reached Jacksonville in November 1852 on foot, nearly penniless, hauling a small cart with his photographic apparatus. He had been a portrait painter in Switzerland, learned the daguerreotype in St. Louis, and come west in the gold rush like everyone else in the camp. He opened a studio in 1854, one of the first in Oregon, and for nearly half a century photographed the town and the valley, from farmers and newspaper editors to a French hotelkeeper and the Chinese miners who worked the gulches, with whom he was on friendly terms.

In 1874, after failing in 1868 and 1869, he got a wet-plate camera to Crater Lake and made the first successful photograph of it. William Gladstone Steel later used Britt's pictures in the campaign that made the lake a national park in 1902. Britt also planted a vineyard in 1858 and is counted as the Oregon Territory's first vintner; he grew pears and peaches and kept weather records for the government.

He died in 1905. The hillside above town is now Britt Gardens, a county park, and the giant sequoia he planted in 1862, the year his son Emil was born, still towers over it. Since 1963 the grounds have hosted the Britt festival's summer concerts on the hill. His prints and negatives are in the collections of the Southern Oregon Historical Society. Below the hill, the brick main street that the railroad's 1884 bypass left frozen is a few minutes' walk away.