Southern Oregon

The Rogue and Umpqua valleys were Takelma country, with the Latgawa in the uplands, the Shasta along the creek where Ashland now stands, and the Cow Creek band of the Umpqua to the north. Gold at Rich Gulch, at the turn of 1851 into 1852, brought miners over the Siskiyous by the thousand. Treaties in 1853 confined the Takelma to a reservation under the Table Rocks, the two flat-topped mesas north of Medford, and the killing did not stop. Before dawn on October 8, 1855, a party of Jacksonville volunteers attacked a camp near the reservation and killed some two dozen people, most of them women, children and old men. The war that followed ended in 1856 with the survivors marched and shipped north to the Coast Reservation, and both the Siletz and Grand Ronde tribes now count the Takelma among their ancestors. The Table Rocks are a preserve; the trails to their tops are short and steep.

The miners' town survives almost whole. Jacksonville was the county seat until the railroad passed it by in 1884, and its brick main street sat unchanged long enough to become a National Historic Landmark in the 1960s. Medford took the railroad and the pear orchards. Ashland, at the foot of the Siskiyou Summit, got the college, and in July 1935 a young English professor named Angus Bowmer staged Twelfth Night inside the roofless walls of the town's old Chautauqua hall. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival has run nearly every season since.

I-5 climbs over the Siskiyou Summit into California. West of Grants Pass, US-199 follows the Illinois Valley past the turnoff to the marble caves of the Oregon Caves toward the redwoods; north, the freeway follows the Umpqua to Roseburg.

What to See in Southern Oregon

5 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Geology & Rock Formations

Oregon Caves

Cave Junction

A cave of marble rather than limestone, found in 1874 by a hunter who followed his dog in by matchlight and found his way out by the sound of a stream.

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The Table Rocks

Central Point

Two horseshoe mesas the Takelma called Ti'tanak, where the 1853 treaty was signed at the foot of one, with a wildflower on top that grows nowhere else.

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Historic Sites

Jacksonville and the Britt Gardens

Jacksonville

The gold camp a Swiss photographer walked into in 1852 pulling his camera on a cart, and the hillside where his 1862 sequoia now shades a summer music festival.

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Wolf Creek Inn

Wolf Creek

A stage-road hotel built in 1883 for the overnight stop on the sixteen-day run between San Francisco and Portland, still taking guests under state ownership.

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Towns & Gateways

Oregon Shakespeare Festival

Ashland

A summer Shakespeare season that grew from one roofless 1935 performance into one of the country's largest repertory theaters, then had to ask for an emergency rescue in 2023.

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Stories from Southern Oregon

Southern Oregon rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.