 I'm Amy Blossom from Jackson County Library Services, and I welcome you to Windows in Time. Windows in Time is a series of local history talks, a program that's been developed by the Jackson County Library Services and Southern Oregon Historical Society. It is also part of the Southern Oregon History Show, which airs on Thursday nights at 6 p.m. You can also see us live though at the Medford and Ashland Libraries the first and second Wednesday of each month at noon. So are you ready for some history? Let's go. Hello, my name is Pat Acklin. I'm a professor emerita of geography and environmental studies at Southern Oregon University. This project was originally developed for the geography department and their majors by SOU professor of geography Claude Curran. The project was featured in a field geography class, and when the university adopted its system of a culminating activities called the capstone, this course became the capstone for geography. It was devised as a way for students to actually show their professors and their student colleagues, as well as those that they invited to the presentation, all that they had learned in their degree. The knowledge and the skills, applying the geographic methodology and in our local landscape. So the students worked together in small groups, collaborating on studying one square mile or a section of land under the public land survey. And we'll talk a little bit more about that in a couple of minutes. They practiced traditional research methods. They learned how to conduct field interviews. They especially focused on cartography or map making because as we'll be seeing, the map is the principal tool of a geographer. They also had to develop presentation materials and each student in the small group was responsible for presenting one hour of material on location. So it was really quite exciting for the presenters and for the audience to be on location hearing about the geography. At the end of the project, student field notes are evaluated. They produce a written report complete with a bibliography of the many sources that they utilize to cover the geography of a square mile. So before we delve into the projects, I can't resist sharing with you a few things about geography. We talked a minute ago about the fact that the map is the principal tool of the geographer. Maps show what we call spatial distributions or the patterns of things on the landscape or in the atmosphere, all of the patterns on the earth. And again, then we utilize cartography to show those patterns. Each student in the project was required to produce a base map, something akin to a topographic map, such as the one here on the slide, or a roadmap where you might have lots of different features shown on the map. In the topographic map that you see in the slide, there's topography shown, but a very obvious spatial distribution or pattern is the green color which shows trees on the landscape. And each project contain many, many spatial distributions of all of the features of the geography. So to give you a sense of what that entailed, here is an exhibit that I have been using for many years that shows the scope of geography. And as you can see under the heading of physical geography are things like geomorphology, which corresponds to geology as a discipline. And we have climatology, which corresponds to meteorology. And we have biogeography, which corresponds to biology. And soils geography, which corresponds to what you'll probably recognize as soil science, but that is called pedology. And then there's human geography, the social science elements. We have history as a discipline. Well, we have historical geography. And a lot of what we'll be talking about today is historical geography, something that's exciting to many students. There's also political geography and economic geography and all of the other social science disciplines. So when the students are working on their presentations, they want to incorporate the various themes in geography. Things like location. And I have listed here relative location. That would be like saying something like, well, Ashland is about halfway between Sacramento and Portland. It's Ashland's location relative to another familiar location. But absolute location is something like a survey or latitude and longitude. And it's defined in a very precise way. There's also place, though. You might hear the expression sense of place. Well, that's the way a location becomes different from another location because of the attributes of place. Things like weather or architecture or vegetation. It certainly doesn't feel the same in Palm Beach, Florida as it does in Seattle, Washington. Both places, which have a sense of place, as do all places. Another theme, human environment interaction. And we'll see some of the presentations that focus on that aspect. And then movement. The idea behind movement is that, for instance, transportation makes patterns on the landscape that show the movement from one place to another, as does something like migration of people or animals. And then finally, region. So when we do work in geography, we work through some questions that we describe as geographic inquiry. And a couple of them are simple. When we go to map something, we'll say, well, what are we going to map? And so that's the what is it question. But then, because it's geography, we wanna know where it is. And both the what is it and the where is it describe things on the landscape. And they also take care of some thinking processes that humans use. The development of knowledge and understanding or comprehension and then the application of those things. But at a little higher level, at the explanation level, we ask why is it there? And more importantly, what is its significance? And that allows analysis and ultimately synthesis a very higher level thought process that brings together the different things that are on the landscape through explanation and gets at that significance. So as we talk about landscape, we look at a model that shows us our physical landscape. For instance, in Oregon, our timbered hills are a good example of a physical landscape element. And there are cultural landscape elements, the things that people put on the landscape or do on the landscape. And a key to understanding the relationship is to look at how society is perceiving those things. I started with the idea of timbered hillsides because our perception of our timber and how we should manage it has shifted dramatically over the last several decades as a result of the societal element and the society's shifting environmental perception. So students are looking for these big patterns and they use an inventory of the spatial distributions in their square mile to do this project. Essentially, the work of Ian McCarg in his seminal book Design with Nature from 1969 described a way of separating each geographic phenomena on the landscape into a separate layer as this slide shows. So for each square mile studied, there will be the physical landscape elements that are here, the hydrology, other natural resources and hazards. An important focus is what we call the sequent occupants and these are the humans on the landscape and the changing human groups and their culture over time. And then we have the current land uses and things like zoning and housing and so on. So when the students start the project they had to pick a square mile and our public land survey system was a good way to get started. And I'm not going to give you the whole explanation of this but essentially, not long after settlement, the land is surveyed into townships that are 36 square mile units. And then each square mile is numbered and that gives students an easy way to pick a square mile from a topographic map. In our slide, we see section number 14 in the middle diagram featured. And a square mile is about 600, well it is, it's not just about 640 acres, it is 640 acres. Although we are surveying a linear grid pattern onto a very irregular surface of the earth. So that's how they arrived at the square mile. Now one of the other features on the topographic map besides the section numbers, there are survey lines that allow us to see the location of the first donation land claims or the lands claimed by the first Caucasian settlers. And those are shown on a topographic map by section numbers that are higher than 36. And so that's how students would look at the topographic map and decide, oh this particular square mile has a donation land claim and that would give me some insight into the pioneers who settled there. And so as they did that, then they would find, oh the pioneers were looking for some special landscape qualities because of their cultural bias and their economic need to be farmers. And so we find in this orange pattern of donation land claims on the topographic maps for Ashland and Medford, a pattern that shows the kinds of lands and their characteristics that the pioneers valued. And of course those were gonna be close to water for domestic water and stock water. And that's a whole other lecture. So we'll move on to something that you might find of interest, people look after they determine their legal description with the public land survey at the Bureau of Land Management website and are able to find through using a legal description this page of land status and cadastral survey records. Cadastral means ownership. So the very first public land survey maps are available in this website. And so if you are living on a property like this, this might be of interest to you. And you'll find that under land survey in the BLM website. Here's an example of one of the early settlement maps done by the early surveyors. And you can see about half of it was mountainous. So they didn't really bother with that initially and instead focused on the lower elevation landscape lands. And here's an example of how they would show the various plots that were claimed by individuals and we'll be looking a little more closely at this one in the exhibits in just a little while. And here's another example down to the individual property owner. So at this point, I think it's time for us to start examining some of the things that the students have done in the Square Mile project. I'm going to start, not totally organize this chronologically, but I'm gonna start using an idea from sequent occupants. And that's the idea of the Native American population that was here prior to Caucasian settlement. This is always of great interest to students. So up in the Cascade Siski National Monument, Rod Smith and Stephanie Painter found a Square Mile that appealed to them and they studied it as the monument was being studied and created. And their interests at first were the Native Americans who were there. And so to illustrate the way the Native American population used the landscape in the Square Mile, Stephanie and Rod made some cordage or twisted string made from cat tails. Now I made this presentation once before and a woman in the audience gasped when I said cat tail. She thought I meant tails of house cats, but what I actually meant was a cat tail were the common wetland plant that we might see in a roadside ditch. So I thought I'd bring that, lest you too think that there was a utilization of cat tails. They also used Oregon grape, this to make a yellow dye and the students dyed a piece of fabric so we could see how that would appear. They used a lichen, which they've called Old Man's Beard and the lichen did a number of things. It was used as an antibiotic, something to stop the bleeding. Also it had antifungal and antibiotic characteristics that were used. And they also used cedar cones and I have a couple of them here to do a variety of processes. So those are some examples of things that were on their square mile that they shared with us. Another student group was interested in the table rocks. Well, actually a number of student groups over time, but this group focused on, again, the Native American use and shared with our group that there was a village near the table rocks of Native Americans when the first donation land claims were settled and conflict occurred that began the rogue Indian wars and in their square mile at Township 36 South, range to west, section 12, was the location of what is called the Lupton Massacre, an unhappy day that kicked off the rogue wars. And instead of showing a benevolent relationship between people, these sequent occupants focused on the conflict of culture and land use. So moving on, let's talk a little bit about some donation land claims. Here we have the donation land claims of the pioneers, the Barron's family, and we also have the Russell's and the Gibbs in the same neighborhood up on what we would call Old Siskiyou Highway. So here's a map of the configuration of the donation land claims and here is the current parcel configuration. And the rest of the board interpreted the maps and featured photos such as the Barron stage stop. And so the Barons were an interesting family. Hugh Barron was a major and he was the patriarch of the family, but I wanna talk about his granddaughter. His granddaughter, Ostie, inherited the ranch. She was the daughter of Edgar and Stacy Barron and she was born on March 10th, 1888. According to her obituary, she attended a normal school here in Ashland, although she never worked as a teacher. When her father Edgar died at the age of 80, she took over the ranch at what was called the Mountain House and you see it referred to in the literature in that way. It was one of the largest ranches in Southern Oregon and Ostie was purportedly a no-nonsense cigar smoking woman. So boy, what a kick it would have been to have met her. Ostie, an onlooker recalls, Ostie who is now the sole manager of the wonderful property of which she has full charge and care and from all appearances thoroughly understands her task. So this is how the landscape then becomes alive for the students when we populate it with real people and real events. So another project featured the neighbors of the Barons and these were the Hill family and this was their donation land claim. You might recognize the name Neil on this land claim because that family has given its name to Neil Creek. So here is the donation land claim map and you can see now parts of Immigrant Lake impose on the Hill land claim. Well, what I wanted to show that this group of students did is they took and showed us through a series of maps beginning in 1950, 1960, 1970, 79, and 92. So we can see the process of land division over time and then they took that information and created a graph of the number of partitions in the square mile and the years in which they took place. So this very highest spike here in 1970 represents about the time that Jackson County lands were first zoned and some of the other spikes such as this one represent the time at which Jackson County adopted its first comprehensive plan. So they used the information to do an analysis that showed when land development occurred. But a cool thing that I wanted to talk about the Hills and their nearby neighbors, the Duns, while we look at this map that is a good example of a modern era GIS map, I wanted to tell you about the Hills and how they're connected to the Duns. So Isaac Hill settled on a donation land claim as I was saying out by Immigrant Lake and he had three daughters. And the daughters were some of the only single women in Jackson County and so they had a great deal of contact with their neighbors for the three marriageable daughters drew crowds. Not just of neighbors, but of men from as far away as Jacksonville and Wairika. And the girls were evidently overwhelmed with marriage proposals and they were brought gifts. My favorite, among the gifts, remember the Russell's donation land claim up by the Barons, well, Jim Russell brought some tiny potatoes from Portland and John Gibbs, the other neighbor near the Barons, brought from a cat and the cat was possibly the first domestic cat in Jackson County. So that's kind of fun. And eventually the girls marry. The first to marry was Mary and she married Patrick Dunn of the Dunn family on a nearby land claim. Anne, whose nickname was Hassa, became a marble carver. Her husband, she married James Russell and she left, as this newspaper article says, her legacy in marble and you can see her work at the Hill Pioneer Cemetery, which is out by Immigrant Lake. So I thought that those were some interesting tidbits about the Hill daughters and their relationship to the Dunn's and the Russell's. So we'd best press on, oops. And we're going to look just a little bit at some of the movement or the ideas around transportation. This student group was fascinated with a square mile at the Siskiyou Summit. And so they studied the transportation there and while they did start with the wagon roads, I wanted to show you this topographic map which features tunnel 13, the location of the infamous final train robbery by the diatomats at tunnel 13. And then they detailed with photos some of the interesting rail events. They went on to show us the first highway, Highway 99 through the Siskiyou's, the building, the improvements of Highway 99, the final construction of I-5. Another student group was interested in the pass and I don't have their project, but I remember it well. And one of those students, Josh Gibson, has gone on to become the assessor of Jackson County. So I just thought I'd share that with you. Here's a project that focused on another square mile near the Ashland interchange again, where over time all kinds of transportation was installed. And this shows the first donation land claim which belonged to a man named John Barrett. And WC and Nathaniel Meyer are the two Northern claims and they went on to have a big impact on the city of Ashland with their livestock breeding. And one of them was a surveyor. And some kind of fun things that they found out was that out on Eagle Mill Road, there used to be a covered bridge over Bear Creek. And so anyway, an exciting historic site out there very near Eagle Mill Farm. Another thing they shared with us is that when Highway 99 was built, Bear Creek was channelized and straightened out. And actually that was responsible for quite a little bit of flooding in this neighborhood in 1997. So the history of local transportation routes and that idea of movement. More movement. This project was done by Roland Mancuso and Charles Bennett, both of whom work for Jackson County, one for the roads and one for the planning department or excuse me, development services. And they were assisted by Hillary Powell. And they focused on Phoenix and they chopped their square mile up a little bit differently. What I wanted to show you here was the fine work they did mapping and describing the Hispanic community that's been growing in Phoenix. And they interviewed a number of local businesses and this map shows the pathways of migration to Southern Oregon from various locations in Mexico and Central America. So again, that idea of the theme of movement. So that was a little on Phoenix. Here's a little bit on Medford. This area is out what Barnett Road and East Main from Central Medford. And it's an area where you see the big houses up on the hill. And occasionally you'll hear someone refer to that hill as Pill Hill because of the number of doctors that live there. Okay, it's a little geography, maybe not flattering all the time, but still part of the spatial attributes that we look at when we talk about place names. So up there is Roxanne. That's the former hillside of volcanic origin that has hosted, among other things, a coal mine over time. But up on Roxanne was the location where the Bowens and the McKees claimed their donation land claims. And John Bowen settled on 320 acres he was from Delaware. One of the people that came with him, Roxanne, gave her name to the hillside above Medford. So that's how we get Roxanne. And what I really enjoy about them is that when they brought with them, Merriam Bowen brought with her a yellow rose bush from Missouri. And she planted it on the slopes of Roxanne. Well, later on, she married John McKee and he sold the donation land claim in Medford and they moved out to the Applegate and they took the rose with them. And now you can see Merriam's yellow rose blooming at the Logtown Cemetery in the Applegate every spring. So not only did they bring their cultural values about farming and architecture and so forth, they brought things like roses so they can plant them in their new home. So that's a kind of a fun story. So finally, we're going to go to Jacksonville. And this is kind of a different approach to mapping. This pair took an aerial photo akin to a street view that you might get on Google or if you use the tilt button to change your view of the landscape. And over it, they superimposed a map of Jacksonville in 1884 so that we could see the patterns of the various buildings in the past compared to where they're located now. And these blue dots are the locations of three cisterns or water storage that were part of Jacksonville's fire protection system. And the students, and this is the kind of thing we like them to do, speculated that perhaps the reason the places that used to be there in 1884 are still there is that those were the ones that could have a hose that reached from the cistern to their properties very frequently because most buildings were made of wood until the bricks were created. There would be destructive fires. So they used that idea to talk about fire prevention. And they also were interested in the economy and how the depression had affected Jacksonville. Well, while I started, our first city was Phoenix, actually Jacksonville is the oldest community. And as you know, it was a gold mining community. It lost out as the county seat to Medford after the railroad came in. And now, as you know, it is a quaint town that is entirely on the National Register of Historic Places. Well, the students found out that the gold mining from the streams might have been over, but there were still interest in gold mining. And all of these stars on this map of Jacksonville that shows a picture of some backyard miners here were places where people went out on their property or behind their house and had little prospects trying to find a few flakes or a gold nugget, the nature of the depression being that anything that you could find would have gone a long ways to making a better lifestyle. So that's kind of a fun way to disguise a soils map because what we really have in the colors of the background of the street map with gold mines of Medford is a soils map that describes the various types of soils that were on this landscape. Another feature that students often study that lays the foundation for what we're seeing on the ground now are maps that are used to create zoning and make land use decisions. So this is a map that the students didn't make. They sometimes brought to their presentations maps that they would get, for instance, from the city of Jacksonville as this one is. But, and it was to show us the way in which spatial distributions of things were used to make zoning decisions. So you see the historic core and various other districts in Jacksonville that were used to make decisions. So the techniques that we've looked at today in the Square Mile project are all still things that are being taught to one degree or another through remaining geography courses and through the environmental studies, now the environmental science and policy department. Students are still taking courses in cartography. They're still looking into the cultural values of people and talking about how those translate into things on the landscape. And they use that information to better understand people and their attitudes towards the environment. And they use that information then to share perceptions with those people so that when they graduate and become land use planners or the county assessor, they still have those same tools and skills to bring to bear on their new found professional lives. So that is the end. So thank you for coming and joining us this evening. And open your eyes, remember, history is everywhere.