Standing in the Gap for Oregon

OR 230 at Jackson County line Therefore with joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of salvation. Isaiah 12:3 Jackson County, just to the east of Josephine County and also bordered by California to the south, is the last county in the South West Region before we move on to the South Central counties. We have mentioned some of the early history here . Jackson County was established in 1852 and has a Board of Commissioners with three positions. The Board comprises Dave Dotterrer, Colleen Roberts, and Rick Dyer . Currently, there is a campaign in effect to change the Board of Commissioners since there have been no changes since the Board was implemented in 1853. Three petitions are being circulated that need 10,500 signatures each to be put on the ballot in 2024. So far, the three each have about 7,000 signatures. One petition is to make the commissioners non-partisan; the second is to increase the number of commissioners; the third is to decrease their pay. The citizens group beh...

Open your mouth for the speechless, in the cause of all who are appointed to die. Open your mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy. Proverbs 31: 8-9 Jackson County shares a lot of the history of Josephine County just to the west, having been settled due to the gold strikes of 1851-2. Medford is now the county seat of Jackson County, made so when the Oregon and California Railroad made the decision to go through Medford, about five miles to the east, rather than Jacksonville, in 1884. Jacksonville, originally Table Rock City, was the site of the first gold strikes in the area and became the main financial center of southern Oregon until the railroad changed things. It is one of the oldest settlements in the state. The town, while not a ghost town (current population about 3,000), has been well preserved. In 1966 it was made a National Historic District with 100 buildings in the central part of town included. Jacksonville saw a number of firsts, including...

Rogue River  Therefore with joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of salvation . Isaiah 12:3 Jackson County was established in 1852. Medford, the county seat, has a population of 85,824 and is one of the larger cities in Oregon. Jackson shares the current crisis with Josephine County around illegal marijuana growers coming into the area, depleting the water by draining creeks and siphoning off groundwater and bringing a variety of problems including human trafficking. In October of 2021 the Commissioners declared a state of emergency over this issue. The earliest churches – Presbyterian and Christian - in Medford started as a “Union Sunday School.” The American Sunday School Union started in 1817 on the east coast, a copy of a similar organization in Britain that began in the mid-18 th century. This organization was not like we think of modern Sunday School. It was designed to reach rural and poor children and educate them as well as attend to their moral training. The m...

Fish Lake, Jackson County, OR But whoever listens to me [wisdom] will dwell safely, and will be secure, without fear of evil.  Proverbs 1:33   Jackson County, named for President Andrew Jackson, was established in 1852. It is bordered by the State of California to the south, Klamath County to the east, Josephine to the west and Douglas to the north. The first county seat was Jacksonville. In 1884 the railroad came to the Rogue Valley and established Medford, the rail station, about five miles from Jacksonville. The town, due to the railroad, prospered, and in 1927 the county seat was moved there. Medford is now the 8 th largest city in the state.   The Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, about twenty miles south of Medford, is something, as an English major, I have long wished to attend, but never been able to get there. The Siskiyou Mountains, a subrange of the Klamath Mountains, runs through Jackson County and into California. I once took an Amtrak trip to Californi...