Passionate about Ashland history

With an interest in history that he can trace back to the fifth grade — when his teacher made students read fiction for book reports and he'd have rather read history — Whitfield Smith, now 74, set out on a journey in 2005 that would take him some 15 months to complete. Inspired by Kay Atwood's Mill Creek Journal, a history of Ashland circa 1850-1860, Smith was especially curious to learn more about the Ashland Sawmill, built by Abel Helman, Eber and Jacob Emery, and James Cardwell in the first few months of 1852.

1949 view — looking North at the intersections of Water, Van Ness, and Helman — of the property that was once home to the Ashland Sawmill. Submitted photo

Smith acknowledges that prior to the official beginnings of Ashland, the area was home to Americans native to the region who also have a very rich and — due to the settlers' immigration — somewhat pained history, but his interest was in understanding the beginnings of the Ashland we've come to know. And, according to Smith, the mill was an integral part of that.

"The mill was a contributing factor that enabled people to come here and make a go of it. The other factors were farmland and the donation land act of 1850," Smith explains.

According to the website, endofthetrail.org, "The Donation Land Act granted every white settler and 'American half-breed Indian' above the age of 18 and already living in Oregon, a free half-section (320 acres) of land if single or a full section (640 acres) if married. Settlers arriving after 1850 were granted half a section if married, or one-quarter if single."

An interesting sidebar to the land act can be found in a bit of commentary at the website, nativenewsonline.org, "The Donation Land Claim Act recognized women's part in pioneering by allowing wives the uncommon privilege of holding real property in their own names. A minor consequence of the double allotment of land for married couples was an increased number of marriages. Single adult women were as scarce in Oregon as in other frontier societies. Very young girls suddenly became marriageable and soon were wives."

Two days following his death on March 5, 1910, The Ashland Daily Tidings wrote regarding Abel Helman, "He was instrumental with several others of the earliest settlers in building the first sawmill on the banks of the Ashland Creek and the first flour mill on the site near the center of the city which is now devoted to park purposes. These enterprises were really the nucleus around which the town of Ashland was built and expanded."

Smith's work at digging up information on the sawmill was time consuming.

"I would spend mornings at the county records office or county survey office and all of Friday afternoons in the Southern Oregon Historical Society Library," says Smith. "I'd also go to the Ashland library and read and reread Atwood's book; she gives an excellent history of the first ten years of Ashland. I was checking it out so often that the library gave me a copy!"

"X Marks the spot," says Whitfield Smith. According to his research, this spot (now home to a parking lot behind the Community Health Center on Central Avenue) marks the beginnings of the Ashland we know. It was here, 155 years ago this month, that Abel Helman, Eber and Jacob Emery, and James Cardwell began building the Ashland Sawmill.

Smith has submitted a manuscript regarding the sawmill — Ashland's First Industry, The Ashland Sawmill: 1852 — to the Southern Oregon Historical Society. In it he writes, "One hundred and fifty-five years ago this month the builders of Ashland's first industry arrived. Originally they were among the hoards of gold seekers from the East ... from a nation a thousand miles away. Gold was the one interest they held in common, but carpentry and farming were the skills that enabled them to survive. Regardless of what dynamic influenced them or which individual initiated the thought, they came to the timbered and fertile soil about Ashland Creek resolved to build a sawmill."

Kay Atwood writes in her well-researched book, "On January 11th, Eber Emery, Jacob Emery, and James Cardwell arrived at Abel Helman's camp."

Atwood's research turned up Cardwell's own writing of the event:

"Myself and others ... determined to go the Rogue River Valley and bild a sawmill. We left Yreka about the first of January, 1852 ... took up that claim and mill site and went to work ... bilding a log house and went to work to bilding the sawmill."

Once the sawmill was complete, Cardwell wrote again:

"We finished our work on the mill as fast as we could. The mines at Jacksonville began to attract considerable attention. A great many miners came in ... we had our mill in operation ... and the demand for lumber was good. We could sell all we could make at $80 per thousand."

It's not certain how long the sawmill operated. The last mention of it in the Tidings' archives, according to Smith, was in 1879 when the paper's editor W.H. Leeds referred to the mill operating in August of that year, "but far behind the times," and again in December an article referred to it merely as "still standing."

Smith says that in 1880 Helman had the property surveyed for an irrigation ditch to provide water to the north part of Ashland, and that by 1882 the mill property had become city block 29, consisting of six lots upon which homes and businesses developed. Smith also notes that a 1911 fire map shows a Southern Pacific Railroad spur traversing the block, ending on a sixty-foot turntable in back of the ticket office which was on Main Street between Oak and Pioneer and stood near the Ashland Hotel.

With the help of county records, Smith is reasonably certain that he's established the boundaries of the former sawmill.

He writes, "Today, the northeast corner of the sawmill's property would be halfway between the SOS Plumbing and Drain Service office and Water Street; the line would run south along Water Street to the drive-in gate of the Water Street Condominiums, turn west into the middle of the complex, then northerly toward where the mill would have been, west into the home located at 152 Helman Street, north through the Pyramid Juice Company then eastward into the SOS yard."

"When I finally got the documentation of the location, the historical society was hoping that the site could be marked somehow," says Smith. "I don't necessarily care if the site's marked or not, my sentiments don't go that way."

Smith says he's done with the mill property and that the purpose of his exploration was to satisfy his own curiosity and to share the information with the public, to "make people conscious of the original activity that led to the creation of Ashland." Smith isn't done being curious however, he's currently trying to find out more information regarding the tracks and a certain motorcar that ran through the sawmill property.

Photo courtesy of Western Burner Co.

"It ran through the property from 1910-1915 I believe. A photograph in Terry Skibby's collection turned me onto it. Whatever it was it carried 85 people and had two speeds. I read about it in the Ashland Daily Tidings archives," says Smith.

When asked what he thinks about how sometimes historians have to infer and guess what happened, Smith responds, "I think you can't prove history. You can only substantiate it or give it validity. The question always remains, how do you know for sure something else didn't happen?"

Smith ends his sawmill journey and essay by asking what became of the standing structure that was the beginning of Ashland, "Perhaps it was moved up the hill a few yards for the new Helman ditch, or dismantled and reused; could fragments still be embedded in the terrain?" Indeed. And how many homes and businesses standing in Ashland today were constructed with the lumber that made its way through the sawmill, and was handled by the very people that envisioned, 155 years ago, a town flourishing here?

Today, walking the boundary markers of Ashland's first sawmill, it's easy to blur your eyes in an attempt to not see the houses, condominiums, and businesses that dot the landscape, and using the view of the hills behind as a frame--along with the sounds of rushing Ashland Creek (which was first called Rock Creek and then Mill Creek by the early settlers)--imagine what it must have been like for those adventuresome men who walked the land 155 years ago. The men--and the women and children who later joined them--who dreamt and planned, took risks and made painful sacrifices, who felled trees, laid foundations stones, and began the building of a community and town that they would call Ashland Mills and that we'd come to know later, simply as Ashland.

Debi Smith is an Ashland based freelance writer. You may contact her at debi@mind.net