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Unemployed Families Flee Rogue Valley 100 Years Ago

One hundred years ago, the Medford Mail Tribune ran an editorial asking what could be done about the Rogue River Valley’s lack of development.

The newspaper advocated increased production and a diversified and intensive agriculture, including an irrigation system and a beet factory that would, in the editorial’s words, “supply a fixed market for the product, furnish a payroll, (and) stimulate stock-raising by furnishing cheap feed.”

The editorial lamented that “Everyone likes to live in the Rogue River valley – but families are daily leaving because they cannot find work and make a living.”  During pioneer days, the newspaper said, large homesteads supported a small population, but the methods that supported 3,500 people would not support 35,000. 

The editorial warned the population would continue dropping if the changed conditions were not met.

In the editorial’s own words,  “It is no longer possible to eke out a shabby existence by scratching a few acres, raising a few hogs at neighbors’ expense, violating game laws and gaffing sore-back salmon.  The surface-scratched land has become exhausted, the neighbors have fenced their holdings, and game wardens guard the spawning riffles.  The idyllic existence of the ‘good old times’ has gone forever.”

 

Source: "Editorial: What is the Matter?" Mail Tribune 17 Nov. 1915 [Medford, Ore.] . (Reprinted in Mail Tribune 17 Nov. 2015 : A3). Print.

Kernan Turner is the Southern Oregon Historical Society’s volunteer editor and coordinator of the As It Was series broadcast daily by Jefferson Public Radio. A University of Oregon journalism graduate, Turner was a reporter for the Coos Bay World and managing editor of the Democrat-Herald in Albany before joining the Associated Press in Portland in 1967. Turner spent 35 years with the AP before retiring in Ashland.