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Forgotten, but not gone Jackson County is sprinkled with monuments whose stories � like the memorials themselves � have faded By Bill Kettler If you don�t know what you�re looking for, you�ll probably never see them. They stand beside busy highways, lost in traffic. Gathering moss along quiet back roads. Overlooked in city parks. They tell about people and places and events that somebody wanted us to remember. Monuments and memorials enshrine countless memories across Jackson County. In Medford�s Alba Park alone, there are at least five; in five downtown blocks there are more than a dozen. A cannon recalls a world at war; a sundial remembers an admirable teacher; a plaque praises a rose gardener. Other monuments honor a fallen policeman, a faithful police dog, a railroad depot. Across the county, many monuments have slipped into obscurity as the people who erected them passed on. Like tombstones, they persist beyond their makers, but their stories pale as life moves on. "Monuments have a life cycle as long as memories of the people involved with them," says Bill Alley, research manager for the Southern Oregon Historical Society. "When the next generation comes around, there�s not the same emotional attachment to a memorial because the people don�t know who those people are." Some monuments fade from view because the times pass them by. A string of bronze plaques along Highway 99 enjoyed high visibility in the 1920s and �30s, when the automobile was new and the pace of travel was slower. Seventy years later, few people know they exist. Jackson County built a monument in 1937 where Highway 99 passed a spring where pioneers watered their stock. Interstate 5 diverted most traffic away from the monument, but its low stone wall and bronze plaque still stand near the Rogue River, about three miles south of the town of Rogue River. A pale green, single-wide mobile home stands just behind the stone wall. A faded red, 1977 Ford squats in the parking pullout, a sun-bleached "For Sale" sign in its windshield. "I don�t think anybody really knows this place is here anymore," says Steve Hartman, who owns the property behind the monument. "It just looks like a rock wall." "Once in a while, I�ll see somebody stop there," says Ted Birdseye, who lives just upriver from the monument on land his family homesteaded in the 1850s. "They�ll take a look for a few minutes and drive on." Birdseye says monuments to local history carry less significance in a time of jet travel, satellite television and the Internet. "Things have sped up so quickly," he says. "When something like that was dedicated, it was a big thing to the locals. Now you see so much on TV, a monument like that is just a drop in the ocean. Young people�s sense of history is pretty narrow. It goes back to about the Vietnam War." Progress simply overwhelms some monuments. Phoenix was a just a wide spot on Highway 99 in 1921, when the Daughters of the American Revolution dedicated a granite slab and bronze plaque to remember the pioneers who blazed the Applegate Trail in 1846. Now thousands of cars speed by the monument, at the corner of Highway 99 and Oak Street, during rush hours. "When transportation patterns change, a whole slew of monuments get left behind," says Scott Clay, a former Jackson County planner who studies Southern Oregon history. When an aging monument falls prey to vandals, there�s often no constituency for repairing it. A memorial sundial on the northwest corner of the Jackson County courthouse block has been without its gnomon (pointer) for more than two decades. "It�s been gone for years and years, long before I came here," says John French, a maintenance supervisor who has worked for Jackson County for 22 years. "We don�t even know what the top looked like, so we wouldn�t know how to fix it." The granite pedestal and sundial were erected in 1923 to honor Julia Cheetham Fielder, who taught for 20 years at Medford�s old Washington School. The school was torn down to make way for the courthouse. Some monuments lose their significance because they�re poorly marked. A cannon that stands in Medford�s Library Park lacks any information about its origin, or why it�s there. Mike Footh, commander of Medford�s VFW Post 1883, says ill-marked war trophies decorate small-town parks and city squares across the United States. "If there was a marker on it," Footh says, "maybe it got pulled off." "These things tend to become like old gravestones," says Jeff LaLande, an Ashland historian who has written extensively about Southern Oregon history. "They�re no longer tended because the loved ones who took care of them have passed on, too." Historian Alley says the cannon is Japanese. It replaced a World War I trophy, a German gun that was placed in the park in 1928. Medford donated the German gun to a scrap-metal drive in World War II. Details about how the Japanese cannon came to Medford have been lost. Japanese characters stamped on the gun confirm its origins, but Medford Parks Department files say nothing about how it came to rest in the park. "Memorials don�t outlast the memories of the people involved unless they�re for someone or something spectacular," Alley says. Historians say our approach to monuments is changing as America�s population becomes more diverse. The bronze-plaque-on-a-granite-slab monuments tended to tell one side of a story, and there�s a growing sense that history has more dimensions. "They were trying to show the superiority of one group of people," says Clay. "You see very few monuments from the period of the 1920s through the 1960s to Native American people." Siting new monuments has become politicized, says Ashland historian Kay Atwood. "Now that we have so many more people than we did, it�s more complex," she says. "The political complexities of singling out individuals for a monument are more complicated." Reach reporter Bill Kettler at 776-4492, or e-mail [email protected] Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.