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They kept telling Grigsby nothing was going to grow on that desert, but that just made him laugh. He pointed to the fruit trees, the loganberries, alfalfa field and his rose bushes. "I've been living on this desert for nigh on to 38 years," he said in 1906. "I've experimented and proved I can do it, and with not a lot of water." Between 1901 and 1907, when he died, Jefferson Springfield Grigsby was Agate, Oregon's first and last postmaster. His post office was a one-room wooden shack on his land claim at the edge of the Agate Desert, along the county road we now call Table Rock Road. It's a land still covered with scattered grasses, vernal pools in the springtime and plenty of rocks. It was so desolate to the early settlers that most of them just used it for grazing horses and cattle. Except for the post office and a school that was built in 1882, Agate was really just a collection of farmers. There were no stores to shop in, no city streets bustling with traffic. The area got its name from the thousands of agate stones littering the prairie, and Grigsby was sure he had found the finest specimen. On one side, "a perfect image of a pug dog" was lightly traced in the multicolored rock, and on the other side, "a beautiful flower may be seen." Grigsby had another "curiosity" that he liked to show visitors. He called it the fern well, because 12 feet down, ferns grew out of cracks and crevices of an unlined well on the property. His theory was that the hard cement gravel forming the well was put there by an ancient river channel that dried up, and until it was dug, the ferns lay dormant underground. The two-room Agate School was described in 1917 by the rural school superintendent for Jackson County as "modern in form, but not especially well arranged." He thought the recently planted trees needed "more encouragement so that shade from the sun would be provided." Though he noted the community was "quite progressive," he thought it needed more "organization to push school matters." For two years, beginning in 1912, the school offered high school classes. A tennis court was built and a one-basket basketball court laid out. Had the high school experiment been a success, students wouldn't have had to travel by horse to Medford or Central Point for their "higher education." But, with only two or three students enrolled each semester, the district decided high school for Agate didn't make sense. The school building survived until 1947, when it was dismantled and moved to the Central Point Elementary School grounds. Well into the 1980s, it was still being used for music instruction. The only reminders of Grigsby's pug-dog agate, his fern well, the fruit trees and his post office are the clusters of bushes and oak trees along the east side of Table Rock Road in Central Point. The community of Agate has scattered away, like the stones that gave it a name. Bill Miller is a freelance writer living in Shady Cove. Reach him at [email protected].