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Another historic role has returned to the 1883 Jackson County Court House — now Jacksonville City Hall — with completion of a 75-piece photo exhibit in the main hallway depicting the town’s early days. The building had been Southern Oregon Historical Society’s museum from the 1950s until 2010. City Councilor Ken Gregg, a professional photographer, curated, printed and installed the exhibit. Town historian Larry Smith had suggested to the city in January 2017 that the photo displays return. Jackson County gave the building to the city in 2012. City officials and residents debated what to do with the structure before deciding to restore it for government service. It reopened in July 2016. “It was my intent to have people in as many shots as possible, because then it will bring it to life,” Gregg said of the exhibition. A photo of a fire drill with a stream of water aimed at the U.S. Hotel shows a good-sized throng of town folk gathered on California Street to watch the spectacle. “It’s just like a festival afternoon in town,” said Gregg, who used the Photoshop software program to bring out details in the fire drill photo that had been lost in earlier print. “When something is in black, often times you can go in there and get details,” Gregg said. Only the white shirt fronts showed up for people under a shaded awning of a nearby building in the shot. But with the computer, Gregg lightened the shadow areas to uncover whole figures and features of the building front. He used the same technique on other prints. Another shot of an arrival at the depot includes a blurred train before it’s stopped, and people waiting to greet it. The train’s engine was the railroad’s first “Teakettle,” which is on display at nearby Bigham Knoll. “As you start to look at it, there’s a whole story told here,” said Gregg. Also in the train section is America’s youngest conductor, John C. Barnum, at age 13, then another shot of him 20 years later sitting in the crowded railroad office with his father, who owned the line. Gregg also displayed an 1883 vista of town taken from the nearby hills that shows buildings. The one he selected shows the courthouse under construction surrounded by scaffolding. Portraits likely taken by photographer Peter Britt contain sharpness and detail lacking in other prints. That’s because Britt was working with larger-format film. Gregg suspects other high-quality prints might also be Britt’s work. Gregg also likes a somewhat-degraded 1897 shot of the town on a festival day. The lack of sharpness reminds him of French impressionists. A thumbprint is visible in the top of the photo, left on the negative by an earlier printer. Gregg spent more than 15 hours combing through prints at SOHS. Negatives are preserved in the society’s archives. The prints were stored in categorized boxes such as schools, organizations, Chinatown, miners, churches, store interiors and others. For the exhibit, Gregg decided to stick with the categories and has displayed five or six prints in each category. Carolyn Kingsnorth produced captions. SOHS scanned the selected photos and sent them to Gregg, who made prints in his Jacksonville studio. About five to 10 percent of the scans lacked exhibition quality. He ordered extra scans and will be rotating prints into the exhibits as time goes by. Once he had the prints, Gregg mounted them on borderless frames at the courthouse and put them up. Gregg was a photographer for North Face during the first 10 years of the company’s existence. For the last 25 years he has been providing art prints to hotels and restaurants around the world. He moved to Jacksonville in 2011 and was elected to City Council in 2014. “I love the idea of doing a project as opposed to doing prints and selling them,” said Gregg. The city paid for costs of materials and the scans. Prints were produced in both black-and-white and sepia tones. They range in size up to 22-by-32 inches. Portraits were done in the traditional 8-by-10-inch format. “One of the rules about my work — the bigger the subject the bigger the print,” said Gregg. Early prints come from the 1850s. A 1932 print of gold mining in town during Depression days is the most recent except for one by Gregg. The photographer wanted a shot of a funeral to go in the cemetery section, but that wasn’t something that was photographed in earlier days. He ended up including his own shot of tombstones. There’s also a lithograph print of an artist’s vista of town and reproductions of two Sandborn maps of the town in its earlier days. City Administrator Jeff Alvis and Finance Director Stacey Bray assisted with the project. Lack of an elevator keeps the second-floor space closed, but once that is installed, space for more displays will likely be available, said Gregg. The courthouse, at 206 N. Fifth St., is open from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday. Tony Boom is an Ashland freelance writer. Reach him at [email protected].