News Article, A Word With the Visitors

The 1900s and early 1910s were exciting boom years for Medford. The article reproduced here, originally published on the front page of the Medford Mail Tribune in April 1910, gives a sense of the optimism felt by residents of the self-styled “commercial metropolis of southern Oregon and northern California.” By 1910, 65,000 acres of orchards surrounded the rapidly expanding city, the population of which had increased fivefold since 1900. Medford, the Tribune boasted, “has the most enterprising and progressive class of citizens, the largest per capita of wealth, and more municipal improvements than any city of its size in the country.”

One of the most notable changes to occur in Medford during the boom of the early twentieth century was the arrival of scores of wealthy easterners, attracted, as one booster noted, by “the combination of fat soil, grandeur of scenic beauty and Italian climate.” A new landscape of privilege took shape as mansions and golf courses sprang up in the countryside while the city gave rise to a new theater, an opera house, two new hotels, and a $75,000 recreation center, the “biggest of its kind west of Chicago,” according to one account.

Many locals resented the lavish lifestyles of the new arrivals, who they derisively labeled “remittance men,” referring to the monthly checks many of the young Ivy Leaguers received from their parents. When the orchard boom turned to bust in the mid-1910s, many of the newcomers left town as suddenly as they had come, leaving their mansions and increasingly unprofitable orchards behind. Some stayed, however, helping keep the local fruit industry afloat during the hard times of the late 1910s, when overdevelopment, the collapse of overseas markets, severe blight, and a lack of irrigation water abruptly ended Medford’s orchard boom.

Further Reading:
Noah, Catherine A. “Age of Speculation and Orchard Boom, 1900-1920.” In Land in Common: An Illustrated History of Jackson County, Oregon, edited by Joy B. Dunn. Medford,Oreg., 1993.

Atwood, Kay, and Marjorie Lutz O’Harra. Medford, 1885-1985. Medford. Oreg., 1985.

Written by Cain Allen, © Oregon Historical Society, 2003.