April 22, 2007
This year's edition of Our Valley, subtitled "Now You Know," is dedicated to those pesky little questions which nag at you for years. They nag at us as well and, being curious types, we've assembled many of them here ... using the best journalistic traditions at our disposal ... the questions "Who," "What," "When," "Where," "Why" and "How."
As a 5-year-old boy in 1859, Gwin S. Butler lost his father to suicide.
Four years later, Jacob Thompson, one of Jackson County's early pioneers, married Gwin's mother, America Butler, and took her son under his wing.
Gwin Butler's gratitude to Thompson endured until the end of his life and inspired him to dedicate a statue of President Abraham Lincoln in his stepfather's memory in 1916.
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The late San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen mocked him, the Secret Service checked out his insides and city fathers and mothers ultimately sent him off into hibernation.
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Some folks called it "Elwood's Pushmobile." That's because local jeweler and later optometrist Elmer Elwood had a lot of trouble getting his newly acquired car to start. Friends had to help him push it around.
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He's as unique as the store he represents and his presence has paid off in spades for what began as an Army surplus store named after him on West Main Street in Medford.
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Interstate 5 serves most moderate-sized cities on the outskirts, where the freeways are less costly, easier to expand — and don't divide the town in half or pour traffic directly into downtown.
There was plenty of space to build Interstate 5 east of Medford in the 1950s, when the freeway route was laid out, but it didn't go there. Why?
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Those majestic cliffs across the freeway from Phoenix have a long and dramatic history. Called Payne Cliffs after a pioneer family, they are part of sediment laid down on the east side of the valley over the last 65 million years by stream erosion.
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