Josephine County
Grants Pass
Grants Pass is located on Interstate Highway 5 about thirty miles north of Medford in Southwestern Oregon. The first Anglo-Europeans to visit the area were undoubtably Hudson Bay Company fur traders in the early years of the nineteenth century. The Applegate Trail brought settlers through the region in the 1840s on their way into the Willamette Valley and the discovery of gold in the Illinois Valley in 1852 brought more folks soon thereafter. Early contact between local Native American tribes and the settlers was largely amicable, but eventually worsened as more and more immigrants arrived in the area. The Rogue River Wars of 1855 and 1856 resulted in most of the local Indian population being killed or relocated to reservations.
The origin of the city's name is in some dispute, but the odds are high that it was in honor of General Ulysses S. Grant. One source claims that, in 1865, local citizens tried to get the name of their town recognized by the U.S. Postal Service as Grant, but found that there was already another Grant in Oregon. Some construction workers building a road into the Upper Rogue Valley decided on Grant's Pass and this eventually morphed into the present name by someone along the line dropping the apostrophe.
In !883, the Southern Pacific Railroad arrived and made Grants Pass the focal point for people living in the surrounding area. 1886, the Rogue River was bridged at Grants Pass and the town was designated the county seat for Josephine County. The city was incorporated in 1887. Gold was, of course, a major element of the economy in the early years, but it was eventually replaced by the timber industry. In more recent years, logging has been severely restricted by government regulation. Today, the region is attracting a lot of retired people and tourism is of increasing importance in the local economy. Grants Pass has an excellent collection of facilities catering to the tourist and it can serve as an excellent base of operations to explore the region.
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