Where to Stay in Medford, Oregon

What is Medford known for?

Medford serves as the hub that the rest of the Rogue Valley comes to for hospitals, shops and services, which is a heavier role than a city of this size usually takes on. Shopping draws its own traffic. Oregon charges no sales tax, so buyers cross into Jackson County from further afield than the map would suggest, and Harry & David Field stands out on a register otherwise made up almost entirely of houses.

What are the main landmarks in Medford?

Thirteen entries make the register. Harry & David Field is the only one that is not a house, which tells a visitor most of what there is to know about how Medford records its past. Twelve houses follow.

The Putnam-Neff House, the Shone-Charley House, the Root-Banks House, the Alfred Evan Reames House, the Hamilton and Edith Patton House and the Sophenia Ish Baker House cover the families who built the town, and the Andrew J. Fredenburg House and Edgar F. Hafer House carry two more.

What is the history of Medford?

The railway named it. David Loring, a civil engineer and right-of-way agent for the Oregon and California Railroad, chose the name in 1883 and took it from Medford, Massachusetts, which lay near his own home town of Concord. The town followed in 1884.

Rail access decided where it stood, and the site near the middle fork of Bear Creek gave a new settlement in the Rogue Valley the flat ground and the water it needed to grow into something. Jackson County business came next. Medford took the county seat and with it the courts, the offices and eventually the hospitals that made the town the place everyone in the Rogue Valley came to for anything serious.

Prosperity shows in the houses. The Putnam-Neff House, the Alfred Evan Reames House, the Hamilton and Edith Patton House and the Shone-Charley House belong to the professional families of that period, and the Root-Banks House and Sophenia Ish Baker House sit among them. Sport arrived later.

Harry & David Field is the one entry on the Medford register that answers to a crowd rather than to a family.

Where is Medford?

The Rogue Valley holds it. Medford sits on the valley floor close to the middle fork of Bear Creek, which supplied the water and the level ground that the railway builders were looking for when they picked the site. Jackson County is largely empty.

Nothing else in it approaches the size of the seat, so the whole county treats Medford as its shopping street, its hospital and its courthouse combined.

What is the climate of Medford?

Autumn is the season here. The Rogue Valley keeps its autumns mild and dry in a way the rest of Oregon does not manage, which is why the months after summer are the ones worth choosing for a visit to Jackson County. Summers run hot.

Heat builds on the valley floor with Bear Creek offering little relief, and the temperate band means the winter that follows is wet rather than severe.

How do you get to Medford?

The railway put Medford here. The Oregon and California Railroad chose the site and the town grew along it, though almost every arrival into Jackson County comes by road instead, across a valley that offers no quick way in from anywhere. Distances are the point.

Medford is far enough from the rest of Oregon that people in the Rogue Valley treat a trip out as a day's undertaking, and a car is essential once here, since the shops, the hospitals and Harry & David Field sit well apart.