Postcards from the Rogue Valley

Central Park is to New York City as Lithia Park is to . . . Ashland. With its 93 acres of curving walkways, woodsy paths, and cascading water, Lithia Park draws a million visitors a year, in a town of 21,000. 

Designed over a century ago by Golden Gate Park’s Superintendent McLaren, the park is on the National Register of Historic Places. The American Planning Association calls it one of “10 Great Public Spaces in America.”

Most mornings, Tony and I head for a short hike in the forested mountains behind our house, mixing cardio with solitude. On those afternoons when the world piles up, though, we head to Lithia Park, where we breathe deeply, exchange greetings with walkers we do not know, and watch the Ashland Creek hurl downward.

Last Sunday afternoon, photographing the fall foliage, not walking, drew me to Lithia Park. An early cold snap had made the maples and oaks resplendent— worthy competitors to the New England fall colors I had savored most of my life.

What put this public park in Southern Oregon on the National Register of Historic Places? Like so much else, it points to Ashland’s long and unusual embrace of what one local resident calls a holy trinity: culture, beauty, and civic-mindedness.

Lithia Park got its start in the late 1893, when Ashland’s population was only 1,800, and the Southern Oregon Chautauqua Association created a performance venue along Ashland Creek. At the time, Ashland was a crown jewel in the national Chautauqua Movement, which sought to bring learning, culture and, later, entertainment to small towns and villages across America.

In 1908, citizens lobbied to set aside all city-owned property on the creek for a park, authorizing a tax levy and a separate park commission, which continues to operate today. The town tore down a decrepit 1850s flouring mill dominating the town plaza, along with pigpens, cow barns, and remnants of an earlier sawmill, creating a gateway to the steep slopes and lush vegetation that defined Ashland Creek. The town quickly became a tourist destination, known for both its seasonal Chautauqua and its beautiful park. 

For a small town, Ashland has always thought big. In 1914, the editor of Ashland’s newly launched Daily Tidings, backed by the Southern Pacific Railway, promoted the idea of a health spa that would pipe local lithium-laced waters from natural springs several miles east of town. He persuaded voters to pass a $175,000 bond issue, $65,000 of which (equal to roughly $1.6 million today) was to develop the park and provide elegant surroundings for this “Saratoga Springs” of the West.

(In 1915, the park commission opened a free auto camp along the margins of the park.  It was an “Auto Camp Delux,” according to the American Motorist, journal of the newly minted AAA, with electricity, gas cooking plates, and hundreds of lights strung in trees.)

While the spa concept quickly died, the park flourished. John McLaren, superintendent of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, was hired as the landscaper. At a rally just before the bond election—described in the Tidings as “the greatest gathering ever held in Ashland”—McLaren declared that the canyon was “the most wonderful natural park” he had ever seen, with “little left to do except enhance nature’s work.” Over 50,000 people attended the park’s inauguration on July 4-6, 1916.

A century later, McLaren’s plan continues to form the core of Lithia Park, with many of the trees—also a hundred years old—still in place. Remaining too, are the curving parkway, hiking paths, the duck pond and an upper lake, tennis courts, a Japanese garden, a neatly rowed sycamore grove, a formal terrace for the Italian marble fountain purchased at the 1915 Pan American Exposition, and a replica of one of the three original pavilions for mineral springs outlets. 

The plantings, curated over decades, reflect the overlapping eco-systems of southern Oregon and non-native and exotic species from around the world—from an open grassy meadow and canyon slopes wild with native ponderosa pine to lush rhododendrons, towering giant sequoia, Chinese mulberry, a rare Dawn Redwood, willows, monkey puzzle, ginkgo, and much more.

“Throughout its history,” an entry in the Oregon Encyclopedia notes, “Lithia has withstood the erosive vicissitudes of politics, the Great Depression, wars, changing social values, the counter-culture movement of the 1960s, uprooting windstorms, and two major floods. 

“It has evolved and expanded, but subsequent landscapers have held fast to John McLaren’s original vision of nature enhanced. Lithia Park continues to be fiercely loved by residents and tourists alike. If the Shakespeare Festival is Ashland’s economic heart, then Lithia Park is its soul.”

My fall outing to Lithia Park did not yield a photo collage of brilliant trees and leaves, as I had planned. Instead, I pointed my camera (in video mode) elsewhere: at a group of college-aged string players sharing a grassy meadow with bubble-chasing preschoolers; parents pushing strollers and adult children pushing wheelchairs; a chess master polishing his knights next to a young Asian film crew; two teens in love sharing a bench with a homeless woman; a classically trained cellist and a rasta with bongo drums performing an impromptu riff. 

Human exchanges like these are what makes Lithia Park one of the greatest public spaces in America.

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