Lithia Park celebrates a century

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Lithia Park will celebrate its 100th birthday this month.Terry Skibby photos

ASHLAND — In its lifetime, Lithia Park has played host to Susan B. Anthony, William Jennings Bryan, a healing spa, an auto camp, a petting zoo and one cantankerous old Roosevelt elk named Teddy.

On Dec. 15, the "crown jewel" of Ashland, now nearly 100 acres of exotic gardens, thick lawns, natural forests and a bubbling stream, will turn 100 years old.

"I'm so thankful those people had the vision and love of place to create the park," says longtime Ashland Parks Commission member JoAnne Eggers, who lives across the street from it. "It's my front yard and everyone else's. The focus for me is always Ashland Creek running through it. It's seen me through good times and sad times."

A community celebration is planned from 4 to 7 p.m. Dec. 13 at Pioneer Hall on Winburn Way.

The park was created on Dec. 15, 1908, when Ashland residents overwhelmingly approved a measure turning the old Ashland flour mill property into a park and levying taxes to develop it.

Today it's a favorite among local joggers and hikers, tourists, bird watchers, Frisbee throwers, parents and their little ones, and people looking for a quiet place by the creek for contemplation.

"It gets me back in touch with nature and connectedness with the environment in a way you don't find in very many other places, and it's so close to walk there," says City Councilwoman-elect Carol Voisin.

"The beauty is so fulfilling. It takes any problems away for a while. I love the flow of water. It's incredible in the fall, letting go of summer and feeling the transition to bareness."

Lithia Park wasn't always "the crown jewel" of Ashland, as Parks Commissioner Jim Lewis calls it. In pioneer days, it was a scruffy canyon, often filled with livestock.

Its beginnings go back to the Southern Oregon Chautauqua Association, which in 1893 built a 1,000-seat dome on a hill above the Plaza — now the site of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Elizabethan Stage. Among the notables who stopped in Ashland on the Chautauqua circuit were Susan B. Anthony and William Jennings Bryan.

In June 1906, W.J. Virgin deeded the Ashland Mills property, now the front lawn of Lithia Park, to the city of Ashland. The Woman's Civic Improvement Club, founded by Chautauqua members to help beautify the town, led the movement that established the park and levy to fund it in 1908.

In 1909, the first Parks Commission was elected.

In 1914, an enterprise led by Ashland Tidings owner Bert Greer piped lithia water from Emigrant Creek into the park, hoping to promote its supposed healing properties to tourists — and giving the park its name.

John McLaren, the designer of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, was retained in 1914 to landscape Lithia Park.

"McLaren's landscape plan for Lithia Park was organic in layout, following the natural canyon of the water course," according to the National Park Service Web site on Lithia Park. "The plantings were naturalistic to the extent that native alders, oaks, conifers and madrones were incorporated, but other plants, such as willows, maples, sycamores, and numerous ornamental varieties, were introduced and selected for hardiness, form and color."

In 1916, the Butler-Perozzi fountain, gleaned from San Francisco's Panama Pacific Exposition at the World Fair, was installed in the park, above where the Butler Band Shell now stands.

As roads were paved and cars became the most common mode of vacationing, an auto park was created in 1915 along the fringes of the park. A petting zoo was established at the park in the 1920s, its first resident being Teddy, a Roosevelt elk the local Elks Lodge purchased from a California game farm. Unfortunately, as Teddy aged, he became mean. In the summer of 1931, the elk gored a parks worker who was feeding him. Teddy was slaughtered in 1936 and the petting zoo lasted until the early 1970s.

Floods ravaged Lithia Park in 1964, 1974 and 1997. After the devastating 1974 flood, the city filled in eroded banks of Ashland Creek, only to see them become the first part of the park swept away in the next flood, says Eggers.

"After that, the lesson we learned is that the creek has its own life," Eggers says. "We should learn from the creek. So we gave it the space it needed and planted a lot of native vegetation around it."

But near the Plaza, the heart of Ashland's retail economy, the city built strong bridges and retaining walls to keep floodwaters in the channel and not sweeping around to the front of businesses, as was its custom, Lewis says.

The park was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.

A park devotee for 25 years and parks commissioner for eight years, Lewis, like a lot of Ashlanders, says he fell in love with the park when he and his wife moved here and would daily take their children to play on park swings and slides.

"We've done a lot to the park in the last 20 years, removed the dangerous tire swing and the rotating barrel and put in the climbing rock and rope climb," says Lewis. The addition of the Japanese garden is "spectacular," he notes.

Parks Superintendent Steve Gies, a 29-year veteran of the department, says the park likely won't change much in the future.

"It's a magnificent resource for the community and visitors. We get a lot of compliments on it. The duck ponds (often fouled with duck waste in recent decades) are doing fairly well, with new filters and ultraviolet treatment," he says.

The community reception will feature a slide show, local artifacts dating back to the early 1900s, a video of the park produced by local elementary schoolchildren, a "birthday card" of donated art, photos and words submitted by Lithia Park lovers and a reception hosted by the staff of the Parks Department and by members of the Parks Commission.

On the Web: www.nps.gov/history/nr/travel/ashland/lit.htm.

John Darling is a freelance writer living in Ashland. E-mail him at jdarling@jeffnet.org.

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