Every month, Jackson County residents (and anyone else with an Internet connection, really) have an opportunity to learn more about the history of where they live.
These unique learning opportunities happen during Windows In Time presentations, hour-long lunchtime lectures featuring area writers and historians that occur on the first and second Wednesdays of the month. Catch the first one at the Medford branch, the second one at Ashland’s. Jackson County Library Services and the Southern Oregon Historical Society put them on in a partnership effort.
You can see a complete schedule of upcoming presentations here.
Historically, JCLS and SOHS offered the program as a hybrid event, meaning interested parties could either show up in person or catch it virtually over Zoom. That’s been updated recently, however, and the only way you can catch it live is in person.
But if you can stand to wait a day or two, we still record them. Instead of using Zoom, I film and edit the presentations now. JCLS has an extensive video archive of the talks on our JCLS Beyond YouTube channel, which has playlists of all of them going back to 2021.
They are just some of the numerous videos we offer for public consumption, but among all the ones I have produced, I have a rich appreciation for Windows In Time presentations. They feel so authentically ours, and by ours, I mean Southern Oregon’s.
Lately, such localized stories have included looks at:
- Regina Dorland Robinson, a brilliant Jacksonville artist from the late 19th and early 20th centuries
- The Russells, a family of stone carvers that started in the 19th century whose works can still be found across Southern Oregon and Northern California
- A.W. Lafferty, who represented 18 Oregon counties over the Oregon & California Railroad land fraud scandal
In one case, a Windows In Time talk was the gateway to one of my favorite video projects I’ve worked on since starting at JCLS in July 2021: a documentary called House of Threads.
Almost a year ago, I received the recording for a presentation that looked at the murder of an Applegate Valley miner (originally from the Azores Islands), the farmhouse built on his property just after his death that stands to this day, and a few other stories connected to it.
I was so moved and fascinated by the presentation that shortly after I put it together, I reached out to the presenter, Heather Paladini – also the home’s current occupant – and asked if she’d be interested in making a short documentary about her property’s somber origin story. She agreed. You can watch the result, House of Threads, here.
There’s a quote toward the end of the video that’s stuck with me, courtesy of McKee Bridge Historical Society president Laura Ahearn, who offered fantastic lay-of-the-land context to the story.
As the video closes out, Laura says the house is “one of several pieces of a much larger jigsaw puzzle that we can keep putting together.”
Through these pieces, we can “not only learn curious, interesting little stories like this one, but start to recognize patterns that really inform and focus more research into the history of not only the Applegate Valley, but all of Southern Oregon.”
The same sentiment is right in Windows In Time’s program description: “The monthly Windows in Time lunchtime lectures feature well-known writers and historians and bring alive the people, values, and events that shaped our southern Oregon heritage.”
So, if you have an hour and ever find yourself curious about a puzzle piece that makes up the vast mosaic of our area, give a Windows In Time talk a try. And if you can’t make it in person, no worries. I’ll get it up on YouTube as quickly as I can.