China Quarter

In the 1860s, this section of Main Street in Jacksonville looked much different than it does today. During the Gold Rush boom of the 1850s, Jacksonville's early merchants and shopkeepers located their businesses here, but after the town's commercial center relocated to present-day California Street, the area became home to hundreds of Chinese merchants and workers brought in by Chinese labor bosses. They worked Jacksonville's gold mines, built roads, dug water ditches, and constructed the Oregon and California Railroad. In a two-block area along Main Street near Oregon Street, wooden buildings housed Jacksonville's Chinese residents, many of whom had arrived in the 1850s to search for gold and endured much hardship. After the gold mines played out and construction projects were completed, and as mining slowed and hostility toward them grew, the Chinese left Jacksonville by 1890 and abandoned the old China Quarter. The crumbling buildings were eventually torn down, except for Jacksonville's 1880 City Hall, Oregon's oldest town hall, and soon all traces of the China Quarter disappeared.

Jacksonville, Oregon · United States