Grave Creek Ranch takes its name from an 1846 encampment by the first emigrant train from Fort Hall, Idaho, to travel the southern route to the Willamette Valley, during which sixteen-year-old Martha Leland Crowley died of typhoid fever and was buried near the creek later called Grave Creek. James H. Twogood laid out his land claim there in the fall of 1851, filed on it on May 1, 1852, and named it Grave Creek Ranch in memory of that event. His partner, McDonough Harkness, became the first postmaster of Josephine County in the newly named town of Leland on March 28, 1855, but was killed by Indians in April 1856 while riding dispatch for the Army during the second Indian War of southern Oregon, which had begun in October 1855. Leland became a stockaded gathering point for regular army troops and volunteers heading into the lower Rogue country and was known as Fort Leland; a major engagement of the war, the Battle of Hungry Hill, took place about 8 miles west and resulted in some 37 dead, wounded, and missing, with some of the soldiers buried north of the fort. In 1860, Grave Creek Ranch became an overland stage stop for the California Oregon Stage Line, and after the Grave House #2 hotel burned in December 1875, an enlarged nearby farmhouse served as the Grave Creek House #3 or Harkness Inn, where President Hayes, his wife, and entourage spent the night on September 28, 1880. The site also includes Josephine County's only remaining covered bridge, built by Elmer J. Nelson in 1920 for the new Pacific Highway project on the county's first donation land claim.
