Digging Jacksonville – February 2020

The Southern Oregon University Laboratory of Anthropology (SOULA) has been sharing its research into the Jacksonville Chinese Quarter in the Jacksonville Review for years. While it may seem like we’ve been away from the action recently, we have actually been expanding our research on early Chinese immigrants and taking it on the road!

The Oregon Chinese Diaspora Project (OCDP)—a multi-agency collaboration focused on research and education into Oregon’s early Chinese residents—grew out of the 2013 excavations in Jacksonville’s Chinese Quarter, which provided an incredible dataset of artifacts that helped to put SOULA on the map within the field of Chinese immigrant archaeology. For example, in addition to regular talks and public outreach events, this material is featured in an online digital collection hosted by the SOU Hannon Library (soda.sou.edu/Chinese) and in an upcoming edited volume by the University of Florida Press (Chinese Diaspora Archaeology in North America, edited by Chelsea Rose and J. Ryan Kennedy).

In an effort to expand this research, we built a partnership with the Malheur National Forest allowing us to chase the Chinese miners that left Jacksonville following the gold strike on the John Day River in 1862. We also teamed up with the Medford District Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to track down the Chinese Railroad workers that built the Oregon and California Line, and with Oregon State Parks to unearth evidence of the John Day Chinatown that once surrounded the Kam Wah Chung & Co. museum. Other research partners include the Oregon Historical Society, the Southern Oregon Historical Society, and the Grant County Historical Museum.

This cooperative partnership allows us to pair the information from Jacksonville’s Chinese Quarter with sites from across the state, shedding light on Oregon’s Chinese residents and the lives they lived in a variety of historical contexts over time. This adds value to the work we did in Jacksonville by compounding the impact of the information and allowing us to make new interpretations and share them on a wider platform.

I am writing this as we gear up once again to celebrate Chinese New Year in Jacksonville. Chinese New Year celebrations were an important part of early Jacksonville, and the Southern Oregon Chinese Cultural Association (SOCCA) has worked hard to bring them back. I realized last year, as I watched the crowd gather in the snow to cheer as the dragon floated down California Street, that celebrating the Lunar New Year has been firmly reestablished as a cherished local tradition. It’s a tradition that is not only great fun, but one that also allows Jacksonville to recognize and celebrate its Chinese immigrant roots.