Ahouse recently determined to be the oldest in Southern Oregon has been restored to its pioneer glory and will open in a few weeks as a bed-and-breakfast inn.

Always known as the Mountain House, the unique 1852 structure on Old Highway 99 near Emigrant Lake was purchased and restored in the past two years by John and Kathy Loram at a cost of more than $1 million.

Now painted a rich yellow, the inn served as the first sign of civilization for Applegate Trail pioneers descending from the Cascades and, until the coming of the railroad in the mid-1880s, a major rest and dining spot on the California-Oregon stage line.

"It’s such a piece of history, a phenomenal building," said Ashland historian George Kramer. "When you talk of pioneer architecture in Southern Oregon, it doesn’t get any more pioneer than this. There is little in Oregon older than the Mountain House and nothing in Southern Oregon."

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Until recently, historians thought the oldest Southern Oregon buildings were the Samuel Culver house on Highway 99 in Phoenix and the Birdseye House near Gold Hill. But research during the restoration showed the Mountain House predated them by four years, said Kramer, who, with Ashland historian Kay Atwood, wrote its history for the National Register of Historic Places.

The Lorams purchased the inn for $325,000 and spent more than $700,000 refurbishing the 3,800-square-foot building, — tearing out sheetrock to expose horizontally placed beadboard walls and ceilings and removing shag carpet to reveal fir flooring throughout.

They built a modern but pioneer-flavored kitchen, with restored Wedgwood stove and pioneer sink and graced the place with lots of reproduction wall and ceiling lamps and custom-designed wallpaper befitting frontier times.

When the Lorams bought the inn in 2002, they considered it a roll of the dice, not knowing how well preserved it would be under its aluminum siding, boarded-up windows and four layers of roofing.

"As we took the siding off, we found an untouched building, the proverbial diamond in the rough and breathed a collective sigh of relief," said John Loram, a retired electronic engineer and owner of Pacific Commware in Ashland. "It’s been tremendous fun, discovery and learning about history and it’s drawn on all my talents to bring it back to life."

Before the Mountain House, only scattered cabin-dwellers lived in the Rogue Valley and took their chances with native tribes, who were still hostile to white settlers, said John Loram. Then, three men trekking from the Willamette Valley to the California gold fields saw the potential of the Ashland area and filed donation land claims of 160 acres each.

The pioneers, John Gibbs, James Russell and Major Hugh F. Barron, needed to "prove up" their claims by building a home with a bedroom, so with pioneer ingenuity and a little bending of the rules, they built the inn so it covered the peg marking the common point of all three claims.

Russell fetched seed, flour, chickens, livestock and tools from the Willamette Valley, while his partners built a cabin and began work on the inn, built of timbers and boards hauled by ox train from the valley’s first mill in Rogue River.

The site, camped on 25 years earlier by the region’s first white explorer, Peter Skene Ogden, became an immediate success, situated as it was at the juncture of two major trails. They called it the Green Springs Mountain Inn. The nearby road, state Highway 66, is still referred to as Green Springs Highway.

Of the site, Ogden wrote, "All here looks like summer … the oaks here being nearly double the size of any I have seen this season. … This is certainly a fine country and probably no climate in any country equal to it… . Birds of all kinds, grass green and at its full growth."

In 1846, two other noted trail blazers, Jesse and Lindsay Applegate, who opened the Applegate Trail, camped on the same site. Lindsay noted, "It seemed like a green meadow, interspersed with groves of oaks which appeared like vast orchards. All day long we traveled over rich black soil covered with rank grass, clover and pea vine."

During Indian uprisings in 1853, Gibbs, who was elected a few months earlier to the first Jackson County Board of Commissioners, was killed. He is buried north of the house. The partners bought his claim from heirs. Soon after, Barron bought out Russell when Russell moved to Yreka to open a butcher shop.

"When it was built," said John Loram, "this inn was the only tavern for 150 miles and probably the only brothel, too."

Three generations of Barron descendants lived at the inn, running cattle and sheep for their butcher shop in Ashland and finally selling it and 700 acres in 1960 — 108 years after it was built.

The original, much smaller, saltbox-style inn, now the rear section of the Mountain House, was moved to its present location when the larger, two-story front part was built in 1887, according to Kramer and Atwood, writing in their Historic Register application.

A small, two-story brick building, also built in 1887, still stands behind the inn and is being converted to a bed-and-breakfast room.

The Lorams (482-2541) plan to charge $150 for rooms in the high season, $125 in slower times of the year and a bit more for the brick room out back.

The inn has been a huge investment, one they plan to pass on, after they live in it about 30 years, to their two children, said Kathy Loram, an artist and author.

"It was a big job," she said, "but I refused not to succeed. It’s been such a wonderful experience to feel all the back story here, the people born, married at three-day weddings here and who died here. It’s an amazing legacy to be entrusted with, to share with the public and to leave to history."

Owners take careful steps to preserve history

They found a rambling, nine-bedroom inn with eight-foot ceilings and one oil heater and remade it into a four-bedroom inn with a spacious dining room, kitchenette and library. It now has forced- air gas heat a new roof and new wiring, insulation and plumbing. They restored ceilings to their former 10- and 12-foot heights and — in a nod to modernity — outfitted each room with cable and high-speed Internet.

Windows were removed and rebuilt, retaining the original frames and glass. Doors, tricked out with faux-painted grain, a popular technique of the 1880s, were spruced up and retain their ornate Eastlake knobs and hinges.

Most rooms got an elegant, but still frontier-feeling wallpaper treatment, custom ordered from Bradbury & Bradbury Art Wallpapers of California, at $1,000 to $3,000 a room — more for rooms with papered ceilings.

Wanting to display the frontier mortise-and-tenon framing of the house, the Lorams built interior windows in the wall of a rear upstairs bedroom, showing the hand-hewn timbers pegged together with handmade dowels and covered with lath and plaster.

Throughout the restoration, they said, historically savvy county building inspectors advised them how to do restorations and changes so as to preserve historic features and still meet building code requirements.

For more on the house, see the Web site www.loram.org and click on the picture of the Mountain House.

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