Randolph is an unincorporated community in Coos County,

Oregon Oregon ( , ) is a U.S. state, state in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. It is a part of the Western U.S., with the Columbia River delineating much of Oregon's northern boundary with Washington (state), Washington, while t ...

, United States. It is on the north bank the Coquille River about north of Bandon and about 3 miles east of the

Pacific Ocean The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five Borders of the oceans, oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean, or, depending on the definition, to Antarctica in the south, and is ...

. Randolph was originally located about three miles to the northwest near the current Whiskey Run Beach, where it was a "

black sand Black sand is sand that is black in color. One type of black sand is a heavy, glossy, partly magnetic mixture of usually fine sands containing minerals such as magnetite, found as part of a placer deposit. Another type of black sand, found on ...

" gold mining boomtown in the 1850s. Today that boomtown is a

ghost town A ghost town, deserted city, extinct town, or abandoned city is an abandoned settlement, usually one that contains substantial visible remaining buildings and infrastructure such as roads. A town often becomes a ghost town because the economi ...

because there are no significant structures left at the site, but the community on the Coquille River has several homes and a historic cemetery.

History

The community was established during a brief gold rush in Coos County by a Doctor Foster and a Captain Harris. According to ''History of Southern Oregon'' (1884), they named the place after John Randolph of Roanoke, a

Virginia Virginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern and Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States between the East Coast of the United States ...

politician. However, an article published by the

Oregon Historical Society The Oregon Historical Society (OHS) is an organization that encourages and promotes the study and understanding of the history of the State of Oregon, within the broader context of U.S. history. Incorporated in 1898, the Society collects, pres ...

in 1957 suggests two other possibilities: that it was named for Randolph, Massachusetts, or for one of the founders of

Port Orford, Oregon Port Orford ( Tolowa: tr’ee-ghi~’- ’an’ ) is a city in Curry County on the southern coast of Oregon, United States. The population was 1,133 at the 2010 census. The city takes its name from George Vancouver's original name for nearby ...

, Randolph Tichenor. The site was first located several miles northwest of its current location, near the confluence of Whisky Run–a small stream–and the ocean. The sands at this location were mined between 1853 and 1855. A legend states that two miners buried a five-gallon can of gold dust under a tree in those days, but when they returned a forest fire had swept through the area, so they were unable to locate the gold, which has never been found. The locale was originally named Whisky Run, and at one time it had the largest population of any gold camp on the coast, even approaching that of

Jacksonville Jacksonville ( ) is the most populous city proper in the U.S. state of Florida, located on the Atlantic coast of North Florida, northeastern Florida. It is the county seat of Duval County, Florida, Duval County, with which the City of Jacksonv ...

. Whisky Run was established in close proximity to an existing village of Coquille people known as the Nasomah tribe. Relations between the large group of miners and the small group of Nasomah grew increasingly tense after a series of sexual assaults on Coquille women and a verbal altercation at the Randolph Ferry over the Coquille River. In 1854, about 40 miners formed an anti-Coquille vigilante group, the Coos County Volunteers. Claiming that the Coquille had committed misdeeds such as riding a horse without permission, the Volunteers attacked the Nasomahs as they slept and killed about 20 of them. Joel Palmer, the Oregon Superintendent of Indian Affairs, responded to the massacre by persuading the remaining Coquilles to sign a treaty surrendering ownership of their homeland of about in 1855 and agreeing to be transported to the

Coast Indian Reservation The Coast Indian Reservation is a former Indian reservation in the U.S. state of Oregon, established in 1855. It was gradually reduced in size and in the 21st century is known as the present-day Siletz Reservation. History The Coast Reservation ...

further north. A somewhat different account of relations between the Nasomah and the miners appears in Verne Bright's "Randolph: Ghost Gold Town of the Oregon Beaches". In this account, some of the mutual antagonism stemmed from a fight in 1851 in which the Nasomah attacked twelve white men traveling along the Coquille River by canoe, killing eight of them. This incident, Bright says, was preceded by two decades during which white sailors and settlers infected many Nasomah and other

Tututni The Tututni tribe is a historic Native American tribe, one of Lower Rogue River Athabascan tribes from southwestern Oregon who signed the 1855 Coast Treaty, and were removed to the Siletz Indian Reservation in Oregon. They traditionally lived a ...

with Old World diseases, usurped their hunting and fishing grounds, and generally treated them with cruel disrespect. After the 1851 fight, "The "Indians pillaged and murdered at intervals during the months that followed, and Randolph's earliest miners worked in the shadow of continued peril." For their part, the miners retaliated by summarily hanging or shooting Indians accused of theft. These acts of violence and related fears culminated in the formation of what Bright refers to as the Randolph Minute Men, who attacked the defiant Nasomah at night, killing sixteen, wounding four, taking "two score women, children, and old men" prisoner, and burning the Nasomah village. Violence continued at a reduced level until the removal of most of the remaining Indians to the Coast Reservation. Whisky Run was later moved to the mouth of the Coquille River, and after the gold rush subsided, it was moved inland to its current location. A trail, originally established by the Coquille people, ran from the original site of Randolph to

Empire An empire is a political unit made up of several territories, military outpost (military), outposts, and peoples, "usually created by conquest, and divided between a hegemony, dominant center and subordinate peripheries". The center of the ...

. Randolph post office opened in 1859 and ran until 1893.

References

External links

Historic image of Randolph SchoolImages of Randolph
from Flickr
Randolph Town Site historic inventory
by Stephen Dow Beckham {{authority control Unincorporated communities in Coos County, Oregon Ghost towns in Oregon Unincorporated communities in Oregon

History

See also

Further reading

References

External links