January 17, 2017
The small house now located at 415 East C Street is not only one of Jacksonville’s oldest wooden buildings, but also one of the most frequently moved. Constructed some time in the late 1850s, the house “built by Strickland” was purchased in September 1859 “for the County Clerk’s office, Sheriff’s office, and jury rooms…and removed to the Court House block” where it stood at the corner of 6th and C streets. For 25 years, all the daily business of Jackson County’s Clerk and Sheriff were conducted in this small, wood frame building. When the County Clerk and Sheriff moved into the new brick courthouse, their old offices were “set apart for the use of the Court House Janitor,” possibly as his dwelling, even though the tracks for the new railroad connecting Jacksonville with Medford were laid only a few feet from the building’s southeast corner. Sometime after 1907, the house was moved to its present site.