February 26, 2019

The vernacular farmhouse at 675 E. California Street was built in 1878 for prominent local physician, Dr. Martin Vrooman. Born in New York in 1818, Vrooman apparently did have formal medical training since an Oregon Sentinel article described him as a “regular graduate” and not one of the “guessing school of physicians.” But like many others, Vrooman heard the call of gold and headed west. In 1850 he was mining in California on the Middle Fork of the American River. He apparently alternated between mining and medicine, pursuing one or both in California and the Nevada Territory. Vrooman settled on medicine, arriving in Jacksonville in the early 1870s where he opened a practice. At some point he married divorcee Christina Strang—one source says early 1870s; a marriage certificate in the SOHS archives gives the date as 1878, around the same time his house was constructed. (The latter date would have been cause for scandal since their son Francis was born in 1876!) By 1881 Vrooman had added a drug store, the Jacksonville Dispensary. But when the Oregon and California Railroad bypassed Jacksonville in 1883, Vrooman moved his practice and his drugstore to the new town of Medford and sold his Jacksonville home. Unfortunately, his son Francis died that same year, 1884, 1 day short of his 8th birthday. Vrooman himself died 7 months later in 1885 from “bronchial consumption,” i.e., tuberculosis.