By Hannah Guzik

The oldest house in Southern Oregon, built in 1852, began as an inn for gold miners — and now, more than 150 years later, it is a treasure.
The owners, John and Kathy Loram, recently spent the better part of three years restoring the Mountain House, a New England Saltbox structure located at 1148 Old Highway 99 South, outside of Ashland.
The Loram’s strove to make the 3,600-square-foot house appear as it did in 1887 when it was added on to and became a family home. The house became listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004, when the Loram’s opened it as a homey, three-room bed and breakfast. An original brick cottage behind the house has also been restored and serves as additional sleeping quarters for guests.
“We decided to put the house on the National Historic Registry largely because it allowed the building department to cut us a lot of slack,” John said.
The move gave the Loram’s the freedom to keep the antique wood banister on the stairs, which doesn’t meet current codes, and to reuse the original wavy glass panes in the rebuilt windows.
They hired two carpenters “who had a reputation for respecting historic structures,” who worked nearly full-time on the house for about 2½ years, alongside other construction specialists. Overall, they spent about $1.5 million restoring the rundown house, which cost a fraction of that to buy.
The family of Hugh Barron, who built the home, owned the house for more than 100 years. After it was sold in the 1960s, it was “modernized” in the style of the times and the 10-foot ceilings were lowered in an attempt to better insulate the home. It eventually fell into disrepair and was “an eyesore” when the Loram’s bought it, Kathy said.
Much to the couple’s relief, when workers removed the house’s battered aluminum siding, they discovered that the original sugar pine siding was in excellent condition. “The house was really amazingly intact considering how old it was and how dilapidated it had become,” Kathy said.
The Loram’s removed other alterations that had been made to the house in the ’60s: replacing the outside trim and removing sheet rock to raise the ceilings to their original 10 inches. They stripped layers of paint and wallpaper from the walls to reveal antique wallpaper and original wood paneling. They were also able to keep many of the original sugar pine doors in the home, some of them with their antique faux-finish painting. They removed the carpet in the house to reveal Douglas fir floors, which appeared to still have faint cut marks from the mill, because they had never been polished.
They transformed the nine-bedroom, one-bath house into a three-bedroom, three-and-a-half bath, by expanding rooms and converting some into baths.
Structurally, builders upgraded the foundation, made of hand-chiseled sandstone blocks and replaced rotting beams to level the house. The New England Salt Box portion of the house, which was built first, features mortise and tenon joinery. The second portion of the house was construction using a balloon frame. Workers replaced the roof, wiring and plumbing in the house, and added a modern heating and cooling system that has various zones. They also completely insulated the house, using fiberglass batting under the floors and foam boards in the ceiling and roof.
Builders did have to redo some aspects of the home. Underneath the bathroom tub and the kitchen sink, the floorboards were rotting. The original building had beams that had been charred in roof fires. And the small staircase that had been used to access the servants’ corridors needed replacing.
The Loram’s made other minor changes to the building, in order to make it more accommodating for guests. They added new windows and French doors at the back of the house, where there had been little natural light, and built wall-length bookcases in the library room, which served as the original owner’s office and has a separate entrance.
When the New England Salt Box structure was built, it was turned 90 degrees from where it sits today. When the owners built the addition to the house, they turned the original structure. It’s unclear how the interior of the home was configured originally, John said. “We don’t know what its initial configuration was,” he said. “We know it served as an inn for its first 35 years.”
Because all of the other homes in the Valley were log cabins at the time, the Mountain House stood out, John said. “This was the height of modern architecture and construction when it was built,” he said.
Hugh Barron and his wife, Martha, operated the inn, first catering to foot traffic on the Siskiyou Trail and then to stagecoach passengers. Hugh also owned a 4,000-acre sheep and cattle ranch, which he acquired after buying his neighbor’s property. For decades, all of the land that could be seen from the front stoop of the Mountain House belonged to the Barron’s, John said.
“He paid the most taxes in the county for something like 20 years,” he said. According to the Mountain House Web site, tax records identified Barron as the richest man in Jackson County in 1879.
The Loram’s own six acres surrounding the house. On the land, John has built a large workshop where he is constructing an airplane from scratch. The retired electrical engineer, who also started a high-tech company with Kathy, said knowing he could have a workshop nearby was what convinced him to buy the Mountain House.
“Kathy said, ‘Well, you know you could build your dream workshop,’” he said. “This was the compromise.”
But as the couple worked on the house, they both came to appreciate its quirks and history, which they hope to preserve, John said.
“I think it was strictly a labor of love,” he said, “and it was a lot of fun.”

For Reservations visit www.ashlandmountainhouse.com