A wooden historical marker highlights a former military fort that existed just south of here and tells us:
Fort Hay in the 1930s
FORT OF INDIAN WAR FAME SURVIVES RAVAGES OF TIME
Structure, Now Used as Farmhouse, Recalls Romantic History of Southern Oregon Mining Days.
GRANTS PASS, Or., Aug. 16.--Unpainted, but not unsung in the memories of those who recall the thrilling days when Indian fighting was making history, stands old Fort Hay.
Dimmed in the annals of the past, forgotten by residents of southern Oregon, save by those whose sires sacrificed their lives seeking gold in the fir-clad hills, the old place has accepted its place in the quiet countryside. Where once trod the Indian fighter, or lounged the rough miner now echo and re-echo of everyday farm life. The place is no longer known as Fort Hay to those who do not remember its past.
Old Fort Hay is now a farmhouse--not an ordinary kind, for even though its past is buried with the dead of Eight Dollar Mountain, it had carried its brand so clearly that even the most casual observer cannot keep from seeing within the walls of he dim, dingy place something that makes it a part of a distinctive past.
The hand-hewn walls of the old rooms bespeak of a time when highly polished furniture did not fit into the locale of a mining community. Every board in the building was chopped from trees grown within shooting distance of the present site. Not a steel nail can be found in the walls, for when old Fort Hay was built in 1850, there were no nails in southern Oregon. [No steel nails, but there were iron nails.] Anything that came from the "store houses" during those days of early pioneering had to be packed in from Crescent City, 130 miles away.
In the days when the old fort was popular the stages that used to run between Grants Pass and Crescent City used to pull up at the door, sometimes to change horses, more often to allow some weary traveler to get out, that he, too, might join the masses of those who sought gold and adventure in the mist-mazed hills of Josephine County.
Much of the detailed history associated with the building has been lost to the present generation because the old pioneers were too busy with other details to remember all of the stirring things, but there has sifted down the channels of time one tale that touches the imagination of even the cushion-calloused tourists who rush by the historic spot in search of western thrills.
Sissy Hay stood in the gathering gloom of an autumn night and watched the dim trail that was to lead her lover to her. From the dark shadows of the tree canopy stole a silent, gliding form. It was an Indian. There was a short struggle and the lover of Sissy was stretched out in the agonies of death. The shock of what she had seen shifted the life of the girl into a different channel and she was never the same again, so the story told today reveals.
It was the battle of Eight Dollar Mountain brought to the old fort perhaps its most interesting part in southern Oregon history. For it was at this battle that the whites and the Indians sniped from behind the giant pine trees until the redmen are reported to have slipped away without taking their dead with them.
At various times the Indians are reported to have tried to storm the old fort and burn it down, but always there was the steady, well-aimed crack of the pioneer rifle.
Today, like many other old landmarks of this section of the state with a brilliant past, the old fort has sunken to a point of subdued significance.
Thousands of tourists pass through Grants Pass yearly who do not know that the first bank in the West, the first post office, the home of the first American flag, the first bar in Oregon, the first driven well, lie hidden in the green-gray hills.
Sunday Oregonian, Portland, August 17, 1930, page 12