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 The first time Laurel Miller and her husband Mitch Sherman rolled into town, test-driving places to live, they spotted people dancing in the street.
“Ashland hit all my senses at once,” says Miller, “from the dancing on Pioneer Street, to the Bloomsbury book store, to the Shakespeare Festival, to finding tofu on so many restaurant menus. For me, it felt like this was the perfect place to be.” Miller is a partner in Aleph Springs, a new “Jewish-inspired” neighborhood adjacent to the Havurah Shir Hadash synagogue.
Located just a few miles north of the California border and a half day’s drive to the Bay Area and Portland, Ashland is at once a magnet for tourists and a day-to-day treat for its 20,000 or so residents.
Culturally sophisticated and spiritually open, the town, cradled between the Siskiyou and Cascade mountain ranges, is informed as much by the geography as it is by the presence of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Southern Oregon University, not to mention the annual Ashland Film Festival.
With commercial development carefully controlled by local government, the esthetics and small-town charm of Ashland has been preserved, says Miller. “You won’t find box stores in town and you won’t find the usual slew of fast-foot restaurants.” In fact, adds Miller, the town’s only MacDonald’s closed a few years ago for lack of business.
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