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Here is an interesting history on the Lucas Lodge on the other side of the Rogue River, just north of this huge fire.

The lodge was a great place to go for lunch while fishing up in that area in the fall, winter, spring or summer.

The jet boats would stop there for lunch and make their way back down river after lunch. One of the jet boat companies had a Friday and Saturday evening dinner run in the Summer time. You left Gold Beach in the late afternoon and went up river to the Lucas Lodge. There you had an incredible dinner served on their deck or outside. Many of the vegie were grown right there including some incredible sweet corn. Often the salmon was cooked in the old Indian way by staking it with cedar poles and putting the slab of salmon around a big cedar fire pit. The heat and smoke from the flame cooked/smoked the salmon. Food to kill for.

Here is the story from Oregon Live:

Lodge has seen 'hot' visitors before

08/08/02

WENDY OWEN

AGNESS -- Corlyss McCullough had just seen "Gone With the Wind" and there, in the dining room of her family's lodge, sat Clark Gable.

The handsome Hollywood actor, who played Rhett Butler in the movie, had stopped for lunch at Lucas Lodge in Agness after a trip up the Rogue River.

It was the 1940s, and McCullough was a teen-ager at the time. She and her sister wanted to talk to Gable, but their mother's warning not to bother famous visitors echoed in their heads.

"We couldn't oooh and ahhh over these people," McCullough said.

Minding their mother, they left Gable alone. No autograph, no photo -- only a pleasant memory from their childhoods.

Built in 1912, Lucas Pioneer Ranch and Lodge is the oldest established business on the Rogue River, said McCullough, 72, who now runs the lodge and restaurant with her children and grandchildren.

While the lodge is threatened by the approaching Florence fire across the Rogue River, McCullough said it will remain open until they're told to immediately evacuate. Tourists continued to call the lodge Wednesday, some to cancel reservations and others to make them.

Lodge visitors come from all over the world, McCullough said. A family from Spain planned to rent a car in San Francisco and drive to the remote town of 150 residents.

Word has spread with very little advertising.

"We don't even have a Web site," McCullough said, shrugging.

The lodge is tucked under a canopy of trees about 50 feet up a hill from the Rogue River. A row of small American flags lines the street to the lodge about a block from downtown Agness. Thirty wild turkeys wandered along an emergency airstrip next to the lodge, which McCullough's father built years ago. The runway crosses the road, but McCullough knows of only one minor car-plane collision.

In Clark Gable's day, the lodge was a hideaway for the rich and famous. But its remote location during World War II also made it attractive to the military. Several generals held secret meetings at a remote cabin far up the Rogue River, and frequently they ate at Lucas Lodge, McCullough said.

Her father would take the men by boat back and forth to the cabin, she said.

"We had a lot of very wealthy, powerful men in here, and they didn't want anyone to know where it was," McCullough said.

Back then, visitors to Agness came mostly for the fly-fishing. They caught salmon in the Rogue and steelhead in the nearby Illinois River, but the river users have changed over the years, McCullough said. Now, tourists riding jet boats from Gold Beach stop for lunch, and boaters floating down the Rogue River from Galice, near Grants Pass, stay the night.

She knows for sure that Ginger Rogers stayed the night. She also remembers seeing Barbara Stanwyck and Gabby Hayes, but she suspects others may have slipped through undetected.

"A lot of them come incognito," she said. "They want to have some time just to themselves."

Hopefully this wonderful place and the People of Agness will be spared from a potential Green Holocaust.