Many of the places we walk by every day have a deeper history. Eugene’s historians want to make sure they aren’t forgotten.

By Bart Brewer

Photos provided by the University of Oregon Libraries.

The campus experience at the University of Oregon looked completely different in 1912. Students would swim and paddle canoes along the millrace, now a sluggish and polluted creek. Partygoers caught the “drunk-special” trolley afterward for a night on the town in Springfield, where the rails are now paved over.

What’s left of this era may seem inconsequential at a glance. Why pay a muddy creek and rusting rails any attention when there are more intriguing sights to see? These features, however, are both tied into the foundation of Eugene.

In the 112 years since 1912, we’ve forgotten parts of the city’s history, even those that helped form its identity. It’s a history worth preserving.

Eugene's millrace — a channel of swift water used to power mills — runs directly through the north end of University of Oregon’s campus, parallel to the Willamette River. Peering down from one of the many bridges that cross it, there isn’t much to see today — a listless body of water flowing between two muddy banks. Its memory of a more rapid current reflects a legacy in decline.

A place you can explore that legacy is the Lane County History Museum. Among displays of covered wagons and turn of the century firefighting, one can peruse the archives with the museum’s Interim Director Marin Aurand.

“Eugene has been really good at tearing down old buildings to the point that a lot of things that would have historic significance aren't here anymore,” Aurand said. “I think that the millrace is one of those really good last vestiges of early Eugene and campus culture.”

Aurand, a doctoral student studying history at the University of Oregon, researches the history of small communities, gender and labor. She’s had a passion for history most of her life.

“My mother is a genealogist,” Aurand said. “It was just very much part of how I grew up — that it was important to know where you came from and who came before you.”

The millrace is one of the places the city grew up in. To understand its historical significance to Eugene, “you need to know the history,” Aurand said.

Before the millrace, a natural slough branched off the Willamette River. This convenient feature saved precious time and resources when laborers dug the channel in 1851.

The millrace is what charged Eugene’s expansion. Its implementation “really helped Eugene to settle,” Aurand said. A gristmill produced flour, a woolen mill spun cloth and several sawmills cut wood. This flurry of production helped to bolster the city’s economy and incorporate the town by 1862. “It’s a really good example of how we have worked with and against nature to create this community,” Aurand said.

Mills weren’t the only things that dominated the millrace. Recreation on the water began as early as 1885 when it froze over during a frigid winter — residents skated on the surface and built raging bonfires on its banks.

In 1900, recreation boomed with a canoe craze. University of Oregon students held the first canoe fête on the millrace in 1915, hosting a pageant of decorated canoes near where the Knight Science Campus stands today. “It was a lot of pomp,” Aurand said. “It was a pretty popular part of campus life.”

Fête is French for celebration. Students would decorate their canoes to resemble just about anything: a dragon, a blooming water lily or a scene right from “Alice in Wonderland.”

Canoe fêtes were held as part of junior weekend, when the junior class would celebrate becoming seniors at the start of each summer. Fraternity and sorority houses participated heavily, spending dozens of hours making their floats.

A surviving leaflet from the 1930 canoe fête, “Les Fleurs de La Nuit,” meaning “The Flowers of the Night,” offers a glimpse into the event’s structure. It featured floats, like “In a Temple Garden,” by the Zeta Tau Alpha sorority. Virginia Esterly, the dean of women at the time, judged the canoes. Onlookers would watch floats drift by from a grandstand on the south bank.

The millrace was also a popular spot for fraternities and romantic getaways. It became the cultural touchpoint of the area. “Creating this space that was specifically geared towards that cultural moment when you're entering into adulthood was a very 1920s thing,” Aurand said. “It’s very Gatsby.”

In 1945, however, the millrace began its spiral into obscurity, when a major flood smashed the intake dam along the Willamette River. A lack of investment for repairs prompted the channel to go dry for four years. When a weak water flow returned to the millrace in 1949 via a new pump system, it took on its contemporary, swampy aesthetic.

The last canoe fête was held in 1970. Student involvement and water conditions had worsened. Canoeing and throwing parties on the millrace had grown out of fashion because “you wouldn't want to spend your time doing what your parents did in college,” Aurand said.

Now, 54 years later, the millrace remains but in the form of a stagnant creek — the mills and canoes gone and the channel dependent on supplemental water to prevent it from becoming a stinking mud pit. It’s in a state far from its former glory.

The history of the millrace is one many University of Oregon students and Eugene residents don’t know exists. Local historians, like Aurand, think that telling the story of the millrace is integral to preserving the history of Eugene.

“The millrace is a really good example of a community history because it touches on absolutely everything about Eugene,” Aurand said. “You can talk about early settlement, how Kalapuya peoples would have used the slough, about the coming of industry. The millrace can tell all of those stories in a compelling way, if we take the time to preserve and protect that area.”

Just as the millrace was a cultural center for the University of Oregon, the old streetcar system is what brought students to it. From 1907 to 1927, Eugene’s electric streetcar rumbled from College Hill to Springfield, ferrying students and residents across town. These days the rails are quiet. Only metal and memories remain.

Randy Gudeika, a Eugene historian, knows the rails well. Having spent the last 20 years researching local lore, he aims to keep the tale of the rails alive.

“Historic preservation is important to the mental health of a city,” Gudeika said. “To see that things are able to continue. That history doesn’t just disappear.”

Gudeika has conducted walking tours of old neighborhoods in Eugene since 2017. He’s a self-proclaimed “bottomless pit” of information about Eugene’s past, and wants to share his knowledge with others.

“I help people see their neighborhoods in a new light,” Gudeika said. “Things that they took for granted they don't take for granted anymore because they know the stories behind them.”

Before electric streetcars rumbled along the rails, Henry Holden of Fort Worth, Texas, utilized a different form of power. He moved to Oregon in 1891, and introduced Eugene to the mule-pulled carts that serviced portions of Willamette Street, 11th Avenue and College Hill.

With eight mules — Sam, Crickett, Molly, Dallas, Shave Tail, Belle, Dave and Buck — and four carts, the service ran until 1900. It never profited during its nine years of operation. The service was at a standstill most of the time during the rainy season.

In 1907, the Eugene & Eastern Railway Company finished construction of a new electric streetcar line that was popular among locals.

“Everyone rode the trolleys before cars came,” Gudeika said. “It was when the community wasn’t separated. Everyone rode together.”

The rail system started as a loop, circling the east side of campus. It traveled south to the Masonic Cemetery before returning to the streetcar barn, located where Oregon Hall is today on 13th Avenue. Future lines would expand outward — one orbiting College Hill, another proceeding west along 11th Avenue and the last heading east into Springfield.

The Springfield line was especially popular among students eager to drink. Eugene became a “dry” town in 1908 when alcohol was banned in the city. Springfield remained “wet,” continuing to supply alcohol, making the rail line useful for students wanting to skirt Eugene liquor laws.

“It went out to Springfield because students demanded it,” Gudeika said. “On Friday nights, the last trolley from Springfield was called the drunk special.”

The last streetcar ran in October of 1927 after the Eugene City Council voted to replace the transportation system with motorized buses, which were deemed better for congestion on city streets. Now, only the rails remain — some still visible in College Hill and along University and Moss Street.

“Stories have to be told,” Gudeika said. “If they don’t, they die. If they die, we don’t know why we’re here.”

On Gudeika's walking tours of the Fairmount neighborhood, he stops along the rails, which are partially covered with asphalt and crosswalks.

“There is a little disappointment that we lost something,” Gudeika said.

Some people wish the streetcar system still carried students to campus. Others miss the canoe fêtes on the millrace. While they are unlikely to make a comeback anytime soon, their memories live on through their impact on Eugene and the historians who work to make them known.

Photos provided by the University of Oregon Libraries.