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The museum reopens following six months of staff and volunteers cataloging and rehousing hundreds of artifacts and a $40,000 renovation of the museum’s front gallery. It is hosting a reception Friday, July 10, during Springfield’s Second Friday Art Walk.
A white bedsheet with red capital letters spelling “BOYCOTT” hangs above exhibits in the Springfield History Museum.
Below it, a picture from the 1970s shows the same bedsheet hanging on the University of Oregon campus next to a sign reading “the EMU” — a reference to when the sheet was part of a 1974 protest at the Erb Memorial Union.
The sheet and photo are among artifacts provided to the museum by Eugene Friends of the Farmworkers, a local activist organization that supports the farmworkers’ rights movement.
Museum Curator Maddi McGraw developed the exhibit, “Farm Labor in the Valley,” in collaboration with Nancy Bray and Herb Everett.
“Once you start doing this, you get passionate about it, and that’s what’s happened to me, is that I feel compelled to keep doing this work,” Bray told Lookout Eugene-Springfield.
Bray joined Eugene Friends of the Farmworkers in 1972. She met Everett at a boycott meeting, and they have been married for 50 years.
The University of Oregon protest was part of the group’s efforts to support United Farm Workers’ boycotts of nonunion grapes and lettuce.
Eugene Friends of the Farm Workers banded together with university organizations to pressure the Erb Memorial Union cafeteria to purchase only grapes and lettuce harvested by union laborers, and ultimately started a boycott “restaurant.” Bray and Everett kept food for the restaurant in a refrigerator in their garage.
Also showcased are boycott bumper stickers printed by Everett through Northwest Working Press, as well as United Farm Workers flags, picket signs and posters.
“A lot of this stuff was in our attic, and so it’s like, ‘Oh, what are we going to do with this?’” Bray said.
Included in the exhibit is a 10-minute movie filmed in 1975 by Everett, which documents Eugene Friends of the Farmworkers picketing Safeway for selling nonunion grapes and lettuce as well as protesting at the University of Oregon and participating in the March on Gallo in California, a winery the union was boycotting for not renewing its labor contract.
“We were a very active group,” Bray said.
There are also panels about the history of farm labor organizing and information on movement leaders — people Bray met while volunteering with the United Farm Workers union in California in 1971.
“It was an honor to be able to share these people,” she said, getting emotional.
The exhibit, which is the museum’s first to be fully translated into Spanish, opens Friday, July 10, with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m. during the Second Friday Art Walk. The exhibit will be on display until Dec. 26.
Regular museum hours are 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., Thursday through Saturday. Admission is free.
‘An opportunity to tell more of the story’
The exhibit was on display at the Lane County History Museum in 2023 and 2024.
When Bray approached McGraw at the Springfield museum about bringing it there, they decided to add information about farm labor in the Willamette Valley, from precolonialization to present.
“It’s just an opportunity to be able to tell people more of the story, and to give them more of that context as they walk into the rest of it,” McGraw said.
This includes panels on Indigenous agricultural practices, the tribes’ forced removal and the return of Indigenous peoples to their ancestral lands for seasonal farm work.
Another panel has information about Chinese, Japanese and Mexican workers who came to Oregon to pick crops, “and you can actually track who the American experience was including or excluding based on who was here picking crops,” McGraw said.
An additional panel highlights Filipino farm workers in the Willamette Valley, and another includes stories of Springfield farmworkers, with space for visitors to write their own experiences on sticky notes and attach them to the exhibit.
And a 1957 ledger, from Davidson Farm in Glenwood, shows who the farm was paying to pick beans.
The exhibit will next go to the Oregon Historical Society in Portland, where it will be on display from March 2027 through August 2027.
Museum reopening after six months of collections care
The farm labor exhibit is the first to be on display after the museum shut down for six months for archiving and renovating.
The museum closes about every two years to document its collection and make sure artifacts are properly stored, McGraw said. The museum has more than 15,000 items, including photographs, textiles, lumber and farming equipment, clothing and more. This closure involved cataloging nearly 400 artifacts in the museum’s object collection.
Unique care is required for different types of artifacts, such as leather boots and Victorian hair art, which is hair that has been wrapped around wire to make an art piece.
McGraw recalled when she began working at the museum eight years ago, she opened a box containing a porcelain doll and a hammer.
There were “lots of little exploded bits of porcelain in there,” McGraw said.
“It’s making sure that things are housed together with other items when they can be, but then also giving them space and separating them, so things like that don’t happen,” she said.
During the closure, museum staff, volunteers and University of Oregon interns photographed, cataloged and stored items in archival supplies such as acid-free or tissue paper depending on what an artifact is made of.
“There’s a lot of science to it,” McGraw said.
The museum also used the time to catalog its quilts. Some belonged to settlers who traveled on the Oregon Trail and whose grandchildren or great-grandchildren later donated them.
McGraw said the museum has many items people may not necessarily think of, such as baby clothing from the late 1800s.
Among the museum’s leather boot collection is a pair of boys’ boots from the mid-19th century brought over on the Oregon Trail that have the original owners’ names written in chalk on the bottom. The museum also has a collection of yearbooks from Springfield schools dating back to the early 1900s that are available to look through.
McGraw said the collection is what the museum is founded on.
“We’re stewards of the collection,” she said. “The collection really belongs to the community, we’re just who’s in charge of it right now, and so it’s our duty as stewards to make sure to take care of them in a way that makes sure that future generations can see and learn from them.”
One significant change visitors will notice is a $40,000 renovation of its front room. Funding came from the museum’s annual budget, donations, an Oregon Museum Grant and funding from the Oregon Community Foundation.
Work included removing built-in displays and replacing them with mobile exhibit cases, allowing the museum more flexibility for programming. The museum also laid new tile and purchased new gift shop furniture and front desk.
“It’s definitely a very different space,” McGraw said.
