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The city is turning to the families of Eugene’s first known Black residents and the broader public to uncover historical details that census records and newspapers never captured.
The city of Eugene wants to better document the history of the city’s first known Black families.
Three city teams — the Office of Equity & Community Engagement, the Planning Division and the Cultural Services Division — launched an effort in June to verify and expand upon existing research into early Black and African American life in Eugene.
The city has contracted Oregon Black Pioneers, the only statewide African American historical society, to interview descendants of the region’s first Black pioneers, including the Mims, Johnson, Reynolds, Nettles and Rutledge/Gibson families.
Many of those families lived decades ago in the region’s first Black settlement, known as Ferry Street Village or the “Across the Bridge” neighborhood, before Lane County displaced the community and demolished homes for development in 1949.
Local organizations and the city have worked to document and memorialize the community’s history in the years since.
The city is now entering the second phase of its work to produce a document about local Black and African American history known as a historic context statement, which can be used to nominate historic properties to the National Register of Historic Places, and for statewide historic preservation plans and local planning initiatives.
“It’s a document that identifies the places and the things that happen in connection to those places that shape Black history in Eugene,” said city Equity & Community Engagement Manager Fabio Andrade. “They can be used for historic preservation, or they can be used in future planning processes to understand how some groups were negatively impacted, and that can influence projects moving forward.”
The city’s first draft statement relied on sources like census records, city and county records, local and state newspaper archives and scholarly research. But those traditional sources didn’t fully capture the experiences of Across the Bridge residents — especially details like where people lived, worked or spent leisure time, said Zachary Stocks, the executive director of Oregon Black Pioneers.
“That’s where the storytelling really becomes critical to our understanding of Black life at this time,” Stocks said.
Officials are now turning to the community to build on and fact-check that draft, an effort involving Oregon Black Pioneers’ interviews with descendants of the families and outreach to Black-led organizations.
The city is also encouraging the public to submit memories, reflections, historical information and artifacts for the project before Dec. 15.
A State Historic Preservation Office grant funded the first phase of historic context statement research, which was completed by the University of Oregon’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History. This next phase of outreach is “mostly funded” by the three involved city departments, Andrade said.
The city is paying the Oregon Black Pioneers about $7,000 for about 24 total hours of oral history work, which Stocks said has been “ramping up” over the past month.
In late September, Stocks and Andrade met with seven descendants of Eugene’s first Black families at the Mims Historic House.
The family representatives shared lesser-known memories dating from the mid-1940s to the ’90s — recalling details like earning 75 cents an hour at their first job, the places where they bought slices of pizza or burgers, and even a fistfight that broke out when Black teenagers attended an all-white dance, Stocks said.
“They talked about how they had to fight their way out of that building, and that’s a story they’ve never seen anyone tell before,” Stocks said. “So, this is our chance to sort of reveal that information, both the fun things, but also the hard things.”
Andrade said the city also hopes to clarify conflicting accounts of events and track down early Black families in Eugene who have since left in this phase of research.
The city will compile what it’s uncovered into a “more polished” document, which it hopes to present to the community in February, Andrade said. He added that the city plans to apply for grant funding to finish the project.
“It is not an adopted plan, so it doesn’t come with any recommendation, any mandates for things to be done after,” he said. “It is just documenting what we can about the history of the places in Eugene that are connected to the experiences of Black people.”
Stocks said the final product will give the Black experience in Eugene a “greater degree of credibility as an inextricable part of the Eugene heritage and identity.”
“If you’re going to tell the story of Eugene, you must tell the story of Black people in Eugene for that to be a complete story,” he said.
Monuments
There are two public monuments in the works to memorialize the Across the Bridge community and Black history in Eugene: the Black Cultural Initiative’s bronze statues at Alton Baker Park, and a memorial fountain across the river at the Downtown Riverfront Park.
Andrade said the Black Cultural Initiative memorial is in the final stages of bronze casting, and will soon enter the permitting phase, with unveiling expected by May 2027.
The city will unveil the fountain across the river in early 2027 due to fabrication and materials supply delays, he said. The fountain’s “design and story have since undergone refinements to more accurately reflect the story of the Across the Bridge community,” a city news release states.
