History and identity

The children’s voices could be heard coming up the trail, and once they learned exactly where it was, they made a beeline for it, sprinting to get there first.

“This happens to be my discovery,” 13-year-old Ashton Oxenreider joked, as he wrapped his arms around the 2-ton monument to one of Eugene’s first black residents, Wiley Griffon.

Eric Richardson, president of the Eugene-Springfield chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, then asked Oxenreider to read what was on the monument in Eugene’s Masonic Cemetery.

“Once described as ‘Eugene’s pioneer colored citizen,’ and ‘one of the most industrious colored men in Eugene,’ Wiley Griffon was well known on the streets of Eugene,” Oxenreider began, going on to read the entire inscription describing how Griffon, who moved to Eugene around 1890 and died in 1913, ran his own mule-drawn trolley in Eugene.

The group of about 30 people, almost all of them black, applauded enthusiastically when Oxenreider was finished reading.

The visit to Griffon’s memorial, installed in the cemetery in 2013, was the second of three stops Saturday during a first-ever tour of African-American landmarks in Eugene during the eighth annual NAACP Family and Youth Conference, which was held at Lane Community College’s downtown campus.

“I’m a history guy,” said Richardson, a 1986 graduate of Churchill High School who grew up in Eugene after his family moved from St. Louis in 1971. “And I think it’s good that folks have a sense of place.

“You come to Eugene, and you think it’s a very white place, but this is their place, too. So, I just wanted them to get a sense of that.”

According to the 2010 U.S. Census, blacks made up only 1.4 percent of Eugene’s 156,185 residents that year, trailing the largest minority population, Hispanics (7.8 percent), as well as Asians (4 percent), in a predominantly white community (85 percent).

In Springfield, blacks made up just 1.1 percent of the 2010 population of 59,403.

But Richardson wants those African-Americans who do live here to know the history.

Thus, the first stop on the tour was between Third and Fourth avenues on High Street, just north of the Fifth Street Public Market.

After they got out of two Northwest Youth Corps vans, the group stood looking at two of Eugene’s oldest homes.

“The city of Eugene is interested in putting a marker here,” Richardson said, standing on the lawn of the house at 330 High St., built in 1867, according to city records.

The Gothic Revival-style home is where C.B. and Annie Mims, perhaps Eugene’s first black property owners, moved in the early 1950s.

The couple moved to the house from “Tent City” on the banks of the Willamette River, where they had been living after moving from Marshall, Texas, by way of Vancouver, Wash., to Eugene in 1947, according to a 2000 Register-Guard story.

Tent City, as Richardson explained, was the only place in Eugene where blacks were allowed to live back then, in a ramshackle cluster of tents and makeshift homes on the north end of the Ferry Street Bridge.

“They had to make their houses out of cardboard and recycled wood,” Richardson said.

C.B. Mims worked as a busboy at Eugene’s old Osburn Hotel and, after Tent City was displaced in 1952 by construction of a new Ferry Street Bridge, the hotel’s owner loaned the Mims family $5,500 to buy two homes.

Today, 330 and 336 High St., the latter built in 1879, are owned by Willie Mims, 79, son of C.B. and Annie.

Willie Mims lives elsewhere in town but rents the properties, Richardson said.

“There’s a lot of love in these walls,” said tenant Chavis Heath, who lives at 330 High St. with his wife and a friend, after the tour members encountered him in the backyard on Saturday. “When we first walked through it with Willie, that’s what he expressed.”

When famous black entertainers such as singer Ella Fitzgerald and actor/singer Paul Robeson came to town, they stayed with the Mimses because they were not allowed to stay in city hotels, Richardson said.

During the stop at the Masonic Cemetery, Richardson explained that Griffon is buried somewhere below the monument in a grave that, until 1959, was marked before someone desecrated it.

Interestingly, he said, that was the same year Oregon voters ratified the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, prohibiting the federal and state governments from denying any citizen the right to vote based on race or color — 89 years after Congress first adopted it.

“I think it’s pretty cool,” Oxenreider, an eighth-grader at Cal Young Middle School, said of the monument and other stops on the tour, including St. Mark Christian Methodist Episcopal Church in west Eugene, near where many of the Tent City residents relocated in the early 1950s. “It’s good to know something about my culture.”

Follow Mark on Twitter @MarkBakerRG . Email [email protected] .