Bird's Nest: Eugene Skinner and the City He Named for Himself
Near Eugene, Oregon
Eugene Franklin Skinner arrived in the Willamette Valley in the autumn of eighteen forty-five, and when he stood on the low basalt butte above the river bend and looked down at the flat ground between the hills, he wrote later that it reminded him of a bird's nest.
He was born in New York in eighteen nine, worked as a trapper and farmer, and followed the Oregon Trail west with his wife Mary and their children. He had looked at a lot of country by the time he reached Lane County. He liked what he saw here. He filed a donation land claim on the south bank of the Willamette, below the butte, in eighteen forty-six.
The Kalapuya who knew the land well had already warned him about floods. Their advice was practical: build on the high ground. Skinner built his cabin on the butte itself, the rock promontory that now bears his name, and watched the valley below him fill with water that first winter.
A post office named for him opened in eighteen fifty. The town was platted in eighteen fifty-two. It was incorporated as Eugene City in eighteen sixty-two, a name that confused outsiders, who sometimes assumed it commemorated a European nobleman. It commemorated Skinner, who died in eighteen sixty-four, two years after incorporation, having lived to see his donated land become a small but determined town at the southern end of the Willamette Valley.
The butte itself is now a city park, with a climbing rose that covers the slope in late spring and a view of the Willamette spreading south toward Springfield. On clear days you can see the Cascade Range to the east. Skinner's claim to have found a bird's nest has held up.
