The Whiteaker: Oregon's First Governor and the Neighborhood That Outgrew Him
Near Eugene, Oregon
John Whiteaker was Oregon's first governor, elected in eighteen fifty-eight, the year before the territory became a state. He was a Democrat and a Southern sympathizer who opposed the Civil War and once gave a speech defending the right of secession. He purchased ten blocks of land along the Willamette River northwest of downtown Eugene in eighteen ninety, and the neighborhood that grew there was named for him.
For most of the twentieth century, the Whiteaker was a working-class district: modest houses, small manufacturing, people who worked in the mills and the rail yards. It did not attract much attention and did not ask for any.
That began to change in the nineteen seventies when the counterculture that had been building in Eugene began moving into the Whiteaker's cheap rents. By the nineteen nineties it had become what it remains today: a dense, walkable, politically left neighborhood with a high concentration of young residents, activist organizations, community gardens, independent media, and art studios. Communal apartment buildings organized along anarchist or environmentalist principles are not unusual there. The neighborhood is sometimes called the Whit.
The name still belongs to John Whiteaker, but the Whiteaker neighborhood has been substantially remade by people who would have found little common ground with the man it memorializes. That tension between a place's name and its present character is not unique to Eugene, but it is unusually legible here. The first governor's ten blocks have become something he could not have anticipated.
