The pioneer home which replaced the original cabin was of southern origin for Grandfather was of North Carolinian stock. Built in 1854, it was low and wide with a small gallery above and a wider one below facing the west and overlooking Centennial Butte where, in 1876, Mitchell Wilkins planted maple and fir trees. He carried water by sled to the butte’s very top to make sure the trees would live. They stand, to the present day, like a tuft of hair on an Indian’s skull. Willamette Forks post office was housed in one of the small outer buildings, bringing neighbors together when stage or pony rider dashed past on East Side Territorial Road, dropping off mail. “Late news” was at best a month old but worth discussion as the years brought disunion and secession problems to be faced among southern democrats and members of the newly organized Republican party. Indians had made the hillside trails which were to become the Territorial Road, and Calapooias still roamed the trails and dug camas roots in the blue-flowered fields. When the Wilkinses built a cabin, there was not yet a Eugene village. Mr. Skinner had only just brought his family to a sheep-herder’s cabin on the butte called Ya-po-ah, and had hardly formed his dream for Eugene City. That town would one day be ten miles south of the Wilkins home. The land proved out Mitchell Wilkins’ plan for raising fine grain and fine cattle. He took his prize grains to Philadelphia’s Centennial in 1876, New Orleans Exposition and Chicago’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, returning with honors for Lane County and Oregon. He served in the State Legislature, 1862-64, there presented Eugene’s petition for incorporation, and was instrumental in its passage. He was one of the men who organized Oregon’s Agricultural Society and Fair, which became the State Fair. He served as an early president and on its board until paralysis forced him to give up all activities. Inaction was hard for the tall, eager-eyed Scotsman, but he endured it with a smile, though he was unable to speak. He had lived a full life. He had been a member of the “Union Club,” a Civil-War-time club of Lincoln and Union enthusiasts as determined and as secretive as the members of the secessionist “Knights of the Golden Circle.” He saw the Union saved, saw Lincoln elected; and rode the secret trail to the James Daniels house in the hills where a few men swore allegiance by candlelight. My father, at 13, was allowed to go there because he knew the words to _John Brown’s Body_. Oregon, a baby state, was half inclined to secede and could not have supported Lincoln except for a division among its Democrats—the loyalty of southerners like Mitchell Wilkins who had come to settle in this Willamette Valley and who did not want slavery for the West. The University of Oregon _Nina Wilkins McCornack_ [Illustration: Oregon Historical Society]