4A COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL MAY 3, 2017
O PINION
Offbeat Oregon History: CG's revenge
Anyone who’s
spent
any time in
For The Sentinel
the town of Cot-
tage Grove, at the
southernmost tip of the Willamette Val-
ley, knows the town has a somewhat
checkered relationship with the city of
Eugene.
Everything is friendly and amiable
between the two towns, to be sure.
But it’s rather like the relationship be-
tween a wealthy older sibling who’s a
bank president, and a younger one who
works on the green chain in a sawmill.
There is a core of tension between Lane
County’s biggest city and its third-big-
gest (Springfi eld is, of course, number
2).
And that tension has not always been
as mild and understated as it is today.
The few years just after 1910 were
when it was arguably at its worst, be-
cause that’s the year it fl ared into a sort
of open warfare between the two towns
— a war fought at the ballot box, using
a then-brand-new weapon: The Initia-
tive and Referendum System.
Here’s the story:
As the new century dawned, the little
riverside town formerly known as Eu-
gene City was growing fast. The town
had gotten its start as the southernmost
terminus of the riverboats that brought
grain down the Willamette River to the
market in Portland before the railroads
were built; but by the turn of the centu-
ry the riverboats were history, and the
new engine of Eugene’s growth was
the University of Oregon.
Then as now, the U of O was some-
thing the town took great pride in. And
as a driver of commercial success, it
was hard to beat. Eugene soon out-
paced all its rivals in size and economic
power. It was also, of course, the coun-
ty seat.
The problem was, from the stand-
point of Lane County’s third-largest
town down at the southernmost tip of
the county, Eugene’s municipal boost-
erism was taking over county govern-
ment. County offi cials were not nearly
as diligent in allocating resources to
fi x roads and infrastructure outside the
Eugene-Springfi eld area as they were
in collecting taxes there. “Grovers,” as
they sometimes call themselves, were
feeling the pinch of the old “taxation
without representation” complaint —
or, at least, they had convinced them-
selves that they were.
And their complaints fell upon deaf
By Finn JD John
ears … until some-
one fl oated a new
idea: Carve off South
Lane County, join it to
North Douglas County,
and form a new coun-
ty: Nesmith County,
named after pioneer
lawyer-politician James
Nesmith.
Lane County’s re-
sponse to this proposal
of secession was as pre-
dictable as it was fero-
cious. They immediate-
ly moved to organize
opposition, and cam-
paigned fi ercely against
it. Douglas County
swells were only slight-
ly less fi erce.
“They have deliber-
ately included a maxi-
mum of taxable proper-
ty with but a minimum
of expense,” raged state
Rep. John Buchanan,
whose district covered
Douglas and Jackson
County.
This, of course, was exactly Cottage
Grove’s major beef — that the South
County was being treated as a revenue
machine, from which taxes could be
extracted far in excess of the services
Lane County chose to provide there.
Advocates argued that the new coun-
ty would be just a small one, less than
2,000 square miles, with an assessed
property value of just $5 million; this
would leave Lane County with an as-
sessed-property value of $18 million
and Douglas with $27 million.
But most of that $5 million would
come from Lane County, not Douglas
— 22 percent of Lane County’s entire
assessed valuation was at stake, as op-
posed to just 4.7 percent of Douglas’s.
And, as Rep. Buchanan inadvertently
pointed out, it would alter Lane Coun-
ty’s cash fl ow substantially, as South
Lane County was something of a cash-
cow for them.
Well, when it came time to vote on
this statewide ballot measure, most res-
idents of the state of Oregon were not
convinced that Cottage Grove ought to
have its own county. The measure went
down to a crushing defeat, with about
68,000 “no” votes to just 23,000 “yes.”
Then as now, it seemed unlikely that
Eugene’s savage opposition was re-
sponsible for such a lopsided outcome.
It’s far more likely that the rest of Or-
egon, seeing no particular reason to
change things, voted to leave them as
they were. But Cottage Grove took the
loss very hard — and blamed Eugene
for it. They bided their time and waited
for a chance to be revenged.
And, the very next year, it came.
The University of Oregon, Eugene’s
pride and joy and the main driver of its
economy, was running out of money. It
needed new buildings to accommodate
its burgeoning population of students,
and to hire more faculty members. At
stake was the university’s reputation,
which city boosters feared would soon
fall behind the competing state fl agship
universities in Berkeley and Seattle.
So in 1911 the state Legislature hap-
pily voted through a half-million dollar
appropriation to redress all the deferred
maintenance, and an ongoing appropri-
ation to adjust the university’s income
from the state, and things looked like
they were on track for a golden fu-
ture there in Duck country … until the
still-embittered proponents of Nesmith
County realized what a golden oppor-
tunity for revenge this represented.
Galvanized into action, the Grovers
passed a kitty, raised a war chest and
hired a Portland lawyer to gather sig-
natures, paying 3.5 cents for each one
— one of the fi rst uses of paid signature
gatherers in an Oregon ballot-measure
campaign. Their plan was to refer the
university’s appropriations bill to the
statewide ballot, for all the voters of
the state to vote on — and those voters
had already demonstrated their over-
whelming propensity to say “no” to
expenditures that they didn’t directly
benefi t from.
The Grovers apparently gave the at-
torney a blank check, for he came back
with 13,175 signatures — more than
double the amount they needed. And
it was a good thing, too, because once
Eugene fi gured out what was afoot,
the town’s movers and shakers started
working all the angles.
A Marion County attorney sued to
have the measure removed from the
ballot, arguing that the signatures were
all fake. A lower court ruled he was
right; the Grovers appealed.
The Appeals court, after hearing the
case and getting input from all sides
as well as from Initiative and Petition
System founder William U’Ren, had
the signatures gone through one by
one, and each one that couldn’t be au-
thenticated was discarded. It was well
for the Grovers that they had gone in
for overkill; nearly half the signatures
went by the board, but the stack that re-
mained was tall enough to qualify the
referral.
Onto the ballot it went. And, as ev-
eryone had fi gured they would, the
voters of the state voted nearly three
to one against giving the University of
Oregon its money.
Now indeed was the fury of Eu-
gene focused on little Cottage Grove.
The editor of the Eugene City Guard,
Charles Fisher, was especially fero-
cious, and vented his fury both on Cot-
tage Grove and on one of the Portland
attorneys hired by the Grovers, a man
named Edward S.J. McAllister, who
became vulnerable to attack after being
caught up in the 1912 “same-sex vice
scandal” centered around Portland’s
community of gay men.
After that, there was some talk in the
Cottage Grove Sentinel about getting
Nesmith County on the ballot again.
But it was never done. As for the Uni-
versity of Oregon, it had to hobble
along for another couple of years on
a small emergency appropriation. The
episode likely did lasting damage to the
university — it occurred during a fairly
critical phase of the college’s growth
and put it at a substantial disadvantage
vis-à-vis the other West Coast states’
fl agship colleges.
But Cottage Grove and South Lane
County had made their point. They
would not be underestimated again.
C ottage G rove
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