The Mill Race was dug to power mills, so the Club went looking for the mills. Two stops, ten minutes apart.

First, the Daniel and Catherine Christian House on East 12th Avenue. Daniel Christian put up a log cabin on his land claim in 1853 and built this house around 1855. It is the oldest house still standing in Eugene and has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 2008. A man was working out front when we walked up. He told us he worked for the owner, and then he told us the owner had built a lightbox into one of the walls so you could see an original timber in the frame of the house, hewn, he said, from the mill. Then he took us inside and showed us.

Behind the glass is grey, worn wood with old plaster torn back around it and a mark still on its face. Above it, two oval portraits hang on the wall.

Second, north to the edge of downtown, where the mills used to crowd around the old mill pond: a flour mill, a sawmill, a gristmill, a woolen mill, a furniture works, and the George Midgley Planing Mill. Midgley ran his planing mill on the race from 1881. Later he and Frank Chambers bought the Mill Race itself, widened it, and built a wing dam in the Willamette to push more water in. The spot where the planing mill stood is now dry grass behind a chain link fence, with new apartments across the lot. Nothing of the mill is left.

A note on the timber. The house is roughly twenty six years older than the Midgley mill, so if that wood came off the Mill Race, the obvious candidate is the first sawmill on it, put up in 1852 by Hilyard Shaw and his partner William Smith. Shaw is the man who dug the race. That is how the Club ended up on Expedition No. 3.

Hilyard Shaw is the reason there is a Mill Race at all. He came west from Epsom, New Hampshire, looked at two sloughs that did not meet, and had a ditch dug between them in 1851. The university now stands on what was his land claim, and his log cabin stood almost underneath the Condon Oaks. An early history of Eugene adds one more thing: Shaw promised that when he died he would come back and haunt the shadows of those oak trees.

So the Club went to the oaks and kept the field journal live, one photograph at a time. Outside Villard Hall, a basalt column cut CLASS OF 1893, broken across the middle at some point and set back together. The Sunday Oregonian described it in 1913. Beside it, the surviving Condon Oak, plaque reading Class of 1897, the oldest tree on campus, probably older than the state of Oregon. Its twin was taken down in 2004. Up in the crown, the limbs knot and bend into something very much like a hand. The Club has provisionally named it the Shaw Claw. Paranormal significance unverified. Atmospheric significance extraordinary.

Near the tree there is a shallow round dip in the grass. Shaw's cabin was about eight feet by twelve. That proves nothing, and it went in the log anyway. Inside Villard Hall, a case of the building's own history holds a photograph taken from Franklin Boulevard in 1896. At its far left edge is the dark mass of a very big tree. It may well be one of the Condon Oaks, photographed 130 years before the Club stood under it.

Then across town to Mulkey Cemetery, in use since 1853, because Shaw is not under the oaks. He is buried at Mulkey, under a stone carved with a weeping willow, and the other charter member took a rubbing of it.

Finding of the Club: Hilyard Shaw's body is at Mulkey Cemetery. By his own account, the rest of him is at the Condon Oaks. As of 27 October 2026, both have been visited.