The University of Oregon is located on Kalapuya Ilihi, the traditional indigenous homeland of the Kalapuya people. Following treaties between 1851 and 1855, Kalapuya people were dispossessed of their indigenous homeland by the United States government and forcibly removed to the Coast Reservation in Western Oregon. Today, Kalapuya descendants are primarily citizens of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, and they continue to make important contributions in their communities, at the UO, and across the land we now refer to as Oregon.

Initially, Oregon’s Euro-American settlers were more concerned with eking out a living than in the refinements of higher education. But in the early 1870s, Judge Joshua Walton convinced residents of Eugene City to commit to building an institution of higher learning. It would grown into the fledgling state’s flagship university. Then, as now, our roots were in our community. Farmers sold produce and mules, and townspeople held church socials to scrape together $27,500—enough to buy an 18-acre parcel that became the heart of our campus.

In 1876, 155 students showed up for the first day of classes at the University of Oregon. They filed into a single, four-story building in the middle of a muddy clearing, with workers inside still hammering away on the upper floors and cattle grazing in the pasture outside. Two years later, we graduated our first class—three men and two women; precursors to the hundreds of thousands who've since earned their diplomas here. 

From these rustic origins grew one of the nation’s leading research institutions.