Standing as it does at the very beginning of Eugene's educational development, Columbia College has exerted a profound influence upon the later school history of the town. The people here, many of whom had been its students, never forgot in the struggles of latter years that this place had once been an important center of learning. To this fact I believe may be attributed much of the ardor shown a decade and more later in the pursuit of the university object. On the other hand it seems not unlikely that the influence of the college was to retard, temporarily, the development of the public school. It was difficult for people accustomed to patronize the more pretentious institution to be satisfied with the humble district school, while the town was not ready to supply at once the kind of secondary school demanded. In other words, the college had made it impossible, for the time, to concentrate educational effort upon the public school, which might have resulted in gradually extending its scope so as to embrace a high school department.
Instead of such a normal development, which the policy of very many towns in the United States was readily securing at that time, the people of Eugene fell back upon the private school idea. Institutions of every grade, kind and description, rose, flourished or languished, and decayed. There were grammar schools, select schools, academies, high schools, juvenile schools, writing schools, singing schools, even sewing schools. Only one or two had any sort of permanency. It is slanderous, of course, to assert, as a minister of the gospel once did, that whenever a young woman of Eugene wanted a new bonnet, she would advertise to keep a private school; but the libel is at least suggestive of the condition of things here from 1860 to 1872. Some of these private schools were worthy institutions, conducted by able teachers who served the community faithfully in the days when with-
