August 22, 2000

Contact Pauline Austin (541) 346-3129

EUGENE–Perched on the roof of one of the oldest houses in Eugene, University of Oregon of architecture professor Don Peting is explaining to a half dozen students why it’s important to restore the 112-year-old Queen Anne building to its former glory.

"We understand history mostly from books," he says, "but buildings speak to us in other ways–by helping us understand how the past has shaped the places we live."

The students, some of whom seem uneasy with their perch on the third-floor roof of the Shelton-McMurphy-Johnson house, nonetheless listen intently as Peting describes the connections between the house and Eugene’s past.

Peting points out the site at the foot of the hill where mills and warehouses once stood in testament to the economic optimism that attracted T.W. Shelton–the physician and pharmacist who built the house–to Eugene. Peting then points up the hill towards the site of the town’s earliest water reservoir, for which Shelton–a doctor and man of science–lobbied.

The history lesson ended, the group scrambles back down to more stable footing on the main floors where they soon will pick up hammers and chisels and start to work.

These students have traveled from the East Coast, the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest to attend the UO’s nationally respected Pacific Northwest Summer Preservation Field School and learn how to restore this house. Over the next four weeks, these and other students will carefully chip crumbling mortar from the foundation of the house and repair years of water damage to window sills.

Erica Burns, an art history student from the University of Washington, delicately pulls an ornately carved board from a window to expose the crumbling wood beneath. Burns, a native of Milwaukee, Wis., became interested in preservation when, as a child, she watched developers bulldoze the city’s historic buildings one by one. "We lost a lot of our history then," she says.

The Shelton-McMurphy-Johnson House, now owned by the city of Eugene, is one in a series of historic Northwest buildings to benefit from the field school. In 1995, the program cut its teeth by repairing 111-year-old round barn built in Oregon’s high desert country by cattle baron Peter French.

Other field schools have focused on the Cape Blanco Lighthouse in Curry County, two former Army forts near the Columbia River and a summer camp at Silver Falls State Park built in the 1930s by the federal Work Projects Administration.

"We’re not just preserving buildings, we’re maintaining traditional crafts that have nearly disappeared. At the same time we’re teaching the students and our host communities about restoration philosophy," says John Platz, an architect and engineer who teaches at the school. Platz, along with Peting and Henry Kunowski–then a project manager with the Oregon State Parks and Recreation Department–was a key player in founding the first field school in 1995.

The local communities Platz mentioned aren’t the only beneficiaries of the program. From the first year, the field school has drawn national attention to the UO’s historic preservation program. Peting says a significant number of the participants decide to enroll full time in the UO program after spending a week or two working on the projects.

Sponsors of this year’s UO Field School include the City of Eugene, the National Park Service, the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department, the Oregon State Historic Preservation Office, the Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission, the Washington State Office of Archaeology and Historic Preservation and Oregon State University

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