Description
"Maxville" was the railroad logging town that existed about 15 miles north of Wallowa, Oregon. The emergence of the Maxville Project reflects the local community's deep appreciation for the preservation of its oral history, photographs, historical structures, and forested landscape.
The Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center will serve as a platform to unify the multiple cultures through educational programs, exhibits, and events. The Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center seeks to gather, catalog, preserve, and interpret the rich history of the multicultural logging community of Maxville, Oregon as well as similar communities in the Pacific Northwest. Maxville itself operated until the early 1930s and was unique in that it included 50 or so African Americans and their families and was home to the only segregated school in Oregon. Previously, historic records only made small mention of these African-Americans. In the last three years, the Maxville Heritage Project has fostered a reawakening of interest in this rich chapter of history through public lectures and school visits, an Elder-hostel lecture, AP articles and an OPB broadcast spotlighting this unique local history. With the ground swell of historic artifacts and stories emerging from descendants and those with relationships to people from Maxville, a large number of video, image, audio and textual digital files, and hard copy images have been collected.
Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center is a fully organized charitable organization. From California to Washington D.C., our governing board members are a diverse group of national, regional, and local volunteers dedicated to educating the public about the significant history of Maxville, Oregon and similar communities in the Pacific Northwest.
Educational outreach with local school districts and universities as well as historical/ archeological studies of the town site are both programs under development.
