Eugene is named after its founder, Eugene SkinnerEugene Franklin Skinner. In 1846, Skinner erected the first cabin in the area. It was used as a trading post and was dubbed as a post office in 1850. Skinner founded Eugene in 1862 and later ran a ferry service across the Willamette River where the Ferry Street Bridge now stands. Columbia College was founded around the same area as the University of Oregon, a few years earlier, but fell victim to two different major fires over four years, and it was decided not to rebuild it again. Even today, people commonly refer to a part of south Eugene as "College Hill," because it was the former location of Columbia College (there is no college there today). The town raised the initial funding to start a public University, which later became the University of Oregon, with the hope of turning the small town into a cultural center of learning. In 1872, the Oregon Legislative AssemblyLegislative Assembly passed a bill ratifying the University. The nearby town of Albany was Eugene's biggest competitor to provide a home for this institute. In 1873, community member J. H. D. Henderson donated the hilltop land for the campus, overlooking the city. The University first opened in 1876 with regents electing first faculty and naming John Wesley Johnson as president with the first students registering on 16 October, 1876. It would not be until 1877 that the first building would be completed; it would be later known as Deady Hall (for the first Board of Regents President and community leader Judge Matthew DeadyMatthew P. Deady.) The University of Oregon has been a leader in diversity since its very beginning; its inaugural class included two Japanese students. However, today less than 400 of the approximate 16,000 undergrads are African-American. Eugene is the home of Oregon's largest publicly owned electric utility, the Eugene Water & Electric Board, which got its start in the first decade of the 20th century after a typhoid epidemic was traced to the groundwater supply. Eugene condemned the private utility and began treating river water (first the Willamette, but now the McKenzie) for domestic use. EWEB got into the electric business when power was needed for the water pumps and excess electricity was used for street lighting. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene%2C_Oregon