The Randall V. Mills Memorial Archive of Northwest Folklore

Abstract

The Special Collections Division of the University of Oregon Library, under its able and indefatigable curator, Martin Schmitt, has long been engaged in the collection of materials pertinent to the settlement of the Northwest and to the culture and lives of early inhabitants. Until some ten or twelve years ago, however, little attempt was made to separate the strictly historical from the traditional in all the varied and extensive collections housed here. In the late 1940's and early 1950's Randall V. Mills, Professor of English at the University and first president of the Oregon Folklore Society, began to augment the holdings of Special Collections with the fruits of his own collecting in the Pacific Northwest and California. Though his untimely death in 1952 caused a serious decline in many folklore undertakings then in progress, his collections served thereafter as the nucleus for a modest but continually growing body of traditional Northwest materials presently being archived at the University of Oregon