THE HISTORY OF MILO "JUDD" SKINNER

The Historic Skinner House is named after Milo "Judd" Skinner, and his wife Emma Skinner, who had the house built for them in 1920-22 and lived here for many years. Judd Skinner was born on September 2, 1874. In 1877, Judd's father and mother, Sarah Skinner, along with their five surviving children, including Judd, came to Oregon by covered wagon, leaving behind their friends, relatives, home, and almost all of their belongings. They crossed the rugged plains, deserts, mountains and rivers of the Western U.S. in a covered wagon, pulled by a team of oxen; a journey that took them over six months.

The Skinner family settled in Coburg, Oregon, and became important early citizens of the young town. Even today, a Coburg street is still named for the Skinners. At age 25, Judd Skinner married Emma Wilkinson at her parents' home in Coburg. Judd Skinner loved adventure and excitement, and Skinner family lore has it that the night before his marriage, he won a house in Eugene in a high-stakes poker game. He and Emma later lived in that house when they first moved to Eugene.

Judd worked for the Booth Kelly Lumber Company, a pioneering timber company. It became the most important and influential lumber company in Oregon's Willamette Valley, and was the first Willamette Valley business to conduct interstate trade. He began as a basic unskilled worker but was soon promoted to being the foreman in charge of the river-borne log drives down the McKenzie River. When Booth-Kelly decided to move their operations and headquarters to Eugene in 1909, Judd Skinner and his family moved to Eugene as well.

Judd was promoted to Logging Superintendent for Booth-Kelly, and helped coordinate early forest fire fighting efforts on both private forest lands and in the national forests as well. Judd was fascinated by the "flying machines" that first visited Lane County in 1918, and shortly afterwards he initiated the use of airplanes for fire spotting patrols. This brought many interesting early pilots to Eugene. The most famous pilot who came to Eugene for these early fire patrols was Lowell Smith.

Judd Skinner, along with Lowell Smith and others, helped forge a role for the use of airplanes in fighting forest fires, one that has become enormously important today. Starting with the early airborne fire patrols initiated by Judd Skinner, the role of airplanes in fighting forest fires has grown to include the regular use of fire patrol planes, huge tanker planes and helicopters that drop fire retardant liquid on wildfires, and specialized aircraft with remote sensing equipment that provide vital information to fire management teams on the ground. Airplanes are also still used to bring Smokejumpers who parachute into the forest to make swift initial attacks on forest fires in many remote, mountainous areas of the West. All of this is, at least in part, the result of Judd Skinner's his firm belief that planes had an important role to play in protecting our forests from wildfires.

Milo "Judd" Skinner died of a sudden heart attack at age 62. The front page of the Eugene Register-Guard told Eugene citizens of his death the next morning. Judd Skinner, who came to Lane County in a covered wagon with almost nothing, had invested a lifetime of honest, hard work to help build Eugene, and at the end of his life here he was a respected, important and well known man who had helped shape our City's history.