Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center

Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to collection, preservation and interpretation of the rich history of the multicultural logging community of Maxville, Oregon, and similar communities in the Pacific Northwest. We celebrate the contributions of these isolated communities in the integration of African Americans and other nationalities over the past 100 years.

Maxville was an early 20th Century railroad logging town about 15 miles north of Wallowa, Oregon. The emergence of the MHIC reflects local residents’ deep appreciation for the preservation of its oral history, photographs, historical structures and forested landscape.

The Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center serves as a platform to unify the multiple cultures represented at Maxville through educational programs, exhibits and events.

MHIC seeks to gather, catalog, preserve and interpret Maxville’s rich historyMaxville 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 made small mention of these African-Americans. In recent years, MHIC has fostered a reawakening of interest in this rich chapter of history through public lectures and school visits, an elder-hostel lecture, newspaper and magazine articles and an Oregon Public Broadcasting broadcast spotlighting its unique local history.

With the groundswell of historic artifacts and stories emerging from descendants and those with relationships to people from Maxville, we have collected a large number of video, image, audio and textual digital files and hard-copy images.