History Minutes: Reuben Shipley and Mary Jane Holmes Shipley

          Mary Jane Shipley // OrHi 89474

This Sesquicentennial History Minute is from The Oregon Encyclopedia, a statewide project supported by Portland State University, the Oregon Historical Society, and the Oregon Council of Teachers of English, with generous support from the Oregon Cultural Trust.  This History Minute is from an entry written by Peggy Lindquist.

Reuben Shipley, a slave, traveled to Oregon Country with his owner in the 1850s, after making a deal to trade his services on the trail for his freedom when they arrived.  Once in Oregon, he worked to earn enough money to purchase his wife and children, still held in slavery in Missouri, only to learn that his wife had died.  Even though African Americans were officially prohibited from owning land in Oregon, Shipley managed to buy eighty acres of land between Corvallis and Philomath for $1,500.  Then he asked for Mary Jane Holmes’s hand in marriage.

Mary Jane was the daughter of slaves Robin and Polly Holmes, who had come west with their owner Nathaniel Ford in 1844, the same year the provisional government passed the Lash Law prohibiting both slavery and black settlement.  Ford freed Mary Jane’s parents after they had labored for years without pay, but he kept custody of their children. After one of the children died, Robin Holmes went to court to regain the other three.  Oregon Supreme Court Justice George H. Williams ruled that because slavery was outlawed in the territory, Ford had no legal right to the children.  He granted custody to their parents—all except Mary Jane, the oldest daughter.  She remained with Ford, who demanded $700 from Reuben Shipley before he would release her.

Reuben and Mary Jane Shipley raised three girls and two boys on their farm. In 1861, they deeded two acres for the Mt. Union Cemetery, where they and their children are buried, along with some of the region’s early abolitionists.