Archives West Finding Aid

The Kuykendall Family Collection consists primarily of the papers of Dr. William K. Kuykendall, born in Wilbur, Oregon in 1855, the son of John and Malinda (Stark) Kuykendall. John Kuykendall (1820-1895) was born in Indiana and was a carpenter by trade. He brought his family overland to Oregon in 1852, traveling with his brother George. He worked for the Federal Government in various Indian agencies, including the Klamath Agency around 1874. In 1876 he lived for a time in Santa Rosa, California. He and his wife Malinda had nine children and eventually settled in Drain, Oregon, in 1883.

John and Melinda's son William K. Kuykendall, a physician, graduated from the Cooper Medical College, San Francisco. He began his practice in Drain, Oregon in 1878 and continued there until 1888 when he moved to Eugene and practiced there for the next forty-six years. In 1876, he married Mary Ada Alysom with whom he had eight children. In addition to medicine, Dr. Kuykendall was the mayor of Eugene in 1898 when he was elected to the Oregon State Senate where he served for nine years, 1898-1906. As an Oregon State Senator, he introduced the first bill establishing high schools in the state. In 1897, he founded the first hospital in Eugene, and with a group of physicians he founded the Eugene Hospital and Clinic in 1922.

Among the children of William K. and Mary Kuykendall was William Alysom Kuykendall (1877-1960) a druggist in Eugene and later in Portland. In 1898 he married Abigail (Abbie) Hemenway, a member of a large Eugene family. They had two daughers, Jean Alysom Kuykendall (b. 1911), who worked as a nurse in Portland; and Helene Kuykendall Deadman (1899-1998), who graduated from the University of Oregon in 1922 and married William Webster Deadman. Other children of William K. and Mary Kuykendall were: Delmon Vernon (1878 -1952) a judge in Klamath Falls; Sybil (b. 1880) who married Robert Smith, a Portland banker; Nellie (1882-1884); John Eberle (1885-1919) who practiced medicine in Eugene with his father until World War I, when he served in the Ninety First Division and died in France; Mabel (1886-1978), who married to R. Dell McCarty, a grocer in Portland; Robert (1891-1930), a lawyer in Klamath Falls; and Ada (1893-1898). Among the family of Abigail Hemenway Kuykendall was her sister Ida, who married Frank B. Hale, who worked for the water department of the City of Portland.