1. Home
  2. »
  3. Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center
Painted Hills

Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center

Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center

"Maxville" was the railroad logging town that existed about 15 miles north of Wallowa, Oregon. The Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center serves as a platform to unify multiple cultures through educational programs, exhibits, and events. The Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center seeks to gather, catalog, preserve, and interpret the rich history of the multicultural logging community of Maxville, Oregon as well as similar communities in the Pacific Northwest.

Maxville 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 only made small mention of these African-Americans. In the last three years, the Maxville Heritage Project has fostered a reawakening of interest in this rich chapter of history through public lectures and school visits, an Elder-hostel lecture, AP articles and an OPB broadcast spotlighting this unique local history. With the ground swell of historic artifacts and stories emerging from descendants and those with relationships to people from Maxville, a large number of video, image, audio and textual digital files, and hard copy images have been collected.

Displays include information about the loggin and railroad industry from Early 1920s-1940s.

Contact Info

403 N Main Street
Joseph, OR