McClanahan, Ed

From Lane Co Oregon

They called him “Lord Chesterfield,” due to his dapper dress and long, white beard. His name was Ed McClanahan (1844-1928), and for many years he drove sections of the main stagecoach line from Sacramento to Portland. Stage drivers were important people in the 1860s, and McClanahan counted among his passengers Horace Greeley, Ben Holladay, and Mark Twain. “Them was good old days,” he remarked in later years. In Eugene, he dealt in real estate, construction, sawmilling, and farm produce. In the early 1900s he developed a chicken incubator that brought him a national reputation. He lived for sixty years on the millrace in Eugene, where he rented boats, largely to UO students, when canoeing on the waterway became popular around the turn of the century. He was one of Eugene’s more picturesque characters, said the Wilkins sisters in their 1949 book, The Story of Eugene, and “resembled Santa Claus more than anyone but himself.”