John Whiteaker (4 May 1820-2 October 1902) was the Democratic Governor of Oregon from 8 July 1858 to 10 September 1862 (succeeding territorial governor George Law Curry and preceding A.C. Gibbs) and a member of the US House of Representatives from 4 March 1879 to 3 March 1881 (succeeding Richard Williams and preceding Melvin Clark George).
Biography[]
John Whiteaker was born in Dearborn County, Indiana on 4 May 1820, and he was almost entirely self-educated. He joined the California Gold Rush in 1849 before settling on a farm in the Willamette Valley of Oregon in 1852, and he became a Democratic probate court judge in Lane County before being elected to the territorial legislature in 1857. From 1858 to 1862, Whiteaker served as the first Governor of Oregon, promoting policies favoring home industries; however, his support for slavery led to his opponents deriding him as a traitor during the American Civil War. He returned to the State House from 1866 to 1870 and served in the US House of Representatives from 1879 to 1881; the Democratic Party spent near-ruinous amounts of money on ensuring that Whiteaker could make it to Washington DC in time to cast the deciding vote in favor of a Democratic Speaker of the House. He was defeated for re-election in 1880 and settled on a farm in Eugene, and he briefly served as a customs collector in Portland from 1885 to 1890 before retiring to Eugene. He died there in 1902, and Eugene's Whiteaker neighborhood is named in his honor.