Young Oon Kim and Her Members Move from Oakhill, Oregon to San Francisco

Young Oon Kim with early members gathered at Oak Hill including Doris Walder Orme, Patty and Galen Pumphrey, Pauline Phillips Verheyen, and Eileen Welch.

Young Oon Kim, “Miss Kim” to early American members, was the first Unification Church missionary to the United States. A former professor at Ehwa University in Seoul, she came to Eugene, Oregon, as an exchange student at the University of Oregon in January 1959. There she witnessed and gathered a small community who resided in Oakhill, a rural settlement outside Eugene. The group dedicated themselves to outreach and production of Miss Kim’s English translation of the Divine Principle text.

In September 1960, two female members fled Oakhill due to persecution from their husbands. They went first to Fresno, California, then to San Francisco. In part, because their husbands continued to harass the group, mainly by target shooting in the field across from where Miss Kim lived, she and three of her core members decided to relocate. Miss Kim wrote:

Eugene was a small, conservative city, where I went not by choice, but to follow my scholarship. Next I went to Oakhill, which was only a small settlement in the countryside. There I spent time raising those who had accepted and deepening their understanding of the Principle, as well as teaching the Principle in Lebanon, Salem, Albany, and Portland. … I found Oregon quite provincial on the whole, though, and was not reluctant to leave. I yearned to launch my work in a cosmopolitan city. I now had a textbook for wider work. … It seemed like this was where Father was leading me.

Miss Kim’s group severed ties irrevocably with the Northwest and began a new chapter of Unification Church history in the San Francisco Bay Area.