Eugene’s beloved Sam Bond’s Garage isn’t going anywhere.
Ian Hill, the Eugene businessman who bought the Whiteaker bar in December, plans to reopen in late May or early June. He’s keeping the Sam Bond’s name and most everything else about the place.
“We’re largely going to keep it as it has been,” Hill says, “but just make some needed renovations and adjustments into a new era.”
Hill and his wife, Grace Hill, moved to Eugene from Kentucky in 1997, around the same time Sam Bond’s opened as a music venue. It’s been a part of their life here ever since. His memories of the place are fond ones: Walking through the door to musicians warming up on stage. Friends waiting for him at a table.
“The idea of it just going away was despairing,” Hill says. “The opportunity that we had to be in a position where we could jump in and try to be a part of bringing it back and keeping it in the community — that just seemed a great place to put energy and resources.”
The plan is to keep the bar a small music venue with eclectic food and the same energy. The building, a squeaky tight 1,800 square feet, is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Located in the Eugene Blair Boulevard Historic Commercial Area, the designation limits the changes that can be made.
Sam Bond’s closed Dec. 1, 2025 after 30 years. Two and a half weeks later, the building sold. Lane County records show that Hill, acting through his company, Bluegrass LLC, closed the sale on Dec. 18. The sale had not previously been publicly reported.
Hill is not entirely unknown around here. He previously owned the popular counter-culture gas station SeQuential Biofuels, on McVay Highway, off Interstate 5. He sold that property last year for $2.5 million, according to the deed.
Hill bought the Sam Bond’s building for an undisclosed amount. County records put the building’s real market value at about $445,000, though the May listing price was closer to $1 million, which included business assets, presumably the name, equipment and inventory of Sam Bond’s.
Longtime Sam Bond’s owners Mark Jaeger, Bart Caridio, and Todd Davis operated the business under the company name JDC LLC. According to the Oregon Secretary of State’s business registry, Caridio co-owns Axe and Fiddle in Cottage Grove, Plank Town Brewing Co. in Springfield, and had Hilltop Bar & Grill in Pleasant Hill, which has since closed.
The SeQuential experience taught Hill how to run a business at the local scale. More than that, both businesses served as community centers, places people “flowed in and out of as they were living their lives,” Hill says. “That’s an awesome thing to be a part of.”
SeQuential became untenable due to fuel economics, Hill says. But Sam Bond’s will be different.
“This is a business that can hopefully survive for generations,” he says. “It’s more like we’re a caretaker for this one, whereas SeQuential was kind of an experiment that had a life to it.”
Bricks $ Mortar is a column anchored by Christian Wihtol, who worked as an editor and writer at The Register-Guard in Eugene 1990-2018, much of the time focused on real estate, economic development and business. Reach him at Christian@EugeneWeekly.com.