Author's Entries

• Adair Village

  The city of Adair Village is located in Benton County about seven miles north of Corvallis along Highway 99W. The name is derived from Camp Adair, a World War II training camp that encompassed more than 50,000 acres. The camp hosted as many as 45,000 troops and military personnel between …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Ainsworth House (Mount Pleasant)

  The Ainsworth House was built in 1851 on the high land east of Oregon City for Capt. John C. Ainsworth (1822-1893). Known as Mount Pleasant, the house was probably designed by one of Oregon’s earliest architects, Absalom B. Hallock. Mount Pleasant is regarded as a fine example of the …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Albert and Nancy Applegate Century Ranch

  The modest peaks of the Calapooya Mountains rise south of the Willamette Valley. Named for the Kalapuya Indians who lived there, the mountains straddle the ancient trail that connected western Oregon with the valleys of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers to the south. Early Euro-American emigrants were attracted …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Amity

  Amity is situated in southern Yamhill County along Salt Creek near its confluence with Ash Swale and at the base of the Amity Hills. Farmers began settling in the valley in the 1840s, and in 1849 families made plans to establish a school. The site for the school was hotly …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Augustin and Marie Raymond Farm

  The farm established by Augustin and Marie Raymond in about 1842 is in the mid-Willamette Valley in what is today known as French Prairie. The Kalapuya Indians of the Willamette Valley made good use of the fertile lands there, where the open landscape, kept clear by strategic burning, …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Beaver gold coins

  Beaver gold coins, in five-dollar and ten-dollar denominations, were created in 1849 to fill a commercial need in the new Oregon Territory, where currency consisted of “beaver skins, wheat, bills, drafts and orders, gold dust and silver coins of Mexico and Peru, all of changing and uncertain value.” Goods such …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Benjamin and Sarah Davenport Ranch (Kow Kamp Ranch)

  The Benjamin and Sarah Davenport Ranch is in the Waldo Hills southeast of Salem, a rolling landscape of fertile soil with a network of creeks tributary to the Pudding River. The homeland of the Santiam and Ahantchuyuk Kalapuya people, the hills were a destination for mid-nineteenth century EuroAmerican immigrants …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Bosco-Milligan Foundation

  The Bosco-Milligan Foundation of Portland was founded in 1987 by Jerry Bosco and Ben Milligan to protect their collection of architectural elements and to further the cause of education about the city’s architectural history. The foundation operates the Architectural Heritage Center, which carries on a program of lectures, house and …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Buchanan Family Farm and Tyee Wine Cellars

  The Buchanan Family Century Farm is located in Benton County near the rural community of Greenberry, at the confluence of Beaver and Muddy Creeks. The bucolic landscape is the homeland of Kalapuya Indians, whose territory extended from today’s Washington County through the Willamette Valley and south to the area …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Buckhorn Mineral Springs Resort

  Buckhorn Mineral Springs is on Emigrant Creek, about eleven miles southeast of Ashland in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, located in a part of Oregon where the ancient Siskiyou Mountains adjoin the recent volcanism of the Cascade Range. One of a number of mineralized hot and cold springs in the region, …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Champoeg

  The town of Champoeg had a brief but memorable life. Instigated by geographic advantage in the 1830s, Champoeg was swept away by devastating Willamette River floods in 1861 and 1862. While the town persisted as a rural riverside community, it failed to recover or to bloom as a center of …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Clara Cynthia Munson (1861–1938)

  Clara Cynthia Munson had a brief but shining moment in Oregon history when she was elected mayor of the small city of Warrenton, on the Oregon Coast southwest of Astoria. In balloting held only a month after the statewide election of 1912 gave women the vote in Oregon, Munson became …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Coalcas Pillar

  Coalcas Pillar is a rock formation—an eroded basalt plug—located on a bluff overlooking the Willamette River about five miles south of Oregon City. Somewhat mushroom-shaped, about thirty feet in height, and often inaccurately described as a “balancing rock,” the pillar has long been a landmark for travelers along the …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Community of Airlie

  The unincorporated Polk County community of Airlie began as the terminus of a railroad that planned to connect the rich farms of the southern Willamette Valley with Portland markets. William Reid, a Glasgow-born attorney who came to Oregon in 1874 as a representative of Scottish investors, established the narrow-gauge Oregonian …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Dorothy Olga Johansen (1904-1999)

  Dorothy Olga Johansen was a prominent Pacific Northwest historian and educator who taught at Reed College in Portland. She was born in Seaside on May 19, 1904, graduated from Astoria High School in 1922, and attended Oregon Normal School (now Western Oregon University), where she earned a teaching …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Hanley Farm

  The Hanley Farm, situated along Jackson Creek about two miles northeast of Jacksonville, is a historic farmstead owned by the Southern Oregon Historical Society. Placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983, the Hanley Farm has a main residence, two large barns, a stone springhouse, and a …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Henry Theophilus Finck (1854–1926)

  Music critic Henry T. Finck spent his childhood on an apple orchard near the Christian agricultural colony of Aurora, in the lower Willamette Valley. The first Oregonian to graduate from Harvard, Finck was a prolific writer and critic of contemporary music. He also wrote about horticulture, romantic love, …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Henry Thiele (1882-1952)

  Henry Thiele was a Portland restaurateur, chef, and socialite whose eponymous restaurant was a city landmark for more than a half century. His culinary accomplishments made a distinct impression on Oregon food maven James A. Beard, who experienced Thiele’s cooking in his youth and described him as having “a …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Hillcrest Orchard

  Hillcrest Orchard has been the name of a farm on the slopes of Roxy Ann Peak in the Rogue River Valley since 1903. It was honored in 2008 as an Oregon Century Farm, a recognition that for a hundred years the property was continuously owned and worked as a farm …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Iwasaki Brothers Nursery

  The Iwasaki Brothers Nursery, located on the southern edge of Hillsboro in Washington County, is on the fertile Tualatin Plains along the Tualatin River. It is the homeland of the Tualatin people, but during the early to mid-nineteenth century the plains became a coveted locale for agricultural settlement by …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Oregon Historical Society

  The Oregon Historical Society is a private museum, archival library, and educational institution headquartered in downtown Portland. It was founded on December 17, 1898, with the purpose of forwarding the “collection, preservation, exhibition, and publication of material of a historical character, especially that relating to the history of Oregon …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Oregon, My Oregon (state song)

  Oregon’s state song, “Oregon, My Oregon,” was composed by Henry B. Murtagh with lyrics by John Andrew Buchanan. Published in December 1920, it is a general paean to Oregon's scenic beauty and a tribute to the state's EuroAmerican settlers. The Oregon legislature designated “Oregon, My Oregon” as the state song …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Peter Britt (1819-1905)

  Peter Britt is best known as an accomplished photographer and horticulturist in Jackson County. But according to his biographer, he was also "by turns, miner, mule train packer, bee-keeper, financier, property magnate, government meteorologist, first vintner in the Oregon Territory and a father of the region's fruit industry." Britt was …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Portland Public Market

  Designated "market squares" were once common in American city plans, and Portland's 1853 plat identified two blocks that served this purpose. One of those blocks, currently the site of Keller Auditorium, was used sporadically for public market purposes between about 1890 and 1911. A privately operated market opened in …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Rose Garbow Naftalin (1898–1998)

  Rose Naftalin was a restauranteur and cookbook author in Portland and the founder of Rose’s, a Kosher-style delicatessen that was legendary for its impressive desserts and huge sandwiches. Rose's opened in 1956 on Northwest 23rd Avenue at the western edge of downtown, one block north of another celebrated Portland restaurant, …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Sarah S. Benson Farm (Lillian Ayres Cox Farm)

  The Lane County farm of Sarah Scott Benson was one of 354 properties inducted into the Oregon Century Farm & Ranch Program in 1958, its first year. Sarah “Sally” Benson (1819–1899) arrived in Oregon Territory in June 1851. A widow with four young daughters, she soon established a farmstead in …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Shanghaiing in Portland and the Shanghai Tunnels Myth

  Since the 1970s, a myth has grown up that propounds the existence of a secret network of tunnels beneath the streets and buildings of the Portland waterfront. The tunnels are said to have been constructed to support the illegal practice of forcibly supplying crews to outbound sailing ships in the …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Yachats

  Yachats (pronounced YAH-hots) is a small resort town on the northern flank of Cape Perpetua, perched above a rocky shoreline and the crashing surf of the Pacific Ocean. Located at the mouth of the Yachats River, the town’s scenic qualities were long appreciated, but until the completion of the …

  Oregon Encyclopedia

• Zimmerman Heritage Farm

  The Zimmerman Heritage Farm in Gresham consists of an 1874 farmhouse on 5.98 acres, the remnant of a large dairy farm operated by the family of Jacob (1816–1899) and Lena (1827–1887) Zimmerman and their descendants. The Fairview–Rockwood Wilkes Historical Society operates the site as a historic house museum. Both Jacob …

  Oregon Encyclopedia