On January 5, 1945, the State of Oregon executed Robert Folkes, a twenty-one-year-old Black railroad worker and labor unionist. His arrest, trial, imprisonment, and futile …

Oregon Encyclopedia

Oregon is home to about 120 farmers’ markets, a form of farm-direct marketing that is at once ancient and relatively new. For centuries, farmers have …

Oregon Encyclopedia

From the mid-1840s until the 1950s, fields of blue-flowering flax flourished in the fertile Willamette Valley to support the only flax industry in the United …

Oregon Encyclopedia

White supremacy dominated opposition to slavery in mid-nineteenth-century Oregon and shaped the conservatism of its Civil War-era Republican Party. But when the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act …

Oregon Encyclopedia

Talk of building a long-distance electric interurban railway south from Portland along the west bank of the Willamette River began in the 1890s. The proposed …

Oregon Encyclopedia

Sam Simpson was a singer of love songs to Oregon. In 1899, Judge John Burnett called him “the [Robert] Burns of Oregon…who could make the …

Oregon Encyclopedia

Between 1869 and 1887, Warren Haywood Williams provided sophisticated architectural design to commercial, residential, and institutional clients in the Pacific Northwest. His most successful buildings …

Oregon Encyclopedia

The Willamette Valley, bounded on the west by the Coast Range and on the east by the Cascades, is the largest river valley in …

Oregon Encyclopedia

Outspoken and often controversial, Abigail Scott Duniway is remembered as Oregon's Mother of Equal Suffrage and "the pioneer Woman Suffragist of the great Northwest." As …

Oregon Encyclopedia

Ada Hastings Hedges, poetry editor Borghild Lee wrote in the March 14, 1926, Oregon Journal, “is an exquisite artist…one of the most finished poets …

Oregon Encyclopedia