Frederic Homer Balch was the first Pacific Northwest fiction writer to cast Native Americans as major characters and the first to celebrate the region's geography …

Oregon Encyclopedia

The first steam locomotive in the Pacific Northwest—the "Oregon Pony"—was used in the early 1860s to portage steamboat passengers and goods past the Cascade Rapids, …

Oregon Encyclopedia

In the early 1900s, the booming economy of Haines earned it the title of the Biggest Little Town in Oregon. Although Astorian expedition leader Wilson …

Oregon Encyclopedia

Yaquina City was a railroad boomtown on the upper reaches of Yaquina Bay, three to four miles east of Newport on the central Oregon Coast. …

Oregon Encyclopedia

Henry Villard gained national significance as a journalist, advocate of abolition, and railroad financier. For Oregon, he is best remembered as the man who brought …

Oregon Encyclopedia

Banks is a small town about twenty-five miles west of Portland. The seeds of the community were sown in the mid nineteenth century, when …

Oregon Encyclopedia

James Jerome Hill was one of the United States’ preeminent railroad managers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As the long-time president of …

Oregon Encyclopedia

Philip Foster was the second treasurer of Oregon’s Provisional Government, but it was financing Sam Barlow’s 1846 toll road around Mount Hood to Oregon …

Oregon Encyclopedia

Arlington, about fifty miles east of The Dalles, is on the Columbia River at the mouth of Alkali Canyon. In the early 1870s, settlers …

Oregon Encyclopedia

One of the more successful American utopian communal societies in the nineteenth century was founded on the Pudding River in Marion County in 1856. Named …

Oregon Encyclopedia