40 Fun Facts About Oregon City

Because Oregon City held the West's only federal court in 1849, which California city's founding plat was filed there?

San Francisco's original plat is still kept in Oregon City, in the first plat book of the first office of records on the West Coast.

A coin toss said to have happened in Oregon City's Ermatinger House named Portland instead of which eastern city?

Boston was the choice of Asa Lovejoy, who came from Massachusetts, but Francis Pettygrove won two of three tosses in 1845. The penny they flipped is kept by the Oregon Historical Society.

Oregon City's Municipal Elevator, a free ride up the bluff, is billed as North America's only vertical what?

Street fits because both the top and bottom doors open onto the same numbered road, which the lift is counted as part of. The 1955 tower replaced a slower lift that opened in 1915.

In 1889, a station at Willamette Falls in Oregon City sent what 14 miles to Portland, a first for the United States?

Electricity left the falls on June 3, 1889, over the first long-distance transmission line in the United States. The small firm that built it grew into Portland General Electric.

Gold coins struck in Oregon City in 1849 to ease a cash shortage carried the image of which animal?

Beaver money, as settlers called it, held 8 percent more gold than official U.S. coins. The private mint behind it ran for only about six months.

The observation deck atop Oregon City's 1955 Municipal Elevator gives the tower the look of which object?

A flying saucer was never the plan: the design specifications asked for a tower as plain as possible, without ornament. Riders reach the top in about 15 seconds.

In 1844 Oregon City became the first incorporated U.S. city west of which mountain range?

The Rocky Mountains had no incorporated American city on their far side until Oregon City, which fur trader John McLoughlin had founded beside a waterfall in 1829.

Oregon City was the Oregon Territory's first capital until 1851, when lawmakers moved the government to which city?

Salem took the capital against the wishes of Governor John Gaines. Corvallis held the title briefly in 1855 before the government went back for good.

The piers of Oregon City's 1922 Arch Bridge once held which public facility, sealed up in 1937 after vandalism?

Restrooms sat inside the piers, reached by stairways from the deck, beside small observation balconies. Everything was filled in with concrete after the closure.

Oregon City marked the end of the Oregon Trail, whose best-known starting point was which Missouri town?

Independence lay nearly 2,000 miles east of Oregon City, where many arrivals spent their first winter camped on a meadow before spreading across the Willamette Valley.

Oregon City founder John McLoughlin ran the Columbia District for which British fur-trading firm?

The Hudson's Bay Company posted McLoughlin to the Columbia in 1824. After resigning in 1846 he moved to Oregon City, where his store sold food and farm tools to arriving settlers.

The Willamette Meteorite, found near Oregon City in 1902, went on display four years later in which city?

New York's American Museum of Natural History has displayed the iron since 1906, after a donor bought it and gave it to the museum. It is the largest meteorite ever found in the United States.

The Barlow Road, the Oregon Trail's final leg into Oregon City, crossed the shoulder of which volcano?

Mount Hood offered overland parties a way to skip a costly, dangerous raft trip down the Columbia River. Most later arrivals in the Willamette Valley chose the mountain route.

In Native oral tradition, which trickster hero placed Willamette Falls at Oregon City so people could fish all winter?

Coyote, called T'allapus in the story, set the falls in the river so his people would never go hungry in the cold months. Tribes still gather there each year to harvest ceremonial salmon.

Willamette Falls, the 1,500-foot-wide cataract beside Oregon City, is described as having which shape?

Horseshoe is the outline of the basalt shelf the river drops over, a 40-foot plunge that ranks as the largest waterfall by volume in the Northwest.

As capital from 1848, Oregon City governed a territory covering all of Oregon, Washington and which other state?

Idaho lay inside the original Oregon Territory, along with slices of Montana and Wyoming west of the Continental Divide. Washington Territory was carved off in 1853.

In the 1840s and 1850s, Oregon Trail arrivals made for Oregon City chiefly because it was the place to file what?

Land claims went through the government office in Oregon City, which made the town the trail's official last stop. Newcomers stocked up at its stores, then scattered to farms across the valley.

Oregon City High School won three straight USA Today national championships in the 1990s in which girls' sport?

Basketball made the school a national name: the girls took the USA Today title every year from 1995 to 1997 and won twelve state championships between 1992 and 2014.

Oregon City's first Municipal Elevator, opened in 1915, took three minutes per ride because it ran on what?

Water power moved the first cab so slowly that a 1924 motor conversion cut the trip to 30 seconds. If the lift stalled, riders left through a trap door and climbed down a narrow ladder.

Before entering the fur trade, Oregon City founder John McLoughlin was licensed in 1803 to practice what?

Medicine was his first career, which is why Oregonians still call him Dr. John McLoughlin. His first fur-trade job was as the physician at a trading post on Lake Superior.

Oregon City's Arch Bridge is coated in sprayed concrete to shield its steel from the fumes of which local industry?

Paper mills just upstream gave off sulfur dioxide that eats at steel, so the span became the only bridge in Oregon wrapped in gunite.

John McLoughlin's house in Oregon City belongs to which national historic site based in Washington state?

Fort Vancouver was the fur-trade headquarters McLoughlin ran for two decades. His Oregon City house, saved from demolition and moved up the bluff, joined the park in 2003.

After retiring from the fur trade to Oregon City, John McLoughlin won which local office in 1851 with 44 of 66 votes?

Mayor was a late honor for McLoughlin, who had become a U.S. citizen only two years earlier. He died in 1857 and lies buried beside his house above downtown.

Oregon City's Oregon Spectator, first printed in February 1846, was the first American what on the Pacific coast?

Newspaper printing began on a hand press shipped by sailing vessel around Cape Horn. The owners kept party politics out of the pages for the first four years.

In 1846 Oregon City became the seat of the second Catholic archdiocese in the United States, after which city?

Baltimore alone came first. The archdiocese kept Oregon City's name until 1928, when it was renamed for Portland, by then a much larger city.

Which crooner and film star was pictured adding glamour to the 1945 launch of the cruiser USS Oregon City?

Bing Crosby appeared in press photos of the launch at a Massachusetts shipyard. The ship's bell now sits in Oregon City's Museum of the Oregon Territory.

Which Amtrak service stops at Oregon City's restored Southern Pacific depot on runs between Portland and Eugene?

Cascades trains call at the depot, which was restored and moved to its present site in 2010. The Seattle to Los Angeles Coast Starlight rolls through without stopping.

After finding the Willamette Meteorite near Oregon City, settler Ellis Hughes spent 90 days secretly doing what?

Dragging it home meant shifting more than 15 tons of iron three-quarters of a mile off a steel company's property. The company noticed, sued, and won it back in the Oregon Supreme Court.

The basalt bluff that splits Oregon City in two came from a volcanic field named for which nearby town?

Boring gives its name to a field of small volcanoes scattered around the Portland area. The lava under upper Oregon City flowed about 2.5 million years ago from a vent a few miles southeast.

Which designer, credited with some 500 Oregon bridges, drew up the 1922 arch span over the Willamette at Oregon City?

Conde McCullough is best known for the bridges that carry U.S. Route 101 along the Oregon coast. His obelisk pylons and ornate railings mark the Oregon City crossing too.

The 1850 trial of five Cayuse men, held in an Oregon City tavern, followed the killing of which missionary couple?

The Whitmans and eleven others died in an attack on their mission near Walla Walla, during a measles epidemic that was killing many Cayuse. All five defendants were convicted and hanged.

Which federal agency bought the Willamette Falls Locks, opposite Oregon City, in 1915?

The Army Corps of Engineers took over a four-chamber canal that had opened in 1873, the first time riverboats could pass the falls and reach the upper Willamette Valley.

Which poet, born in Oregon City in 1852, became famous for the poem The Man with the Hoe?

Edwin Markham left Oregon City with his mother at the age of four and grew up in California, yet Oregon made him its poet laureate from 1923 to 1931.

Which Oregon City merchant, elected provisional governor in 1845, gives his name to the city's Interstate 205 bridge?

George Abernethy came to Oregon to run a Methodist mission's store and went on to lead the provisional government until 1849. The freeway bridge named for him opened in 1970.

Joseph Lane, who reached Oregon City in 1849 as the Oregon Territory's first governor, was appointed by which president?

James K. Polk gave the post to Lane, a general just back from the Mexican-American War. Lane's first official act in Oregon City was to order a census, which counted 8,785 American citizens.

Which fur trader buried in Oregon City's Mountain View Cemetery is the namesake of a city in Utah?

Peter Skene Ogden explored the Great Salt Lake country in 1828 and 1829, then retired to Oregon City, where he died in 1854. Ogden, Utah, takes its name from him.

Which tribal confederation bought Oregon City's closed Blue Heron site beside Willamette Falls in 2019?

Grand Ronde was one of the reservations the falls' own villagers were removed to in the 1850s. The tribes named the site tumwata village, after a Chinook Jargon word for waterfall.

Besides salmon, which fish do tribes still collect each summer at Willamette Falls beside Oregon City?

Lamprey are a ceremonial food for Columbia Basin tribes, and dams have left the falls as almost the only place where a harvest is still possible.

Oregon City native Susan Ruttan earned four Emmy nominations as secretary Roxanne Melman on which legal drama?

L.A. Law kept Ruttan busy from 1986 to 1993, and she returned to the part for a reunion film in 2002. She grew up in Oregon City as a logger's daughter.

No crater marks where the Willamette Meteorite was found near Oregon City; what is thought to have carried it there?

Glacial floods at the end of the last Ice Age are thought to have swept the ice-bound iron down from Montana or Canada, about 13,000 years ago.