100 Fun Facts About Oregon

What is the capital of Oregon?

Salem has had to rebuild its capitol twice: fires destroyed the statehouse in 1855 and again in 1935, and the present marble building was finished in 1938.

Oregon became the 33rd state in 1859 on which holiday?

Valentine's Day 1859 ended a long wait: Oregonians had ratified their state constitution in November 1857, fifteen months before Congress admitted them.

Which river forms most of Oregon's eastern border with Idaho?

The Snake marks the Idaho line for more than 200 miles, and in 1805 Lewis and Clark became the first outsiders known to see it on their way to the Pacific.

Which Cascade volcano is the highest point in Oregon?

Mount Hood has a film credit too: Timberline Lodge, high on its slopes, supplied the exterior of the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.

Which lake, the deepest in the United States, lies at the heart of Oregon's only national park?

Crater Lake has no rivers flowing in or out: it is filled only by rain and snow, which helps make its water some of the clearest of any lake.

Which volcano's collapse about 7,700 years ago created the centrepiece of Oregon's only national park?

Mount Mazama emptied itself in a huge eruption and fell in; later eruptions inside the hollow built Wizard Island before rain and snow filled it.

Which organism beneath a national forest in Oregon's Blue Mountains is often called the largest living thing on Earth?

A honey fungus nicknamed the Humongous Fungus lies mostly out of sight: it creeps through the soil along black, shoestring-like cords and kills the conifers it feeds on.

Which sportswear giant, headquartered near Beaverton, is Oregon's largest public company?

Nike's swoosh was drawn in 1971 by Carolyn Davidson, a graphic design student at a nearby university, who wanted a mark that suggested motion.

Under what name did Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman found their Oregon shoe company in 1964?

Blue Ribbon Sports began by importing Japanese running shoes, which Knight sold at track meets from the boot of his car.

Oregon is one of only five states without which tax?

Sales tax has gone to Oregon's voters nine times and lost every time, most recently in 1993, when three in four voted no.

Oregon's 'kicker' law returns money to taxpayers when what happens?

Tax revenue beats its forecast by more than 2 percent and the whole amount above the forecast goes back to taxpayers; voters wrote the rule into the constitution in 2000.

In 1971 Oregon passed the first US law of its kind requiring a deposit on what?

Beverage containers were targeted because they littered Oregon's beaches and highways; nine other states and most Canadian provinces later passed similar deposit laws.

Oregon was the first US state to legalise what, in 1994?

Physician-assisted suicide arrived with the Death with Dignity Act; Oregon voters refused to repeal it in 1997, and the US Supreme Court sided with the state in 2006.

Until August 2023, what did Oregon law forbid drivers to do at a petrol station?

Pump their own gas: the 1951 law gave 17 reasons for the ban, from fire risk to protecting attendants' jobs, and it lasted 72 years.

From 2018, Oregon charged a flat $15 excise tax on which purchase?

New bicycles priced at $200 or more carry the tax, and the money is earmarked for grants to cycling and walking projects.

What did Oregon's 1967 Beach Bill guarantee along the state's whole coastline?

Public access to every beach became law after a Cannon Beach motel owner fenced off the dry sand for his guests and Governor Tom McCall took up the fight.

Which Oregon-born cartoonist named characters Flanders, Lovejoy and Quimby after streets in his home city?

Matt Groening also named Homer, Marge, Lisa and Maggie after his own father, mother and sisters, and made Bart an anagram of 'brat'.

Which 1985 adventure film about treasure-hunting kids was shot on Oregon's north coast?

The Goonies made its filming town a place of pilgrimage: the old county jail from the opening scene now houses the Oregon Film Museum.

Bend, Oregon, is home to the last remaining store of which once-huge video rental chain?

Blockbuster's last outpost began in 1992 as an independent shop called Pacific Video, joined the chain in 2000, and has outlived every other branch in the world.

Which Oregon bookstore claims to be the largest independent new and used bookstore in the world?

Powell's began in 1971 when Walter Powell copied his son's Chicago bookshop; its flagship now fills an entire city block with more than a million books.

Which city in Oregon, a centre of craft brewing, once had a brewer offer to pump free beer through its new fountain?

Portland turned Henry Weinhard down when he made the offer for the dedication of the Skidmore Fountain, which survives as the city's oldest piece of public art.

Which nickname did Oregon's largest city earn in the 1800s as land was cleared in a hurry for new streets?

Stumptown grew so fast after 1847 that felled trees' stumps were simply left standing in the streets until someone could be spared to pull them out.

Which town near the Columbia's mouth was the first permanent American settlement west of the Rockies?

Astoria began in 1811 as a fur post of John Jacob Astor's company, but within two years it was sold to a British rival and renamed Fort George.

Which town at the end of the Oregon Trail served as the territory's first capital?

Oregon City once mattered so much on the West Coast that San Francisco's original town plat was filed there, and a local museum still holds it.

Where did Lewis and Clark spend the winter of 1805-06, near the mouth of the Columbia?

Fort Clatsop rotted away long ago; a 1955 replica burned down weeks before the 2005 bicentennial, and hundreds of volunteers then built the present one.

Which slogan demanded the whole Oregon Country for the United States before an 1846 treaty settled on the 49th parallel?

Fifty-Four Forty or Fight named latitude 54°40′, the border expansionists wanted, but President Polk accepted the 49th parallel instead of a war with Britain.

What killed six picnickers near Bly, Oregon, in 1945, the only wartime deaths from enemy attack on the US mainland?

A Japanese balloon bomb had drifted across the Pacific on high winds; a pastor's wife and five children from his Sunday school found it in the woods, and it went off.

Oregon's provisional government banned slavery in 1844 and, in the same law, barred which group from settling?

African Americans were shut out again by laws of 1849 and 1857, and the last of these exclusion laws was not repealed until 1926.

Which guru's followers built a city on an Oregon ranch in the 1980s and poisoned salad bars with salmonella?

The Rajneeshees wanted to win a county election by making voters in The Dalles too ill to turn out; 751 people fell sick, though nobody died.

Which unidentified hijacker boarded a Boeing 727 in Oregon in November 1971 and parachuted out with $200,000?

D. B. Cooper is a reporter's mistake: the man bought his ticket as 'Dan Cooper', and the wrong initials stuck once other news outlets repeated them.

Which Coos Bay runner, killed in a car crash at 24, inspired two Hollywood biopics in the late 1990s?

Steve Prefontaine never won an Olympic medal, finishing fourth at Munich in 1972, yet he set American records at every distance from 2,000 to 10,000 metres.

Which Oregon author, raised in Springfield, wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest?

Ken Kesey drew the novel from night shifts as an aide on a psychiatric ward, and the 1975 film was shot inside the real Oregon State Hospital where the story is set.

Which children's author set Ramona Quimby's books in the Grant Park neighbourhood of her Oregon home city?

Beverly Cleary's characters now stand in the park itself: statues of Ramona, Henry Huggins and his dog Ribsy were put up there in 1995.

Who was Finals MVP when the Trail Blazers won the 1977 title?

Bill Walton's Trail Blazers lost the first two games of the Finals to Philadelphia and then won four in a row, as the craze known as Blazermania took hold.

Which Providence Park women's team won NWSL titles in 2013, 2017 and 2022?

Portland Thorns FC took the first title after finishing only third in the table, and then drew the league's biggest crowds in each of their first eight seasons.

In which city do the Oregon State Beavers, rivals of Eugene's Oregon Ducks, play their home games?

Corvallis and Eugene have met at football since 1894 in a game known from 1929 as the Civil War, a name both universities dropped in 2020.

Oregon grows nearly all of the US crop of which nut?

Hazelnuts, also called filberts, thrive in the mild climate of a single Oregon valley, which grows almost the whole US crop of the European tree.

Which red grape, the pride of France's Burgundy, became Oregon's signature wine?

Pinot noir made Oregon's name after David Lett came from California with 3,000 vine cuttings and a theory that the best wine comes from grapes that struggle to ripen; in 1979 his wine held its own against Burgundies in Paris.

What is Oregon's state tree?

Douglas fir is not a true fir at all, nor the pine its other name, Oregon pine, suggests: botanists place it in a genus whose name means 'false hemlock'.

Which chipmaker's largest site in the world is in Hillsboro, Oregon?

Intel built on what Tektronix began: the home-grown oscilloscope maker was long Oregon's biggest private employer, and firms spun off by its former staff seeded the 'Silicon Forest'.

Which Columbia Gorge waterfall, at 620 feet, is the tallest in Oregon?

Multnomah Falls drops in two tiers down a basalt cliff; the financier Simon Benson bought the land around it and deeded it for a public park.

Which gorge on the Oregon-Idaho border is deeper than Arizona's most famous one?

Hells Canyon is North America's deepest river gorge at nearly 8,000 feet, yet most of it cannot be reached by road.

Which 235-foot monolith rises from the sand at Cannon Beach on Oregon's north coast?

Haystack Rock can be reached on foot at low tide, when its tide pools of starfish and sea anemones are uncovered, and puffins nest on its ledges.

Which animals winter in the great sea cave near Florence that has drawn Oregon tourists since 1932?

Steller sea lions shelter there in winter and breed on the ledges outside, the only such site known on the US mainland, in what its owners call America's largest sea cave.

Which Newport attraction was once home to Keiko, the orca from Free Willy?

Oregon Coast Aquarium built Keiko's rehabilitation pool with more than $7 million given by a foundation and by schoolchildren, and he lived there from 1996 until his flight to Iceland in 1998.

Oregon claims which tiny Lincoln City waterway as the shortest of its kind in the world?

The D River lost the Guinness title to Montana's Roe River in 1989, so Lincoln City sent in a new measurement, taken at high tide, of about 120 feet.

Which lowland, home to most Oregonians, owes its rich soil to floods from glacial Lake Missoula?

The Willamette Valley got its fertility second-hand: Ice Age floods scoured the topsoil off eastern Washington and dumped it there when the water backed up.

Which part of Oregon keeps most of its residents on Mountain Time, unlike the rest of the state?

Malheur County keeps Mountain Time because Ontario and Vale, its main towns, sit close to Boise, Idaho; only a small southern corner of the county stays on Pacific Time.

The 'Oregon System', approved by voters in 1902, gave citizens which pair of direct-democracy powers?

Initiative and referendum were the work of the reformer William S. U'Ren and his Direct Legislation League, and other states soon copied Oregon's lead.

Which bird is Oregon's state bird?

Western meadowlark had to share the honours in 2017: after a push to replace it with the osprey, legislators named the meadowlark state songbird and the osprey state raptor.

In 1970, Oregon highway officials used half a ton of dynamite to remove what from a beach near Florence?

A dead sperm whale was rotting on the sand, and engineers hoped a blast would leave pieces small enough for scavengers. A veteran warned that 20 sticks would do; they used 20 cases.

Which frozen potato snack did Ore-Ida's founders invent in Ontario, Oregon, from leftover scraps?

Tater Tots began in 1953 as slivers of cut potato that would otherwise have been thrown away. The founders chopped them up, added flour and seasoning, and pushed the mash through holes.

Oregon's state flag shares which feature with the national flag of Paraguay but no other US state flag?

Two different sides set Oregon's flag apart: the front carries the shield from the state seal, while the back shows a single gold beaver.

Which 1980 horror film used Oregon's Timberline Lodge as the exterior of the snowbound Overlook Hotel?

The Shining used only outside views of the lodge, a Works Progress Administration project built by local artisans in the Great Depression and dedicated by President Roosevelt in 1937.

Which future US president, orphaned in Iowa, spent his boyhood with a Quaker uncle in Newberg, Oregon?

Herbert Hoover arrived in Newberg in 1885, a year after his mother died of typhoid, to live with an uncle who was a doctor. The home they shared is called the Hoover–Minthorn House.

Had an 1845 coin toss gone the other way, Oregon's largest city would be named after which city?

Boston was the hometown of Asa Lovejoy, who lost a best-of-three toss to Francis Pettygrove of Maine. The 1835 copper cent they flipped is on display at the Oregon Historical Society.

In 1887, seven years ahead of Congress, Oregon was the first state to make which day a public holiday?

Labor Day became a federal holiday in June 1894, when President Cleveland signed the bill at the height of the Pullman Strike. By then most states had already followed Oregon's lead.

A 1957 reporting trip to the coast near Florence, Oregon, inspired which classic science-fiction novel?

Dune grew out of a magazine article its author never finished, about a federal effort to pin down the drifting sand with grasses. The research sparked his interest in ecology and deserts.

Which toy, sold to Wham-O in 1983, did Mike Marshall and John Stalberger invent in Oregon in 1972?

Hacky Sack was a brand name that became the everyday word for any footbag. Marshall died in 1975, and Stalberger carried on alone until the game caught on nationally in the early 1980s.

A handshake deal with Walt Disney first let the University of Oregon base its mascot on which character?

Donald Duck was cleared for Oregon's use with nothing in writing. When Disney's lawyers queried the deal in the 1970s, the university produced a photo of Walt in a jacket bearing the Oregon Donald logo.

Which 1978 comedy was filmed at the University of Oregon on condition that the state went unnamed on screen?

Animal House was welcomed by a university president who, at Berkeley years earlier, had seen his campus considered for The Graduate and missed out. He asked only that Oregon never be mentioned.

Which 1986 coming-of-age film, based on a Stephen King novella, was shot around Brownsville, Oregon?

Stand by Me turned Brownsville into the fictional town of Castle Rock, and the town has repaid the favour by holding an annual Stand by Me Day since 2007.

Which 2008 vampire romance, set in Forks, Washington, was filmed mainly across the border in Oregon?

Twilight was shot in 44 days in the spring of 2008, mostly around the state's largest city, where the Cullen family's striking glass-and-wood residence is a real home.

Which Disney animated series sends twins Dipper and Mabel Pines to a fictional Oregon town for the summer?

Gravity Falls drew on creator Alex Hirsch's childhood summers with his own twin, and on roadside attractions such as the Oregon Vortex.

Which hit by Oregon band the Kingsmen did the FBI investigate in the 1960s over supposedly obscene lyrics?

Louie Louie defeated the FBI laboratory, which concluded that the 1963 recording could not be interpreted at all, so nothing in it could be found obscene.

Which Oregon-born skater, the first American woman to land a triple Axel, was banned for life in 1994?

Tonya Harding was also stripped of her 1994 national title after her ex-husband orchestrated an attack on rival Nancy Kerrigan and she helped to cover it up.

Which Oregon State high jumper won 1968 Olympic gold with a back-first technique he devised in high school?

Dick Fosbury's style got its name in 1964, when a Medford newspaper captioned a photo of him flopping over the bar and a reporter likened him to a fish flopping in a boat.

Which voice of Bugs Bunny, nicknamed the Man of a Thousand Voices, went to high school in Oregon's largest city?

Mel Blanc had moved north from San Francisco as a boy and attended Lincoln High School. Beyond Bugs, he voiced Tweety, Sylvester the Cat and Yosemite Sam.

Which chemist, born in Oregon in 1901, won unshared Nobel Prizes for both Chemistry and Peace?

Linus Pauling is the only person to have won two Nobel Prizes without sharing either. At 15 he already had enough school credits to enter Oregon Agricultural College, the future Oregon State University.

Which everyday desktop device was invented in the 1960s by Oregon-born engineer Doug Engelbart?

The mouse was shown off at Engelbart's 1968 presentation, later nicknamed the Mother of All Demos. He never received any royalties for the invention.

Which cheese brand comes from a farmer-owned dairy co-operative founded on Oregon's north coast in 1909?

Tillamook is named for its home county, where the co-operative's cheese factory doubles as a visitor attraction that draws more than a million tourists a year.

Which blackberry cultivar, released in 1956, is named after the Oregon county where it was bred and tested?

Marionberry takes its name from Marion County, and it has gone on to become the most widely planted trailing blackberry in the world.

Which coffee chain did two dairy farmers start from a pushcart in Grants Pass, Oregon?

Dutch Bros was the brothers' way out of a struggling third-generation family farm in 1992. Their first outlay was about $12,000 on an espresso machine and a single cart.

Which Oregon multi-tool brand was born after its founder struggled to fix a Fiat with a pocketknife in 1975?

Leatherman began as Tim Leatherman's idea for a Boy Scout knife with pliers, dreamed up while he nursed a $300 Fiat 600 around Europe. The company itself followed in 1983.

Which giant flying boat, built by Howard Hughes, was moved in the 1990s to a museum in McMinnville, Oregon?

The Spruce Goose flew only once, briefly, in 1947, and despite the nickname it was built almost entirely of birch. Its journey north by barge, train and truck took 138 days.

Which flower, honoured with a festival first held in 1907, gives Oregon's largest city its official nickname?

Rose growing suits the local climate so well that the nickname City of Roses was in use by 1888, though the city council only made it official in 2003.

Which southern Oregon town has been home to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival since its first plays in 1935?

Ashland's backers feared the first festival would lose money and insisted on boxing matches to cover the deficit. In the event, the profit from the plays covered the boxing's losses.

Which northeastern Oregon city is famous for its woolen mills and a rodeo, the Round-Up, held since 1910?

Pendleton's mill began weaving blankets and robes for Native American customers in 1895, and the Round-Up brings tens of thousands of visitors to the city each September.

Oregon's southern border follows the 42nd parallel, shared with California and which other state?

Nevada and California meet Oregon along a line first agreed in 1819, when a treaty with Spain made the 42nd parallel the northern limit of the Spanish Empire.

On 21 August 2017, the Oregon coast became the first land in the United States to see which event?

A total solar eclipse reached the coast shortly after 10:15 that morning, the first to touch the contiguous United States since 1979. About a million visitors were expected in the state.

Which national monument in eastern Oregon includes the colourfully banded Painted Hills among its three units?

John Day Fossil Beds owes the hills' stripes to bands of laterite, and the same unit is rich in the remains of early horses, camels and rhinoceroses.

Which trio of Cascade volcanoes in central Oregon did early settlers name Faith, Hope and Charity?

The Three Sisters go by the plainer names North, Middle and South Sister, and all top 10,000 feet as the third-, fourth- and fifth-highest peaks in Oregon.

The passages of Oregon Caves National Monument, in the Siskiyou Mountains, formed in which rock?

Marble took the place of limestone here when the parent rock was transformed by the forces that built the Klamath Mountains. Elijah Davidson found the cave in 1874.

Which fish, nicknamed the king and under threat from dams, is the official state fish of both Oregon and Alaska?

Chinook salmon are the largest of the Pacific salmon, and they support both sport and commercial fishing along the coast.

Which stone, promoted by a Springfield rock club, became Oregon's official state rock in 1965?

The thunderegg looks like an ordinary rock until it is sliced open and polished. The world's largest, a 1.75-ton specimen, sits in a museum in Hillsboro.

After lobbying by schoolchildren in West Linn, Oregon adopted which shellfish as its state crustacean in 2009?

Dungeness crab was the choice of the pupils at Sunset Primary School, and legislators agreed, citing the catch's importance to the state's economy.

Oregon's Owyhee River, named for three trappers lost there in 1819, keeps an old spelling of which islands?

Hawaii was commonly spelled Owyhee at the time, and about a third of the men on those fur-trapping expeditions were islanders. The three were probably killed that year.

Which offshore plate boundary shook the Oregon coast in 1700, sending a tsunami all the way to Japan?

The Cascadia subduction zone quake is dated to the evening of 26 January 1700 because the waves were recorded in Japan, and drowned cedars along the coast last grew rings in 1699.

Which mountain range in Oregon's northeastern corner is nicknamed the Alps of Oregon?

The Wallowa Mountains include Sacajawea Peak, which at 9,838 feet is the highest summit in Oregon outside the Cascade Range.

Which author of the Earthsea novels lived in Oregon's largest city from 1959 until her death in 2018?

Ursula K. Le Guin moved there when her husband took a history post at the local state university, and she set her 1971 novel The Lathe of Heaven in the city.

Which Missouri town, known as the Queen City of the Trails, was a main starting point of the Oregon Trail?

Independence was one of the trail's primary starting points, sharing the role with nearby Westport, which was later annexed by Kansas City.

Which fur-trading firm made John McLoughlin, later called the Father of Oregon, head of its Columbia District?

The Hudson's Bay Company ran the region from Fort Vancouver, where McLoughlin served from 1824 to 1845. Oregon's legislature made his nickname official in 1957, a century after his death.

Which Nez Perce leader, forced from northeastern Oregon, gave up in 1877 after a 1,170-mile retreat from the US Army?

Chief Joseph laid down arms on the understanding that his people would be allowed to return to a reservation in Idaho. His Nez Perce name means Thunder Rolling Down the Mountain.

Which ancient fishing site on the Columbia River vanished in 1957 beneath the reservoir of The Dalles Dam?

Celilo Falls had supported one of the oldest continuously inhabited communities in North America. On 10 March 1957, hundreds watched the rising water silence the cascade and swallow the village.

Which folk singer was hired by the US government for one month in 1941 to write songs about Columbia River dams?

Woody Guthrie turned out 26 songs in his month on the payroll, three of them among his most famous, for a documentary promoting the federal dams.

Which items, woven from sagebrush bark at least 9,000 years ago, made Oregon's Fort Rock Cave famous in 1938?

Sandals from the cave are between 9,000 and 13,000 years old. The archaeologist who dug them up coated them in a preservative, unaware that it would prevent radiocarbon dating.

In 1973 Oregon became the first US state to abolish criminal penalties for possessing small amounts of which drug?

Marijuana possession in small amounts stopped being a crime under the state's new decriminalisation law. Voters went further in 2014, approving Measure 91 to legalise recreational use.

Which Buster Keaton film sent a real locomotive plunging off a collapsing bridge near Cottage Grove, Oregon?

The General's wrecked engine became a minor tourist attraction for nearly twenty years, until it was salvaged for scrap during the Second World War.

Which Scottish village paired up with the Oregon community of Boring in 2012 to boost tourism in both places?

Dull was put forward by a Scottish cyclist who had ridden through Boring on holiday. The pair later founded a League of Extraordinary Communities, which Bland in Australia joined.

Which University of Oregon stadium hosted the first World Athletics Championships ever held in the United States?

Hayward Field honours Bill Hayward, the university's track coach from 1904 to 1947. He was busy working as a trainer when the name was announced and only heard about it the next day.