OROregon Fun Facts

Crater Lake has no river running into it and none running out. Every drop in it fell from the sky as rain or snow, which is why the water is the deep blue that shows up in every photograph and why, at 1,943 feet, it is the deepest lake in the United States. It sits in the collapsed crown of Mount Mazama, a volcano that tore itself apart roughly 7,700 years ago while Klamath people were living close enough to watch. Their oral tradition still describes it.

Facts most people get wrong

• Portland is not the capital. Salem is, and has been since territorial days. Portland is simply the biggest city, which is why visitors assume the government is there.
• Portland was nearly named Boston. In 1845 its two owners, Asa Lovejoy of Massachusetts and Francis Pettygrove of Maine, flipped a copper penny best of three for naming rights. Pettygrove won and named it for Portland, Maine. The coin survives and is on display in the city.
• You can pump your own gas now. Oregon banned self-service in 1951 and stayed one of only two states with the rule. A 2023 law ended it statewide. Attendants still work plenty of stations, so the myth is outliving the statute.
• Oregon is not wet from end to end. The rain stops at the Cascade crest. More than half the state lies east of that line as high desert, and southeastern towns can go a year on less than a foot of precipitation.
• It did not enter the Union as a simple free state. The 1857 constitution banned slavery and also banned free Black people from living in Oregon. It was admitted in 1859 as the only state to join with a Black exclusion clause written into its own constitution, and voters did not strike the language out until 1926.
• The flag has two different sides. Oregon is the only state whose flag carries a different design front and back: the state shield on one face, a beaver on the other.

Records and firsts

• Deepest lake in the country. Crater Lake, 1,943 feet, protected in 1902 as the fifth national park in the United States.
• Deepest river gorge in North America. Hells Canyon, cut by the Snake River along the Idaho border, drops close to 8,000 feet from rim to water, deeper than the Grand Canyon.
• The largest living organism on Earth. A honey fungus in the Malheur National Forest runs through roughly 3.5 square miles of soil as a single genetic individual, estimated to be thousands of years old.
• The smallest park in the world. Mill Ends Park in Portland measures 452 square inches, a single circle of dirt in a traffic median, and Guinness recognised it in 1971.
• The first bottle deposit law in the country, passed in 1971 and copied by ten other states since.
• The first state to vote entirely by mail. Oregon voters approved all-mail elections by ballot measure in 1998, twenty years before most states considered it.

Geography that surprises

• Every foot of beach is public. In 1913 the governor declared the shoreline a public highway to keep it out of private hands, and the Beach Bill of 1967 locked in access along all 363 miles of Oregon coast. There are no private beaches in the state.
• Part of Oregon is on Mountain Time. Malheur County in the far southeast keeps its clocks with Idaho, where its business goes. The rest of the state is Pacific.
• Ninth largest state, one crowded valley. Most Oregonians live in the Willamette Valley, a strip roughly 150 miles long pinned between the Coast Range and the Cascades. Drive two hours east and the population thins to a few people per square mile.
• An active volcano overlooks Portland. Mount Hood, 11,249 feet, stands about 50 miles from downtown and is the highest point in the state.

Where the name comes from

Nobody has settled it, and that is unusual for a state name. The word first appears in print in 1765, in a petition from the British officer Robert Rogers asking permission to search for a river he spelled Ouragon that supposedly ran west to the Pacific.

Two explanations compete. One traces it to the French ouragan, meaning windstorm, for the gales that come off the Pacific in winter. The other blames a printing accident: a French map of 1715 labelled the Wisconsin River Ouaricon-sint, the word broke across two lines, and a later reader saw Ouaricon sitting alone with an arrow pointing west. Neither theory has ever been proved.

Quick stats

• Population: 1 to 5 million
• Area rank: #9 of 50
• Admitted: 1859, the 33rd state
• Capital: Salem
• Largest city: Portland
• Time zone: Pacific (Malheur County is Mountain)

Bordering states

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