OROregon State Symbols

Oregon's most recognisable symbol is the beaver, and it earned the place commercially rather than sentimentally. Hudson's Bay Company trappers worked the Columbia and Willamette drainages so hard in the 1820s and 1830s that beaver pelts became the region's currency, and the animal was already on the reverse of the state flag long before the legislature made it the official state animal in 1969. Oregon State University still fields its teams as the Beavers, and the nickname sticks to the state itself.

Official state symbols

What is on the Oregon state flag

Oregon carries the only state flag in the country with a different design on each side. The front is navy blue with gold lettering and devices: the words STATE OF OREGON across the top, the shield taken from the state seal in the middle, the date 1859 below, and thirty-three gold stars ringing the shield because Oregon was the thirty-third state admitted. Turn the flag over and the navy field carries a single gold beaver.

The legislature adopted the two-sided design in 1925, and the navy and gold were chosen to match the colours of the University of Oregon. Massachusetts once had a two-sided flag as well, but dropped its reverse in 1971, leaving Oregon alone. The practical result is that Oregon flags cost more to manufacture, since each one has to be sewn from two separately printed panels.

The state seal and the two ships

The seal was adopted in 1859, the year of statehood, from a design attributed to Harvey Gordon. Inside the shield an ordered scene tells the story Oregonians wanted told about themselves. Mountains and forest fill the background. An elk with branching antlers stands on the ridge. A covered wagon and an ox team come down toward the coast, marking the Oregon Trail migration.

The clearest political statement is on the water. Two ships sit in the Pacific: a British man-of-war sailing away, and an American merchant vessel arriving. That pairing was meant to record the end of British commercial control after the 1846 boundary settlement and the arrival of American trade in its place. Below the shield a sheaf of wheat, a plough and a pickaxe stand for farming and mining, thirty-three stars ring the whole design, and a ribbon reads "The Union", which served as Oregon's motto from 1957 until the legislature restored the older Latin line in 1987.

Symbols that surprise people

• A state microbe. In 2013 Oregon named brewer's yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, its official state microbe, becoming the first state in the country to designate one. The craft brewing industry lobbied for it.
• A state mushroom. The Pacific golden chanterelle was adopted in 1999, and commercial pickers harvest it from Coast Range and Cascade forests every autumn.
• A state seashell. The Oregon hairy triton, a bristly marine snail found on the outer coast, was named in 1991.
• A state crustacean. The Dungeness crab was adopted in 2009 after a campaign by schoolchildren in Sunset Beach.
• An official Father and Mother of Oregon. John McLoughlin, the Hudson's Bay Company chief factor at Fort Vancouver, was declared Father of Oregon in 1957. Tabitha Moffatt Brown, who founded the school that became Pacific University, was named Mother of Oregon in 1987.
• Revised song lyrics. "Oregon, My Oregon" has been the state song since 1927, but the legislature rewrote lines in 2021 that read as exclusionary about the state's founding.

Symbols of bordering states

More about Oregon