Historical Marker Details Archives - Oregon Travel Information Council

Oregon Nisei Veterans WWII Memorial Highway

Posted on: August 19th, 2025 in Historical Marker Details |

This highway is dedicated to the Oregon Nisei (2nd generation Japanese American) soldiers who served our country during World War II (1941-1946), even as many of their families were incarcerated in camps on American soil.

Oregon Nisei Veterans’ ServiceImmediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. entered war against Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, and Fascist Italy. Anti-Japanese attitudes in the U.S. grew rapidly in the public arena, and U.S. military …

Cape Sebastian

Posted on: July 17th, 2025 in Historical Marker Details |

Native people call this cape Daa-ghvsh-ne’. European explorers noted the landmark because of its elevation rising 668 feet above the Pacific Ocean; the name Cape San Sebastian was later given in 1603 by Spanish explorer Sebastian Vizciano. In the 1960s, the seventy-pound, fossilized remains of a duck-billed hadrosaur were discovered in the sandstone that forms the cape. The sandstone and fossil share a complex geologic history. During the Late Cretaceous period (84 to 72 million years ago) the creature fell into a river or was swept out to sea …

The Coos People

Posted on: November 13th, 2024 in Historical Marker Details |

Life Comes from the Land and Water Here stood the Hanis Coos village of Qaimisiich. Hanis Coos, and their Miluk Coos neighbors to the south, lived along Coos Bay, south to the Coquille River, and east to the Coast Range. Experts in a sustainable life, the Coos people hunted, fished, and gathered here for many centuries. They traded with other tribes to obtain goods they could not find locally, such …

Upper Klamath Lake

Posted on: November 13th, 2024 in Historical Marker Details |

Ews (Upper Klamath Lake) is Oregon’s largest body of water. ?ewksiknii c’oy modokni (Klamath and Modoc) peoples have lived here for thousands of years. During the creation of giwas (Crater Lake) their ancestors sought refuge in Ews while the world around them burned. From that time on, populations of native peoples grew and built villages around Ews. They lived off the bounty of the water. In 1825, Hudson Bay Company …

Yaquina Bay

Posted on: November 13th, 2024 in Historical Marker Audio Tours, Historical Marker Details |

For millennia, the rich plant and animal life around Yaquina Bay sustained Yaqona tribal people. In 1855, President Pierce set aside these homelands among 1.1 million acres along the coast as a reservation for western Oregon tribes. By the 1860s, the abundant native oyster beds caught the attention of San Francisco-based oyster firms and illegal encroachment by settlers increased. The town of Oysterville was established in 1863 and a wagon …

Williamson River

Posted on: November 13th, 2024 in Historical Marker Details |

A Pacific Railroad Survey party searching for a practicable route for a railroad to connect the Sacramento Valley with the Columbia River passed near this point bound north on August 20, 1855. Lieutenant R.S. Williamson headed the party with 2nd Lieutenant Henry I. Abbot second in command. Among the officers in the Army escort were Lieutenant Phil S. Sheridan and Lieutenant George Crook. Dr. J.S. Newberry was the Chief Scientist …

Willamette Stone

Posted on: November 13th, 2024 in Historical Marker Audio Tours, Historical Marker Details |

This short trail leads to the Willamette Stone, the surveyor’s monument that is the point of origin for all public land surveys in Oregon and Washington. The landmark was established on June 4, 1851 by John B. Preston, Oregon’s first Surveyor General.

With increasing settlement and passage of the Donation Land Claim Act, the Oregon Territory desperately needed to extend the Public Land Survey System of 1785 that divided public lands …

Willamette Falls Locks

Posted on: November 8th, 2024 in Historical Marker Audio Tours, Historical Marker Details |

WILLAMETTE FALLS LOCKS still in use below this point-were opened on New Years Day, 1873, when the steamer Maria Wilkins became the first vessel to navigate up the west end of Willamette Falls. Farming and shipping interests had long sought to eliminate expensive portages around this age-old bar to navigation 26 miles above the mouth of the river. The initial project was completed by the Willamette Falls Canal and Locks …

Willamette Falls

Posted on: November 8th, 2024 in Historical Marker Audio Tours, Historical Marker Details |

Was the site of an Indian salmon fishing village. The falls furnished the power for a lumber mill which began operation in 1842, a flour mill in 1844, a woolen mill in 1864 and the first paper mill in the Pacific Northwest in 1867. The first long-distance commercial electric power transmission in the United States was from this area in the City of Portland in 1889.

Location: West Linn View …

Willamette Post

Posted on: November 6th, 2024 in Historical Marker Details |

Willamette Post was established in December 1813, on a knoll just east of here, by the Montreal-based North West Company, close to the Kalapuyan village of Champeog. The two-room log cabin, also called Fort Kalapuya, was a place for trade and a depot for fur-trapping and hunting expeditions supplying the North West Company’s Fort George near the mouth of the Columbia River. The post was still standing in the late …