Oregon City

The board counts the Oregon Spectator among the town's firsts. It was the first newspaper printed west of the Missouri, its opening issue run off here on February 5, 1846, and its owners promised it would serve no party. William T'Vault, the first editor, printed his own opinions and was gone after thirteen issues. George Law Curry, who followed, was dismissed in January 1848 for refusing to promote Governor George Abernethy, who controlled the paper. Curry had a press built of wood in Oregon City and started the rival Free Press.

What the plaque says

Oregon History Oregon City- supply point for pioneer emigrants was first located as a claim by Dr. John McLoughlin in 1829. The first provisional legislature of the Oregon Country was held here in 1843 and land and tax laws formulated. Oregon City was the capital of the Oregon Territory from 1845-1852. The first Protestant church (Methodist) west of the Rocky Mountains was dedicated in 1844 and the first paper (Oregon Spectator) and the first Masonic lodge were established in 1846.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• McLoughlin House — 0.6 mi
  The retirement house of the Hudson's Bay man who supplied the Oregon Trail's starving arrivals, saved from a paper mill's lot in 1909 and hauled up the bluff to a park he had given the town.
• Willamette Falls — 0.6 mi
  A horseshoe of basalt across the Willamette, ringed by a century of mills, that is still one of the last places in the Columbia basin where tribes gather lamprey by hand.
• Champoeg — 15 mi
  The river-bend meadow where settlers voted for a government in 1843, and where the Willamette took the entire town but one warehouse eighteen years later.
• Vanport — 17 mi
  Briefly Oregon's second-largest city, built in about 110 days for Kaiser's shipyard workers, washed away in an afternoon in 1948, and later renamed out of existence.

More markers nearby

• Oregon City Falls — steps away
• Willamette Falls — 0.6 mi
• Willamette Falls Locks — 0.6 mi
• George Abernethy — 0.6 mi