The Willamette Stone

The survey of two states hangs from a point at the end of this trail. John Preston's crew drove a cedar stake here on June 4, 1851, and in 1885 the Interior Department set a stone post cut BASE and LINE on two faces and WILL. and MER. on the others. Every township and section in Oregon and Washington is still described from it. The post was set in a concrete slab in 1956, recast in 1984, then broken off flush in 1987, its brass plaque stolen again. A stainless steel marker has stood in its place since 1988.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Vanport — 5.7 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.
• Willamette Falls — 13 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.
• McLoughlin House — 13 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.
• Champoeg — 20 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.

More markers nearby

• Vanport — 6.0 mi
• George Abernethy — 13 mi
• Dr. John McLoughlin — 13 mi
• Willamette Falls — 13 mi