• Home
  • Archives

Dave Knows Portland

Subscribe to Dave Knows Portland by Email

March 2, 1853: Northern Oregon Becomes Washington

March 2, 2011 by Dave 1 Comment

Washington and Oregon TerritoriesOn March 2, 1853, President Millard Fillmore signed the act declaring the portion of the Oregon Territory north of the Columbia River the Washington Territory.

When the bill was first introduced, the name was going to be the Columbia Territory, but Kentucky Representative Richard H. Stanton thought it would be nice to honor the first president with a state named after him, besides we already had a District of Columbia.

Olympia was then, and is now, the designated capital.

Map credit: Map by Matthew Trump, used under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 license.

Filed Under: History, Oregon, The West, This Day in History

Comments

  1. Paul says

    March 3, 2018 at 8:28 am

    Looks like we need to take back our land from Idaho and Montana…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Dave Knows Portland Archive

Copyright © 2023 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in