Benton County County
Benton County was created from Polk County by an act of the Provisional Government of Oregon in 1847. It is one of seven counties in the United States to be named after Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, a longtime advocate of the development of the Oregon Territory. The county was created out of an area originally inhabited by the Klickitat Tribe, who rented it from the Kalapuya Tribe for use as hunting grounds. At that time, the boundaries began at the intersection of Polk County and the Willamette River, ran as far south as the California border and as far west as the Pacific Ocean. Later, portions of Benton County were taken to form Coos, Curry, Douglas, Jackson, Josephine, Lane and Lincoln Counties, leaving it in its present form with 679 square miles of land area.
Mapped Location
Benton County: The mapped location is an approximation and should not be used for navigation or wayfinding.
Information
General information on Benton County
- Feature Type: County
- County Seat: City of Corvallis
- Established: Thursday, December 23, 1847
Official, historical, colloquial and alternative toponyms for Benton County
A brief list of names that this geographic feature has been named
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Benton County | Official |
Related Catalog Titles
A Bibliography for Benton County, County
Rogue River War speech of Dr. A.G. Henry, of Yamhill, delivered before the citizens of Corvallis, on the evening of Dec. 3d, 1855 by Anson G. Henry
Delivered by pioneer physician and politician Anson G. Henry, Rogue River War Speech captures a fiery public address given in Corvallis, Oregon, in December 1855 to rally support for military action against Indigenous tribes during the height of the Rogue River Wars. The speech plays upon frontier anxieties, detailing alleged atrocities and framing the violent subjugation of local native populations as an urgent, righteous defense of American settlers. Through contemporary rhetorical appeals, the text preserves the raw, unmasked political panic and racial animosity that drove territorial policy during the Pacific Northwest's Indian wars. A keen insight drawn from the work is how wartime rhetoric deliberately inverted the roles of aggressor and victim; by casting preemptive military campaigns of displacement as defensive humanitarian rescue missions, pro-war leaders successfully mobilized civilian volunteers and legitimized state-sanctioned violence under the banner of civic protection.
41 pages : illustrations ; 19 cm
CIRC [ 1 ]
Alsea texts and myths by Leo Joachim Frachtenberg
Published in 1920 as a federal bulletin for the Bureau of American Ethnology, linguist Leo Joachim Frachtenberg’s Alsea Texts and Myths presents a meticulously translated, bilingual repository of the oral literature of the Alsea people from the central Oregon coast. Relying on a handful of the last surviving fluent speakers residing on the Siletz Reservation, Frachtenberg rigorously transcribed creation narratives, shamanistic rituals, and animal lore into phonetic notation alongside literal English translations. Designed as a definitive scientific record of a Yakonan language on the verge of extinction, the volume reflects the frantic urgency of the era's "salvage anthropology." A keen insight drawn from the work is how the academic process of textualizing Indigenous oral traditions operated as a subtle mechanism of colonial containment; by severing these sacred narratives from their dynamic, performative contexts and freezing them as rigid, bilingual data points within a government archive, anthropologists effectively neutralized the living cultural power of these myths, transforming them from the active voice of a surviving people into the static, owned property of the American scientific establishment.
304 pages ; 24 cm
ONLINE CIRC [ 1 ]
Last updated: 2013-01-08