About Us

Where else in the world can you drive four hours and surf the coast, hike beneath waterfalls in a temperate rainforest, cycle across a high desert and camp in a Forest Service hut beneath a Ponderosa canopy? Oregon is an amazing state, and it attracts creative people who lead interesting lives. We're pioneers in the sustainable movement, we're bike geeks and techies, Native Americans and cowboys, financiers and vintners. We're urban, suburban, rural and ranch. This is our Oregon and she flies on her own wings, alis volat propiis.

In the year 1859, Oregon was admitted to the Union as its 33^rd state. That year Henry Green and Washington Irving founded the Portland Gas Light Company, with its shipment of lights arriving a year later from New York to illuminate the streets of Portland for the first time. About a decade later, Oregon's first lighthouse at Cape Blanco opened its eye to guide ships along our perilous coast. Americana songwriter Woodie Guthrie sat down along the Columbia River Gorge in 1941 and a month later had produced 26 songs including, "Roll On Columbia." Almost two decades later, a Bend resident and 10th Mountain Division soldier named Bill Healy opened Mt. Bachelor for skiing with a single rope tow that would elevate the area to among the ski industry's elite pioneering ski resorts and change the course of Central Oregon's destiny.

In 2009, Oregon's first statewide cultural magazine was born with 1859, to shine a light on Oregon's cultural riches, to explore the people and the places that make our state one of the world's hidden treasures. Originally a quarterly publication, 1859 transititioned to a bi-monthly format with the July/August 2012 issue.