Glencoe in Oregon: A Scottish Memorial

This stone cairn and stele honors a wound carried across an ocean. In February of sixteen ninety-two, government troops under orders from King William the Third descended on the Scottish glen of Glencoe and killed dozens of members of the MacDonald clan who had sheltered them. The Massacre of Glencoe became one of the most notorious acts of betrayal in Scottish history, a violation of sacred Highland hospitality.

Oregon's Scottish immigrant community erected this memorial to keep that memory alive and to honor the Scottish men and women who came west during the nineteenth century and helped settle this corner of the Pacific Northwest. Scotland and Oregon sit at opposite ends of the earth, yet both are shaped by rivers, rain, and rugged coastlines, and the people who carried their heritage here never forgot where they came from.