Rome, Oregon: The Pillars That Named a Town

Just west of where the Owyhee River cuts through the high desert of Malheur County, a five-mile band of cream-colored clay bluffs rises a hundred feet from the plateau. An early settler named William Stine thought the formations looked like the ruined temples and columns of ancient Rome, and so he called them the Pillars of Rome. The name stuck, and when a post office was established here in nineteen oh nine, the community took the same name.

Rome never grew much. It remains an unincorporated stop on US Ninety-Five, a handful of buildings in the open country. But the cliffs that gave it its name are worth the detour: fossil-bearing sedimentary formations carved into columns by wind and rain, five miles long, looking out over a river canyon that had nothing to do with Italy and everything to do with the deep-time geology of the Oregon desert.