Tangent: Named for Twenty Miles of Straight Track

Tangent got its name from a surveyor's vocabulary. When the Southern Pacific Railroad's predecessor laid track through this part of the Willamette Valley in the early eighteen seventies, engineers noticed something unusual: the line ran straight for more than twenty miles without a single curve. In railroading, a perfectly straight stretch of track is called a tangent, in the same geometric sense as a line that touches a curve at exactly one point. The engineers named the station accordingly.

A post office was established here, and the community incorporated in eighteen ninety-three. It remains one of the flatter, straighter stretches of the entire I-Five corridor, a geometry that made it easy to build a railroad and then an interstate, and made the town's name an accidental piece of plain-spoken poetry.