The Name Between Two Cities

You are driving through Salem, the capital of Oregon, a city whose very name carries an echo of the ancient world. When Methodist missionaries laid out this town in eighteen forty-six, the name is most often credited to Reverend David Leslie, president of the town's board of trustees, though some accounts credit W. H. Willson. The name uses the last five letters of "Jerusalem," a reference to the ancient Hebrew word meaning city of peace. Some accounts also suggest a nod to Salem, Massachusetts, where Leslie had been educated. Either way, the missionaries were planting a place-name from the Old World into soil that indigenous people had called Chemeketa for generations. That word, Chemeketa, belonged to the Kalapuya people who had lived in this valley for thousands of years. It roughly translates to "a place of rest" or "a meeting place."

The naming debate continued well into the territorial period. When Oregon's legislature gathered in eighteen fifty-three, lawmakers floated alternative names. None of them stuck, and the question of where the capital would sit took years more to settle.

Salem became the capital of the Oregon Territory in eighteen fifty-one, and when Oregon entered the Union in eighteen fifty-nine, the city kept its title. Portland may be bigger and louder, but Salem has always been the place where Oregon's legal and political life officially resides. Drive through the wide streets here and you are moving through more than a hundred and eighty years of overlapping names, peoples, and meanings. The city of peace, the meeting place, the capital. It has been all three.