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Reviews
Oregon Geographic Names, seventh edition
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By Lewis A. McArthur and Lewis L. McArthur
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Oregon Historical Society Press, Portland, 2003. Photographs, maps, index. 1,088 pages. $75.00 cloth, $35.00 paper.
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Reviewed by Alexander B. Murphy
University of Oregon, Eugene
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| For more than seventy-five years, Oregon Geographic Names has been a valued reference work for those interested in the history and geography of Oregon. The book offers brief descriptions of Oregon's cities, towns, railroad stations, lakes, mountains, valleys, streams, islands, and more, together with whatever information the compilers could find about the most commonly used names ascribed to those places since the period of Euro-American settlement. (Some of these names are of Native American origin, but the book does not include the names given by Native peoples to many of Oregon's places and features.) Each edition has been more comprehensive and more detailed than its predecessor, and the seventh edition is no exception. Weighing in at well over a thousand pages, it offers a remarkably wide-ranging survey of Oregon's nooks and crannies. |
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For those familiar with the prior edition, there are no dramatic changes to the book itself. The publishers have adopted a new typeface and layout that are easy on the eyes, and the introduction has been slightly expanded to allow for a brief discussion of how the material for this and prior editions of the book was gathered. The seventh edition also contains a modest number of photographs (primarily historical) that were not present in previous editions. These are welcome complements to the text. Finally, the eight-hundred-odd new entries in the book's latest edition make it an ever-more comprehensive resource for information on the commonly used place-names of Oregon. |
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There is one major innovation to the seventh edition of Oregon Geographic Names: the inclusion of a remarkable CD with interactive maps, a search function that allows users to find place-names on the map of Oregon, and a comprehensive index of places and biographic names. Curiously, this feature of the book could easily be missed by a reader not paying close attention. The only mention of it appears in a couple of sentences at the very end of the preface, and the CD itself is tucked away in a hard-to-open sleeve inside the back cover. If you were to miss this feature, however, you would be missing an invaluable complement to the written text. |
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Building on electronic data files compiled for the second edition of the Atlas of Oregon (University of Oregon Press, 2001), the CD's designer, Erik Steiner of the University of Oregon's InfoGraphics Lab, developed an interface that allows a user to find places of interest on a portion of an Oregon map covering some 10,000 square miles (i.e., ca. 100 miles on a side) and then zoom in for greater detail as far as a map covering approximately 250 square miles (i.e., ca. 16 miles on a side). Two basic maps can be manipulated in this way: one of place-names and one of historic post offices. When a section of one of the maps is chosen, the same section of the other map appears on the screen once that map has been selected. Moreover, a user looking at a map section can drag it north, south, east, or west to look at what lies nearby — or jump to an entirely different part of the state by moving a box on an inset map to the desired area of interest. A clear legend helps the reader interpret the meaning of symbols for settlements, transportation arteries, and physical features. |
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The search feature on the CD is also quite useful. Typing even a portion of a place-name will yield a list of possibilities — including variant and former names — and once a desired place-name has been selected, a map comes up showing its location. Not surprisingly, the CD does not include all sixty-two-hundred-odd place names found in the book, but the more important ones are here. Finally, the biographic and geographic indexes on the CD are an added plus, since these are not part of the printed book. The indexes are not linked to the map, but they encompass all of the entries in the book. They allow the user to display lists of names, print them out, or move them to an Excel spreadsheet. |
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The updating and expansion of the book and the production of a CD make the seventh edition of Oregon Geographic Names a more useful book than ever. It is an indispensable resource for anyone with a serious interest in Oregon. It also deserves space on the back ledge of any vehicle exploring the back roads of this remarkable state. |
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