Courtesy of Thurston County Historical Preservation Office
Samuel R. Thurston was the Oregon Territory's first delegate to Congress.

County's namesake never visited here

RUTH LONGORIA, THE OLYMPIAN

Originally published Saturday, January 12, 2002

Thurston County's name was the result of a selfless act by Tumwater's pioneering father, Michael T. Simmons.

Although many wanted to name the county after Simmons, he is said to have suggested that the county memorialize the territory's delegate to Congress, Samuel Royal Thurston.

Although Thurston never set foot in the county that now bears his name, his influence was felt in his namesake area.

Thurston was born in Maine in 1816. An extraordinarily well-educated man for his time, he attended Maine Wesleyan Seminary, Dartmouth College and, in 1843 at the age of 27, he graduated from Bowdoin College in Massachusetts. Thurston subsequently read law with a prominent Maine politician and was admitted to the Maine bar in 1844.

There are no known records of whether Thurston married or had a family.

In 1845, he migrated to Iowa, where he practiced law and edited a newspaper. In 1847, he moved to what would become the Oregon Territory, where he practiced law in Hillsboro and served as a delegate to the assembly of the Oregon provisional government.

With the creation of the Oregon Territory in 1848, Thurston was elected its first delegate to the U.S. Congress. Oregon Territory encompassed what we now know as Oregon, Washington, Idaho and parts of Montana and Wyoming to the summit of the Rocky Mountains.

As a territorial delegate, Thurston was not allowed to vote but could lobby and present bills and speeches before Congress. Thurston's first work was the Donation Land Claim Law of 1850, which allowed white men and families who settled in the Oregon Territory to claim free parcels of land. The federal government awarded 320 acres of free land to both husbands and wives arriving in Oregon before 1850, and 160 acres after that date if they lived on the property for four years.

Thurston also provided for the passage of measures to extinguish Indian land claims through treaties and worked for establishment of a superintendent of Indian affairs and surveyor general for Oregon. He helped set up mail routes and post offices in the Northwest and procured a uniform postal rate to the territory.

Thurston helped pass bills for a Pacific coastal survey and provisions for lighthouses and navigational aids. Thurston also advocated for a Customs District of Puget Sound that was established in February 1851 with Olympia as the port of entry, thus setting Olympia on its course as a center of government. He sought and received more than $190,000 in appropriations for Oregon and procured a pension agency for veterans of the War of 1812, many of whom settled in the territory.

Eastern papers called him an "eloquent and effective debater" and "a bold and active man." Not only did he lobby Congress, he worked as a one-man promotion for Oregon, answering letters and inquiries, corresponding with newspapers and correcting their perceptions about Oregon. He also answered questions from relatives whose families had migrated to Oregon.

He was an information bureau, sending newspapers and patent reports, attending Smithsonian lectures and supplying the territorial library with maps and books.

An indefatigable letter writer, he sent lengthy epistles to Oregon's only paper, The Spectator, proclaiming his achievements.

On his homeward voyage in 1851 across the Isthmus of Panama, Thurston, 35, contracted a fever. He died on the steamer California on April 9, 1851, and was buried in Acapulco, Mexico. He was reinterred in Salem, Ore., in 1853, and a memorial was erected to him.

In 1991, the Thurston County Historic Commission placed a special stone at his gravesite commemorating him as the namesake of the county.

The inscription on the marble monument in Salem reads: "Here rests Oregon's delegate, a man of genius and learning, a lawyer and a statesman, his Christian virtues equaled by his wide philanthropy, his public acts are his best eulogium."

Shanna Stevenson, Thurston County historian, contributed to this report.

The Olympian Copyright 2002

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