Click here to download the Oregon Centennial Anthology (published in 1959).

Not too long ago, as Oregon’s sesquicentennial drew closer, I wondered: was an anthology published for the state’s centennial? Surely, I thought, such a book exists, even though I’d never encountered one in all my years of literary sleuthing across the state.

With the help of a friend, I began an investigation, and soon received a letter in response to a phone message I’d left. I excerpt part of the letter here:

Dear Matt:
Thanks for the telephone call. The centennial anthology was Governor Hatfield’s idea. He came to me, knowing something, I suppose, of my reputation. Why we turned the project into a contest, I don’t recall. I have no idea how many copies the state printed. I put it together and sent it to Salem. And that was about it. How did you ever find it?
Arthur Kreisman

In 1959 the State of Oregon published the Oregon Centennial Anthology: A Collection of Prize-winning Short Stories and Poems. The 64-page pamphlet was edited by Arthur Kreisman, a Professor of English at Southern

Oregon College. The anthology contains six short stories and six poems and was the product of a contest open to college students and the general public. Interestingly enough, William Stafford, who later became Oregon’s Poet Laureate, won both the open poetry and short story competitions. Winners received $250, second prize earned $200, and third place netted $150.

I also learned that exactly 18 copies of the Oregon Centennial Anthology reside in libraries across the Pacific Northwest (although many of the copies cannot be checked out for general circulation) and there isn’t one copy for sale, at least the last time I checked online. I may have obtained the last one, which is great for me, but terrible for Oregon literary and history junkies.

In his excellent introduction to the anthology, Professor Kreisman wrote, “One hundred years is not a very long time, as human history goes, and it is considerably less than that since Oregon was largely frontier country, a new land, opening its arms to new people who had come to build lives for themselves, and in the process built a state. The next hundred years will see such growth in Oregon as is undreamt of by most of us today.”

The message of the first Oregon Trail to America was: “Nature is here. A rich landscape. Go. Take it. It will last forever. Start your life over.” When the state celebrated its centennial in 1959, the message was exactly the same and manifest, at least to me, in the Oregon Centennial Anthology.

What intrigued me after reading it (and watching the View-Master reels of Oregon’s Centennial Exposition) was realizing that the modern Oregon we all know and love today did not exist in 1959. It was all trees and fish and farms and white men that dominated the narrative. Virtually all other stories were either marginalized or unimagined. Oregon changed for the better in the 1970s, but Oregon in 1959 was much closer to 1900 than it was to 2000 and that’s fascinating to consider when reading the poems of stories in the Oregon Centennial Anthology—that is if you have an opportunity to read them.

We’re all so busy and rushed these days that I wanted to make it as easy as possible for everyone to read the Oregon Centennial Anthology. I have scanned the pamphlet, which was printed at taxpayer expense and rests in the public domain, and created a PDF file of it that can be easily downloaded for free from my web site at www.nestuccaspitpress.com. It’s not quite the same as a handsome reprint, but this Oregon literary artifact has been lost long enough.