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Offbeat Oregon History podcast

Offbeat Oregon History podcast

Written by: www.offbeatoregon.com (finn @ offbeatoregon.com)
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 A daily (5-day-a-week) podcast feed of true Oregon stories -- of heroes and rascals, of shipwrecks and lost gold. Stories of shanghaied sailors and Skid Road bordellos and pirates and robbers and unsolved mysteries. An exploding whale, a couple shockingly scary cults, a 19th-century serial killer, several very naughty ladies, a handful of solid-brass con artists and some of the dumbest bad guys in the history of the universe. From the archives of the Offbeat Oregon History syndicated newspaper column. Source citations are included with the text version on the Web site at https://offbeatoregon.com.Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 4.0 Social Sciences Travel Writing & Commentary World
Episodes
  • Oregon Vortex: 95 years of keeping experts guessing

    Oregon Vortex: 95 years of keeping experts guessing
    Jan 9 2026
    ABOUT 20 YEARS ago, Alex Hirsch, a student at the California Institute of the Arts in Santa Clarita, set out to make a low-budget short animated film that he hoped would become a demo reel one day. It was called “Gravity Falls” … you have perhaps heard of it, yes? Hirsch used the 11-minute reel to pitch Disney on his show, and they snapped it up. To say it was a success is to understate things quite a bit; when it debuted in 2012 the show was probably the biggest new thing on The Disney Channel that year. Gravity Falls is the adventures and misadventures of a pair of 12-year-old fraternal twins who are sent off to spend the summer with their great-uncle Stan, who has converted his A-frame cabin deep in the backwoods of Oregon into a tourist trap that he calls “The Mystery Shack.” The inspiration for the show, Hirch told reporters, was the “mystery” type roadside attractions that he used to visit with his family when he and his twin sister were young. Places like “The Mystery Spot,” a short distance from his home in the San Francisco Bay area — and the attraction that inspired The Mystery Spot: The Oregon Vortex and House of Mystery, near the town of Gold Hill. (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/2510a1002d.oregon-vortex-keeps-experts-guessing-709.063.html)
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    11 mins
  • The crazy story of U.S.’s first woman governor (Part 2 of 2)

    The crazy story of U.S.’s first woman governor (Part 2 of 2)
    Jan 8 2026
    HALFWAY THROUGH HIS second term in office, Governor Chamberlain ran for a seat in the U.S. Senate, and won the election. So he resigned his office as governor in favor of his Secretary of State, Frank W. Benson, and prepared to board an eastbound train to take his new seat. There was a problem, though.... (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/23-04.caralyn-shelton-first-woman-guv-620.html)
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    9 mins
  • The crazy story of U.S.’s first woman governor (Part 1 of 2)

    The crazy story of U.S.’s first woman governor (Part 1 of 2)
    Jan 7 2026
    IF YOU ASK most Oregonians who the first woman governor in state history was, they’ll have an immediate answer … but they’ll be wrong. Conventional wisdom holds that the first woman to take the gubernatorial purple in the Beaver State was Barbara Roberts, who was elected to the job in 1990. In fact, that’s almost true … but, of course, “almost” doesn’t work very well as an answer to a true-or-false question. The truth is, Barbara Roberts was the first elected woman governor in Oregon history. But the first woman to serve as governor of Oregon — or any other state, for that matter — was a remarkable woman named Caralyn B. Shelton. It was because of Caralyn Shelton that Oregon, for one historic weekend in early 1909, became the first and only state in the nation with a female governor. This was especially ironic because it wasn’t until 1912 that women won the right to vote in Oregon. (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/23-04.caralyn-shelton-first-woman-guv-620.html)
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    10 mins
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