Hermiston

History

The historic inhabitants of the area were the indigenous Umatilla, Cayuse, Walla Walla, and Columbia Indians, descendants of peoples who lived in this area for thousands of years. The earliest European settlers established a mission near Pendleton in 1847. The territorial government organized Umatilla County in 1862 from the larger Wasco County. Hermiston's early development was plagued by rivalry between The Maxwell Land & Irrigation Company and developers Skinner & Newport, who both fought to establish their own town of Hermiston in the exact same spot, centrally located in the irrigation district along the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company's main line. While Maxwell was able to secure the train depot on the West side of the tracks, initially naming it after themselves, Skinner & Newport filed their own Hermiston plat directly across the tracks in November 1904, beating the Maxwell Company's filing by two days. With neither side willing to cede to the other, two separate business districts formed on either side of the tracks, Hermiston Avenue on the West side and East Main street (there is no West Main Street) on the East side, defiantly placed one block off so they didn't align. Each district featured its own bank, hotel and mercantile but East Main Street would eventually win out. The rival developers eventually settled their differences and on July 10, 1907, the two towns were incorporated as a single Hermiston. Colonel J. F. McNaught, an early settler in the region, is credited with originally coming up with the Hermiston name, which was taken from Robert Louis Stevenson's unfinished novel Weir of Hermiston. The greater Hermiston region began to see irrigated agriculture in 1908, with the completion of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation's Umatilla Basin…

Geography

According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of , all land. Distance to major cities: * Tri-Cities, Washington - * Portland, Oregon - * Seattle, Washington - * Spokane, Washington - * Boise, Idaho - * Salt Lake City, Utah - * Missoula, Montana - Hermiston's recent population growth is due to its proximity to large cities in the Pacific Northwest and its location along two major freeways. According to the Köppen climate classification system, Hermiston has a steppe climate (Köppen BSk). This gives the area hot dry summers with high daytime temperatures that cool considerably overnight, and relatively cold winters which typically yield several snowstorms per year with relatively minimal accumulation. On June 29, 2021, a max temperature of was recorded in Hermiston, which is just one degree below the new record high temperature for the State of Oregon, which was set at the nearby Pelton Dam, which is also in Jefferson County, on the same day.

Race & ethnicity