Oregon State Coat of Arms

Oregon's coat of arms is the central design of the Great Seal of Oregon, defined in Oregon Revised Statutes § 186.030. It shows a shield divided horizontally: the upper half depicts the Pacific Ocean with a departing British warship and an arriving American steamship; the lower half shows a covered wagon moving through a mountain and forest landscape.

A bald eagle with spread wings sits above the shield. A beaver appears below it. A sheaf of wheat and a plow stand on one side; a pickaxe stands on the other. Thirty-three small stars ring the outer border, and the motto The Union appears at the top.

The coat of arms appears on the front of Oregon's state flag, making it the design seen on official documents, public buildings, and state communications throughout Oregon.

Oregon's coat of arms was designed at the state's Constitutional Convention, which met in August 1857, more than a year before Congress admitted Oregon to the Union. The convention designed the seal alongside the state constitution. The elements were codified in what became Oregon Revised Statutes § 186.030, which specifies each component and its placement.

The convention's designers drew on recent political history. The 1846 Oregon Treaty had settled the contested boundary between the United States and Britain along the 49th parallel, ending nearly three decades of joint occupation of the Oregon Country that had persisted since 1818. That settlement was recent enough in 1857 to record deliberately on the coat of arms.

Oregon was admitted as the 33rd state on February 14, 1859. The coat of arms designed in 1857 became the state's official emblem on that date. The 33 stars along the border mark that exact count. The design has remained in continuous official use since then under the same statutory description.

Oregon's coat of arms carries more historical narrative than most state designs. Each element was selected at the 1857 Constitutional Convention to represent a specific fact about Oregon's geography, economy, or political moment.

The Oregon coat of arms is a sequence of events compressed into a single shield. The two ships on the ocean scene tell a story in one frame: Britain leaves, America arrives. The 1846 Oregon Treaty, which ended decades of contested occupation, is the fact behind that image.

The covered wagon below it tells the other half of the story. Oregon had to be settled to become a state, and the Oregon Trail was how that settlement happened. The wagon is not a generic frontier image; it is the specific object that carried enough people to Willamette Valley to make statehood possible.

The beaver, the wheat, the plow, and the pickaxe anchor the design to the actual economy of 1859 Oregon: fur, farming, and gold. The 33 stars around the border close the sequence with Oregon's position in the Union. The motto The Union, chosen four years before the Civil War, states what the founders believed the sequence was building toward.

Oregon's coat of arms has retained its core composition since adoption in 1859. The eagle, shield, beaver, stars, sheaf, plow, pickaxe, and motto have not changed. What shifted over time were engraving standards and the precise rendering of each element, as different printers and engravers applied their own interpretations to the statutory description.

Before statehood, Oregon Territory used a separate territorial seal. The coat of arms replaced it on February 14, 1859, and the state design has remained in force ever since.