The Astoria Column was dedicated on July 22, 1926, on a hilltop site overlooking Astoria, Oregon, and the mouth of the Columbia River. Funded by the Great Northern Railway Company and Vincent Astor, the great-grandson of fur trader John Jacob Astor, the column was built to commemorate Euro-American settlement in Clatsop and Chinookan homelands. New York architect Electus D. Litchfield (1872-1952) modeled the structure on a Roman column, rising 125 feet with an interior spiral staircase of 164 steps to an outdoor viewing platform. The exterior was painted by the Italian artist Attilio Pusterla (1862-1941) and displays a spiral sgraffito fresco, a technique that entailed applying dark pigment over stencils onto a wet plaster surface. The fresco depicts scenes from the region’s history, including the approach of the Columbia Rediviva in 1792, the arrival of the Lewis and Clark Expedition in 1805, and the explosion of the Pacific Fur Company ship Tonquin in 1811. The imagery culminates at the top of the column with a depiction of the arrival of the railroad in 1893. The Astoria Column remains one of Oregon’s most recognizable landmarks.

Sources: “History of the Column: A monument to the West,” 2024 (accessed June 15, 2026), https://astoriacolumn.org/history/; Astoria Column, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, U.S. Department of the Interior National Park Service (1974)