Laid Down: 1891
Launched: 1893
Completed: July, 1896
Displacement: 10,300 tons
Main Armament: four 13” guns (two twin turrets)
Secondary Armament: eight 8” guns (four twin turrets)
Speed: 15 knots
Treaty: Pre-Washington Naval Treaty
Major Engagements: Straits of Magellan, Battle of Santiago de Cuba
Fate: Scrapped, 1956
Third ship of the Indiana class, Oregon was the second warship of the name to serve in the United States Navy (the first was a brig used primarily for exploration), although CSS Oregon had run blockades for the Confederacy. In the 1890s and 1900s, the USN used state names for both battleships and armored cruisers. At the time the two ship types were roughly the same size, with battleships carrying a heavier armament at the expense of speed. The types diverged over time, and in 1912 the USN renamed the remaining armored cruisers after cities, in order to free up state names and unofficially recognize the pre-eminence of the battleship.
Oregon was laid down in 1891, immediately in the wake of the publication of the first volume of Alfred Thayer Mahan’s Influence of Sea Power Upon History. Oregon and her sisters were designed primarily for coastal defense work, but carried a main armament comparable with the most advanced foreign battleships. Nevertheless, although a reasonable effort for a navy unused to constructing line of battle ships, Oregon and her sisters did not compare favorably with foreign counterparts, the cream of which were represented by the British Royal Sovereign class. The Royal Sovereigns were 3,000 tons larger, carried 13.5” guns, and could make a knot and half faster than Oregon. Nevertheless, Oregon represented a start, and the USN would, with the help of Mahan and several committed presidential administrations, follow through with the creation of one of the world’s most powerful navies.
[no image in epub file]
USS Oregon, 1898. From The History and Conquest of the Philippines and our Other Island Possessions; Embracing OurWar with the Filipinos in 1899 by Alden March.
USS Oregon, 1893 line drawing.
Built in San Francisco, Oregon was commissioned in 1896 and immediately deployed to the Pacific. The Pacific Squadron was expected to support the Asiatic Squadron, which secured US interests in China and the rest of the Far East. On February 15, 1898, in the context of increasing tensions between Spain and the United States over Spanish control of Cuba, the armored cruiser Maine blew up in Havana. Thanks in part to the advocacy of William Randolph Hearst’s network of newspapers, the United States went to war with Spain in April. Expecting the conflict to escalate, USS Oregon set sail for Cuba from San Francisco on March 19.
Oregon was not designed to withstand the rigors of a high speed trip around South America. Captain Charles Edgar Clark, who had only taken command of Oregon a few weeks before, opted to take the treacherous Straits of Magellan to save time. This placed the battleship in serious jeopardy when a major gale struck, forcing Oregon to anchor in uncertain conditions. Nevertheless, Oregon survived and arrived in the Cuba theater of operations on May 24. Now nicknamed “McKinley’s Bulldog,” Oregon participated in several actions against Spanish positions in Cuba before the war ended, including the Battle of Santiago de Cuba, which destroyed the bulk of the Armada España .
The story of Oregon’s experience circling South America was critical in building support for the construction of the Panama Canal, as access to a canal would have cut three weeks off the travel time. Consequently, the United States fomented a rebellion in Colombia that led to the independence of Panama, and purchased French equipment and property in what came to be known as the Canal Zone.
Oregon was redeployed to the Pacific after the war, and spent considerable time in East Asia, including duty on station during the Boxer Rebellion. An uncharted rock nearly sent her to the bottom in 1900. In 1906, the same year that HMS Dreadnought entered service, Oregon was decommissioned. Badly obsolete, she was refit and recommissioned in 1911, decommissioned again in 1914, and commissioned/decommissioned several more time before 1920. In 1923, Oregon was demilitarized and loaned to the state of Oregon as a floating museum. She was moored in the Willamette River for what was expected to be a permanent stay in Portland. However, World War II intervened, and the USN decided that Oregon was more useful as scrap metal than as a war monument. No less than Representative Lyndon Baines Johnson delivered the keynote upon her sale to a local scrapyard.
Strangely enough, the story doesn’t end there. The Navy determined that it didn’t actually need the scrap, and halted the process after Oregon’s guns and superstructure had been removed. The hulk was reclassified and used as a munitions ship in the Pacific campaign. Moored in Guam after the war, her hulk broke free during a storm in 1948, and floated about the Pacific for a month. In 1956 Oregon met her end as she was sold for scrap to a Japanese shipyard. Oregon’s foremast survives today in Tom McCall Waterfront Park in Portland, Oregon.
Author’s Note
In 1992, I convinced a young woman that the entire battleship was actually buried beneath the Park, with only the mast above ground. I carry no guilt from this deception.
USS Oregon mainmast, Tom McCall Waterfront Park, August 27, 2005. CCA, Cacaphony.
There’s no question that USS Oregon would have better served the long-term interests of the United States Navy as a memorial in Portland than as scrap, especially given that most of the ship ended up in Japan. Had she survived, Oregon would have been the last representative not only of the early USN, but also of an era of battleship architecture.
We tend to think of our era as one of accelerating technological development, but it’s interesting that Oregon went from construction and commissioning to decommissioning and obsolescence in a mere ten years. In twenty, she was an archaic relic. By comparison, we now expect Nimitz and Ford class aircraft carriers to serve as front line units for fifty or sixty years.
Related Entries
Contemporary of… HIJMS Mikasa
Inspired… España
Preceded… USS Michigan
HIJMS Mikasa
Laid Down: 1899
Launched: 1900
Completed: March, 1902
Displacement: 15,300 tons
Main Armament: four 12” guns (two twin turrets)
Secondary Armament: fourteen 6” guns (single mounts)
Speed: 18 knots
Treaty: Pre-Washington Naval Treaty
Major Engagements: Battle of Yellow Sea, Battle of Tsushima
Fate:
