Corvallis, Oregon: A Latin Name to End a Mix-Up

Corvallis, Oregon, was Marysville until 1853, when a new name meaning “the heart of the valley” ended the mix-ups with Marysville, California. The new name is two Latin words run together: cor, heart, and vallis, valley.

Marysville on the Willamette

Joseph C. Avery, a Pennsylvanian who’d crossed the plains in 1845, took up a claim in 1846 where Mary’s River runs into the Willamette. David Fagan’s 1885 history of Benton County credits him with laying out the town of Marysville there. If you try to pin down the year, the same book gives you three: 1846 in one chapter, a few lots staked in the winter of 1847–48 in another, and “the winter of 1850” in Avery’s obituary. William F. Dixon held the claim just to the north, and the town grew across both.

One name, two towns, one stage route

The trouble was that California had a Marysville too, and it sat on the same stage route. Fagan says the shared name “was wont to produce confusion.” So on December 20, 1853, the territorial legislature passed an act changing the town’s name, with a careful line “that said change of name shall not affect any right or titles to any lots or blocks of land sold and conveyed in said town.” Then, as Fagan put it, the town “was christened by the very appropriate cognomen of Corvallis — the heart of the valley.”

Fagan doesn’t say who came up with the word. The City of Corvallis credits Avery, the same man who’d laid out Marysville.

Latin, not Spanish

Gannett’s 1902 book of federal place names got the language wrong. It called Corvallis a “Name formed of two Spanish words, meaning ‘heart of valley.’” A Latin dictionary of the period has both halves: cor is “the heart,” and valles or vallis is “a valley, vale.” The 1905 edition of Gannett’s book dropped the Oregon entry. What’s left under Corvallis is a town in Montana, “named from and settled by people from Corvallis, Oregon.”

A few months as the capital

Two years later, the town got a brief promotion. Fagan writes that in 1855 Corvallis “bore the honors of the Capitolian Crown, for some months,” when the legislature met there. It didn’t last. Writing in 1885, Fagan said the town had been “as incomprehensibly robbed of its Capitolian crown,” and the capital today is Salem. What Corvallis got in the end was the State Agricultural College, which you can spot on the 1921 map above.

Sources & further reading

• David D. Fagan, History of Benton County, Oregon (1885). Avery’s claim and Marysville (pp. 333, 345, 422–423), the act of December 20, 1853, the California Marysville on the same stage route and “the heart of the valley” (p. 425), and the capital in 1855 (pp. 333, 425).
• Charlton T. Lewis, An Elementary Latin Dictionary (1918). The entries for cor and valles or vallis.
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1902 and 1905). The 1902 “two Spanish words” and the 1905 entry for Corvallis, Montana.
• City of Corvallis, “Corvallis History.” Credits Joseph C. Avery with coining the name.
• GNIS feature 1140162 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Corvallis.