Swastika Mountain in Oregon will be renamed Mount Halo following a vote by the US Geographic Names Board.
It is located in a remote part of the Umpqua National Forest outside of Eugene, Oregon, and is getting a new name after an 81-year-old Oregonian saw the old one in the local newspaper.
Until recently, the mountain was relatively unknown and its name rarely used: the small peak was named after a local cattle ranch in the early 20th century, long before the term became associated with the Nazi Party.
The new name for the mountain, Mount Halo, pays homage to chief Halito of the Yoncalla Kalapuya tribe.
Swastika Mountain in Oregon will be renamed Mount Halo following a vote by the US Geographic Names Board.
The mountain is located in a remote part of the Umpqua National Forest outside of Eugene, Oregon.
Chief Halo (pictured) objected by refusing to be relocated to the Grand Ronde Reservation when local tribes were driven off their land.
The change was approved in a 19-3 vote in December and went into effect late last month, according to the Register-Guard.
An earlier proposal suggested calling it Umpqua Mountain, but the petitioner withdrew it to support adopting the name Mount Halo, according to materials from the newspaper’s state board reviews.
In the 1850s, Chief Halo objected by refusing to be resettled on the Grand Ronde reservation when local tribes were driven from their land in the Umpqua Valley. His tribal village was located 20 miles west of the mountain.
The relatively unknown mountain appeared on the public radar in January 2022, when two teenagers were reported missing after hiking near the mountain.
Their rescue prompted a press release from the US Coast Guard, which named the peak ‘Swastika Mountain’.
Oregon woman Joyce McClain, 81, read about the rescue mission and couldn’t believe a mountain would still have that name in 2022. She responded by starting a petition to change its name.
“People need to come forward and take action when they see something that’s not right or needs to be changed because one person can make a difference, and it just goes to show that that’s so true,” McClain told NPR at the time.
The relatively unknown mountain appeared on the public radar in January 2022 when two teenagers were reported missing after hiking near the mountain.
The mountain was not well known before the rescue and its name went unnoticed for more than 100 years.
McClain wrote to the Oregon Geographic Names Board and filed to propose a name change. Kerry Tymchuk, executive secretary of the historical society, told NPR that McClain was the first person he knows of to apply for the mountain.
“It’s not a well-known mountain, and frankly, I didn’t know there was one,” Tymchuk told NPR.
“It’s in a national forest, not accessible to many people like Mount Hood or Mount St. Helen. It is not well known throughout the state; the vast majority of people probably never even knew it was there,” he added.
The word ‘swastika’ comes from South Asian Sanskrit and means ‘to be lucky’ or ‘well-being’. A variation of the symbol appropriated by the Nazis is a historical Hindu symbol.
The mountain, as well as the nearby and now-defunct town of Swastika, was named after a cattle ranch in the early 20th century before Hitler’s rise to power, according to Tymchuk.
