Gold Beach is a city in and the county seat of Curry County, Oregon, United States, on the Oregon Coast. Take a look below for 15 great and interesting facts about Gold Beach, Oregon, United States.
1. The population was 2,253 at the 2010 census.
2. The community was originally named Ellensburg in the 1850s, but later took the name Gold Beach after a beach near the mouth of the Rogue River where hundreds of placer mines extracted gold.
3. An Ellensburgh post office was established in 1853, changed to Ellensburg in 1877, and changed to Gold Beach in 1890.
4. Mailboats based in Gold Beach have been delivering mail upstream to Agness since 1895, one of only two rural mailboat routes remaining in the U.S.
5. Although Gold Beach had been a community since the middle of the 19th century, and the county seat since 1859, its current incorporation charter only dates to 1945.
6. In June 2020, the Mayor (Karl Popoff) resigned from a local child-oriented nonprofit after stating “Black Lives Matter don’t matter to Black Lives Matter people … you can shove your racism bandwagon.”
7. Popoff had been mayor for 16 years at that point. Responding to The Oregonian, he apologized for his tone but stood by the content of his message, stating “Those three words hit me the wrong way”, speaking of Black Lives Matter.
8. A majority of city councilors voted to censure the mayor and to withdraw funding for his projects, with one stating “He doesn’t know what he wrote was wrong.”
9. According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 2.76 square miles (7.15 km2), of which 2.53 square miles (6.55 km2) is land and 0.23 square miles (0.60 km2) is water.
10. Gold Beach is bordered to the north by the Rogue River and Barley Beach, also known as Bailey Beach.
11. Gold Beach has cool, very wet winters and mild, relatively dry summers. The location is heavily influenced by the moderating waters of the Pacific and the cool offshore currents. As a result, the temperature swings are very narrow for a climate of its latitude.
12. According to the Köppen climate classification system, Gold Beach has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate (Csb).
13. Between 1948 and 2014, the average maximum temperature in January was about 54 °F or 12.2 °C, and the average minimum was about 41 °F or 5 °C.
14. The corresponding averages for July were 68 °F or 20 °C and 51 °F or 10.6 °C.[11] Annually, there are high temperatures of 90 °F or 32.2 °C on an average of only 0.1 days and there are low temperatures of 32 °F or 0 °C or lower on an average of 9.2 days. The record high temperature was 102 °F (38.9 °C) on September 10, 1973. The record low temperature was 12 °F (−11.1 °C) on January 21, 1962.
15. The average annual precipitation between 1948 and 2014 was about 80 inches or 2,030 millimetres, mostly falling between October and April.