Baker City's vibrant and bustling downtown offers visitors to Eastern Oregon a perfect balance of urban amenities and small town charm.

Until 1861, the land now known as Baker County, Oregon, was an unsettled wilderness. Then four men looking for the fabled Blue Bucket Mine spent the night in Griffin Gulch and discovered gold.  In October 1874, Governor LaFayette Grover authorized the signing of the charter of Baker City and the town was incorporated and named in honor of Colonel Edward Baker, a civil war hero who served as Oregon's first Senator,  and by the turn of the century, Baker City boasted a population larger than Spokane or Boise at the time and Baker City became known as the "Queen City of the Inland Empire."