Oswego Lake
| Oswego Lake | |
|---|---|
Lakewood Bay (connected to the main lake in 1928)
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| Location | Lake Oswego, Clackamas County, Oregon |
| Coordinates | 45°24′34″N 122°41′47″W / 45.40944°N 122.69639°WCoordinates: 45°24′34″N 122°41′47″W / 45.40944°N 122.69639°W |
| Type | Kolk depression/Reservoir |
| Primary inflows | Tualatin River, Springbrook Creek |
| Primary outflows | Willamette River (via Oswego Creek) |
| Catchment area | 6.6 sq mi (17 km2) |
| Basin countries | United States |
| Max. length | 2.5 mi (4.0 km) |
| Max. width | 0.3 mi (0.48 km) |
| Surface area | 420 acres (1.7 km2) |
| Average depth | 26 ft (7.9 m) |
| Max. depth | 55 ft (17 m) |
| Water volume | 10,055 acre·ft (12,403,000 m3) |
| Residence time | 2 months |
| Shore length1 | 11.95 mi (19.23 km) |
| Surface elevation | 99 ft (30 m) |
| Islands | Jantzen Island |
| Settlements | Lake Oswego |
| 1 Shore length is not a well-defined measure. | |
Oswego Lake is a lake in Clackamas County, Oregon that is completely surrounded by the city of Lake Oswego. Though the lake is naturally occurring (a former channel of the Tualatin River), it has been significantly altered because of the concrete dam that has increased its size to 395 acres (1.60 km2). Officially, the United States Geological Survey records the official name as Lake Oswego and classifies it as a reservoir (due to its artificially increased size). To distinguish it from the city, however, the lake is usually called Oswego Lake.
The lake is a former channel of the Tualatin River, carved in basalt to the Willamette River. Eventually, the river changed course and abandoned the Oswego route.
About 13,000 to 15,000 years ago, the ice dam that contained Glacial Lake Missoula ruptured, resulting in the Missoula Floods, which backed the Columbia River up the Willamette River. The flooding created an underwater vortex called a kolk, which scoured out and enlarged the old Oswego channel, creating a natural lake. The rocks and boulders were flung by the kolk up to a mile away to present-day Durham and Tualatin, where they were quarried for many years before the site was converted to the Bridgeport Village shopping center.
The lake was known to the native Clackamas Indians as Waluga ("wild swan"), for the birds they hunted there. With the arrival of European settlers in the mid-19th century, the lake was called Sucker Lake for a type of fish that was abundant in its waters. In 1847, Albert Alonzo Durham built a sawmill on Sucker Creek, the lake's outlet to the Willamette River. In 1850, he made the first Donation Land Claim in the area, which he named Oswego after Oswego, New York.
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Wikipedia