February 14 · This Day in America
President James Buchanan signs the bill, and a vast green country on the far edge of the continent — Pacific fog, basalt rivers, a coastline that took settlers months of dust and dying to reach by wagon — becomes the 33rd American state. It comes in free, a year after free Minnesota, and in 1859 nobody can pretend that is a small thing: the country is two years from a war over exactly that question, and every new star on the flag is a vote about what kind of nation this will be. Oregon is the line drawn in the redwood-dark Northwest. The trail that brought people here was the longest road in American memory. Now it ends not at a destination but at a state, with a vote, in the Union.
Source: hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu
Also on this day · 1912
Fifty-three years to the day after Oregon, President Taft signs Arizona into the Union. With it, the contiguous United States is finished — forty-eight states, an unbroken country from the Atlantic to the Pacific, no more territories waiting in the lower map. For nearly half a century, until Alaska and Hawaii, this is simply what America looks like. The shape we still draw from memory was completed on a Valentine's Day.
Source: www.whitehousehistory.org