Monmouth is a city in Polk County in the U.S. state of Oregon. It was named for Monmouth, Illinois, the lineage of its primordial settlers. The population is 11,110 at the 2020 Census and it is allowance of the Salem Metropolitan Statistical Area.

Monmouth was settled in 1853 by a help of pioneers who allocated 640 acres (2.6 km) to construct both a city and a “college under the sponsorship of the Christian Church”, and proceeds from the sale of these lands were used to found Monmouth University, currently known as Western Oregon University.
For decades, Monmouth was a abstemious town that banned the sale of alcoholic beverages in supermarkets, restaurants and bars. Monmouth’s status as the last abstemious town in Oregon was ended by a popular vote in the November 2002 election.

Monmouth was fixed by Elijah Davidson and his family. Originally a devotee of the Christian Church of Cameron (Monmouth, Illinois), Davidson was a devout futuristic of prohibition. In 1852, sixty-three-year-old Elijah Davidson and his intimates set out for Oregon Territory. By 1854, more than a dozen Disciples families from Monmouth, many of them combined to each extra or to Davidson, had allied him. In February 1859, Davidson and new trustees efforts to prohibit the importation, exportation, sale, and consumption of alcohol in Monmouth became a reality. One of the main arguments Davidson and his fellow religious supporters used to push prohibition legislation was, “to enable them to suppress and prevent nuisances, to render the possession of simulation and property more secure, to enable them to intensify and decorate the streets of the town.”

Despite the efforts of Definite merchants to repeal prohibition in Monmouth throughout its history, their efforts proved fruitless. What was most important to the local religious community was to save prohibition for the betterment of the social order of Monmouth. Although opponents raised religious, moral, economic, and quality-of-life arguments thesame to those preached during the nineteenth century, they as a consequence brought two new arguments to middle stage: the historic plants of Monmouth’s prohibition and the uniqueness that local prohibition brought to the town.