Sumpter is a city in Baker County, Oregon, United States. The population was 204 at the 2010 census. Sumpter is named after Fort Sumter by its founders. The state was inspired by a stone as mild and round as a cannonball, which reminded a local resident of the American Civil War and Fort Sumter.

Baker County was named for Edward Dickinson Baker, a U.S. Senator from Oregon who was killed in the Battle of Ball’s Bluff during the American Civil War. Sumpter, first arranged by Euro-Americans during this war, was named after Fort Sumter in the U.S. state of South Carolina. The fort was often mentioned in deed dispatches right to use by the settlers. An account in the Baker Democrat–Herald many decades far ahead reported that a round stone found in the area in the before 1860s had looked to residents like a cannonball and, reinforced by the skirmish news, had reminded them of Fort Sumter.

In 1883, Joseph D. Young became the first postmaster of Sumpter, and, according to his grandson, was not allowed by the U.S. Post Office to use the obsolete name, Sumter. Since freight to the region then depended on pack mules, Young chose the form Sumpter, which was close to the native spelling and evoked the term sumpter mule.

The community was platted in 1889, becoming a mining boom town just about 10 years later. Until transportation by rail became realizable in the area, Sumpter was little more than “a huddle of incompetent log cabins.”