Delena is an

unincorporated community An unincorporated area is a parcel of land that is not governed by a local general-purpose municipal corporation. (At p. 178.) They may be governed or serviced by an encompassing unit (such as a county) or another branch of the state (such as th ...

in Columbia County,

Oregon Oregon ( , ) is a U.S. state, state in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. It is a part of the Western U.S., with the Columbia River delineating much of Oregon's northern boundary with Washington (state), Washington, while t ...

, United States. It lies along

U.S. Route 30 U.S. Route 30 or U.S. Highway 30 (US 30) is an east–west main route of the United States Numbered Highway System, with the highway traveling across the Northern U.S. With a length of , it is the third-longest U.S. Highway, afte ...

slightly west of Alston and about halfway between Rainier on the east and Clatskanie on the west. Delena had a post office that operated intermittently from April 22, 1892, to March 15, 1922. Lincoln J. Meserve was the first of nine postmasters at this location. Accounts of the origin of the community's name have varied, according to ''

Oregon Geographic Names ''Oregon Geographic Names'' is a compilation of the origin and meaning of place names in the U.S. state of Oregon, published by the Oregon Historical Society. The book was originally published in 1928. It was compiled and edited by Lewis A. McArt ...

'' (OGN). It may refer to a mythological name that Meserve found in a book or it may be the name of someone in Meserve's family or it may refer to a place in

Nebraska Nebraska ( ) is a landlocked U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern region of the United States. It borders South Dakota to the north; Iowa to the east and Missouri to the southeast, both across the Missouri River; Ka ...

. In 1947, W. N. Meserve, Meserve's brother, told the OGN compiler that the mythological explanation was correct, and the compiler could find no place named Delena in Nebraska.

References

Unincorporated communities in Columbia County, Oregon Unincorporated communities in Oregon {{ColumbiaCountyOR-geo-stub