Little River (North Umpqua River tributary)

The Little River is a tributary of the North Umpqua River, about long, in southwestern Oregon in the United States. It drains part of the western side of the Cascade Range east of Roseburg, between the North and South Umpqua.

The current Colliding Rivers Information Center was originally the North Umpqua Ranger Station of the Umpqua National Forest. It was built in 1938 by the Civilian Conservation Corps and United States Forest Service (USFS). It was converted to a residence in the 1950s, but in 1990 the building began to be restored to be similar to the original condition for use as an information center. Opened in 1992, the visitor center is managed jointly by the Forest Service, the Roseburg Visitor and Convention Bureau and the Bureau of Land Management. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Name

An early name for the river was the East Umpqua. In 1855, a pioneer settler, Meshek Tipton, filed a donation land claim near the confluence of the East Umpqua and North Umpqua rivers. Tipton had lived near the Little River in Tennessee before emigrating to Oregon. It is thought that Tipton changed the East Umpqua's name to Little River in memory of his birthplace.

Watershed

The heavily forested Little River watershed, which extends from the western Cascades to the Umpqua Valley hills, includes a variety of conifers, hardwoods, and prairie vegetation. As of 2006, 63 percent of the land was publicly owned, and 37 percent was private. The U.S. Forest Service administered about of the public land and the Bureau of Land Management about . Roughly 97 percent of the land, public and private, was devoted to forestry.