Proposal Rock is at the mouth of the Neskowin Creek, about 10 miles (16 km) north-northeast of Lincoln City and 0.5 miles (0.8 km) south-southwest of the community of Neskowin, Oregon. The rock is named for a local legend and is also located adjacent to the stumps of an ancient spruce forest buried in the beach sand.

In 1887, Alexandria L. Rock came to teach school in Oretown, a community on Nestucca Bay about 4 miles (6.5 km) north of present-day Neskowin. In 1949, she wrote a book on the history of the area and recalled that settlers from the Little Nestucca River area journeyed to the mouth of Neskowin Creek for picnics on the beach in the 1880s and ’90s. During one such outing, a sea captain named Charley Gage proposed to Della Page, a daughter of a homesteading family with a local farm.

Adjacent to Proposal Rock and the mouth of the Neskowin Creek are stumps of a Sitka spruce forest that were likely buried when an earthquake of the Cascadia subduction zone abruptly lowered the trees and they were subsequently covered by mud from landslides or debris from a tsunami. Many of the stumps are over 2,000 years old. Read more here and here. Explore more of Proposal Rock here: