French Prairie, Prairie in Marion County, Oregon

French Prairie is a prairie in Marion County, Oregon, in the Willamette Valley north of Salem. The Willamette River bounds it on the north and west, where it turns 90 degrees south near Newberg, and the Pudding River bounds it on the east. Settlements founded by French Canadians on the prairie include Butteville, Champoeg, Gervais, Saint Louis and St. Paul.

French-Canadian settlers arrived in the 1820s through 1840s and gave the region its name. This early settlement became a foundation for further American expansion in this part of Oregon.

The name was first recorded in the early 1850s by Pierre Charles Fournier de Saint-Amant, a French consul to California visiting Oregon, who called the area "les prairies françaises". The settlers were French Canadian and Métis, mostly former Hudson's Bay Company employees, and many took Kalapuya wives. The St. Paul Roman Catholic Church, built a year after St. Louis in 1845, is the oldest brick building still standing in the Pacific Northwest.

The region is easy to explore using hiking and biking trails that link several small towns including Butteville, Champoeg, St. Paul, St. Louis, and Gervais. These trails give you a direct way to see the settlements and surrounding landscape.

The prairie is also noted as one of the earliest Métis settlements in Pacific Northwest history. In the 1880s the Oregonian Railway Company briefly ran a station named French Prairie about two miles southeast of St. Paul.