The monument was commissioned by the local American Legion post to honor the residents of Clatsop County who served in the Great War. On July 21, 1926, the city of Astoria dedicated it with a commemorative plaque reading: "Soldiers Monument: Dedicated to Soldiers of World War of Clatsop County By the City of Astoria." The location was deliberate. The intersection sits at the edge of Uniontown, Astoria's historically Finnish neighborhood, where many of the young men who shipped overseas to France had grown up fishing the Columbia River and working in the canneries that lined its banks. For a community of immigrants who had come to America seeking a better life, the monument declared that their sons had earned their place in the national story.

John Paulding, born in 1883, was one of America's most prolific creators of World War I memorials. His "Over the Top at Cantigny" statue captures the moment of an infantry charge: a helmeted soldier in full pack, canteen and bayonet swinging from his ammunition belt, a square pouch around his neck, lunging forward over the debris of no man's land. The Battle of Cantigny, fought in May 1918, was the first major American offensive of the war, and Paulding chose it as the defining image of the American doughboy. His work sparked a rivalry with sculptor E. M. Viquesney, whose similar "Spirit of the American Doughboy" led to copyright lawsuits between the two artists. Paulding's versions stand in communities across the country, but Astoria's is distinctive for Diamond's Spanish Revival base — a cupola-topped structure that gives the monument an architectural identity beyond its sculpture.

The monument's path to historic recognition came in two stages. On November 15, 1984, the National Register of Historic Places listed it individually, acknowledging both its artistic merit and its significance to the community. Four years later, on August 25, 1988, the register included it as a contributing structure within the broader Uniontown–Alameda Historic District, tying the monument to the neighborhood's larger story of immigrant settlement and civic identity. In the mid-2000s, a $10,000 grant from Oregon's State Historic Preservation Office funded repairs to the monument's lights, windows, and doors, along with renovations to the restroom facilities that had served the public since the structure's dedication. The work acknowledged what Astoria already knew: the monument is both a memorial and a piece of living infrastructure, used daily by the people it was built to serve.

Nearly a century after its dedication, the Astoria Victory Monument still occupies its triangular plot at the convergence of three streets, watching over traffic that flows between downtown and the waterfront. The doughboy's perpetual charge faces the Columbia River, where cargo ships pass beneath the Astoria–Megler Bridge and fishing boats head for the bar. The monument stands in a city that has reinvented itself several times — from fur trading post to salmon canning capital to film location — but has never forgotten its debts. Clatsop County sent its young men to France in 1917 and 1918, and Charles Diamond and John Paulding gave them a memorial that combined civic duty with practical purpose. The restrooms may invite a smile, but the soldier above them remains earnest, frozen in the act of going over the top.