In this paper, we report the room-temperature ferromagnetism (FM) of a pure SnO2 nanostructure with various morphologies synthesized by a chemical vapor deposition (CVD) method and study the growth condition dependences of morphology and magnetic property. As the growth temperature is increased from 700 to 900 degrees C, the average diameter of SnO2 nanowires (NW) increases from 20 to 60 nm, while magnetization decreases from 0.223 to 0.081 emu/g. However, morphology and FM are not sensitive to the argon flow rate during the CVD synthesis. Selected area electron diffraction, X-ray diffraction, and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy measurements show that all the samples possess a typical rutile structure, and no other impurity phases are observed. The results demonstrate that the ferromagnetic properties of the samples are related to the morphology and exhibit an increment trend with the increasing surface-to-volume ratio. With a combined study of photoluminescence, our results reveal that the oxygen vacancies mainly at the surface of NW contribute to the FM of SnO2 nanostructures. (C) 2010 The Electrochemical Society. [DOI: 10.1149/1.3435307] All rights reserved.