Scenic gorge highway set the tone for Oregon roads

By Finn J.D. John
July 21, 2024

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is a rewritten and re-researched version of a much shorter article published Dec. 3, 2010, which you can find here.

VOGONS ARE REALLY bad poets. Everyone who’s ever read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy knows this.

If that includes you, please mix yourself a Pan-Galactic Garble Blaster and sit back while I fill in the uninitiated on the Vogons:

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide, Vogons are a race of corpulent, green-tinted humanoid aliens who are like the worst kind of highway-department bureaucrats. At the beginning of the book, the Vogons are preparing to blow up the Earth to make way for construction of a new hyperspace express route.

According to the book, they are callous, unimaginative, and officious; but the most important piece of advice the Hitchhiker’s Guide gives about Vogons is, “On no account should you allow a Vogon to read poetry at you.”

Vogons love to write poetry, and to share it whenever they can; but they are so very bad at it that their poems can inflict actual physical injury.

It’s a clever way to play with the idea that highway engineers, and engineers in general, often seem not to have much of a sense of aesthetics.

Except, of course — that just isn’t true. Engineers just usually don’t get the opportunity to bring their appreciation of scenic beauty, or graceful forms and artistic touches, to their work.

Engineers make stuff that gets a job done. Paying extra money to make it prettier usually just doesn’t make sense.

But every now and then you run into an engineer with a vision that marries great aesthetics with top-tier engineering and figures out how to make it all make better financial sense than a plain, cheap job.

We spent some time exploring the life and times of one such engineer in the last two Offbeat Oregon columns — Conde McCullough, author of the string of magnificent bridges that adorn the Oregon Coast Highway. (Here is a link to Part One, in case you missed it.) In that article, I mentioned that McCullough was probably attracted to the state by another engineer, Samuel Lancaster, and by Oregon’s receptiveness to him and his vision as he built the Columbia River Scenic Highway.

So, let’s talk about him now. Because most likely, if he hadn’t come to Oregon and built that highway, McCullough wouldn’t have come here, and Oregon would look a lot different today — different, and probably not better.

SAMUEL LANCASTER WAS born in Mississippi in 1864, and got into road engineering in 1881. Like a lot of professionals back then, he didn’t have a formal credential; he took a few engineering classes at Union University, jumped straight into a job on a local railroad, and learned the trade on the job.

By the time he showed up in Seattle around 1906 or 1907, he was a popular and well known evangelist for the Good Roads Movement, which had been started by the League of American Wheelmen (bicycle riders) a decade or so before.

Lancaster was in Seattle because his friend Samuel Hill, a fellow good-roads activist and wealthy railroad executive, had recruited him to help Seattle beat Portland in the rivalry between the two West Coast port cities.

Portland had just had its Lewis and Clark Exposition in 1905, and it had been a huge success — a commercial fantasy city on a picturesque little lake. (Here is a link to an Offbeat Oregon article about it.) But Portland had built the fairgrounds on leased land, and after the event they’d torn everything down. Despite the urging of Frederick Law Olmstead, the legendary designer of New York’s Central Park, it was not made into a park, and within a year or two a colorful mining engineer from Colorado named Lafe Pence was working on filling the lake up with dirt so he could sell lots for warehouses (here's a link to an Offbeat Oregon article about that scheme).

The leaders of Seattle had watched the whole thing — the big boost in tourism and municipal marketing, the wasted potential for a legacy park feature that would have attracted visitors and tourists for decades afterward — and were determined not to make the same mistake when their turn came.

And their turn was coming in 1909, when the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition was scheduled.

So, at Hill’s urging, they hired Lancaster as well as Olmstead’s son, John Olmstead, to design and create an elaborate network of scenic parks and boulevards to spruce up their city.

It was a huge success, of course. The economic benefits that Seattle reaped were big, measurable, and — unlike Portland’s — lasting. Portland leaders could see what a big opportunity they’d missed.

Then Washington hired Lancaster to design a system of access roads in Mount Rainier National Park, which are still legendary today — following Lancaster’s aesthetic goal of bringing visitors to beautiful scenery with roads and bridges that fit into and enhance that scenery.

By this time Lancaster had a strong reputation as that rare creature, an engineer-artist — a Vogon poet, if you will. His projects made money, because they attracted people to see them.

Meanwhile, Portland civic leaders and prominent citizens like Simon Benson and John Yeon were anxious to get even with Seattle with an even bigger, more spectacular road-and-parks project.

So when railroad executive Samuel Hill and engineer Samuel Lancaster approached them to pitch a highway through the Columbia River Gorge that blended first-class engineering with magnificent, scenery-enhancing aesthetics, they got pretty excited.

THEIR TIMING WAS excellent. In addition to Oregon’s desire to score on those pesky Seattle upstarts, the Columbia Gorge was a real problem that needed to be solved.

It’s hard to think of this today, but in 1913, Portland and The Dalles might as well have been across an ocean from each other.

Traffic between the Willamette Valley and the east was either on a railroad train or a steamboat. Passage wasn’t cheap and the journey wasn’t easy. Everyone could see that a highway would bring great economic benefits to the region.

Everyone also knew the tourism potential of the Columbia River Gorge would be enormous. By now, most of Portland’s wealthy swells had outfitted themselves with automobiles, and the price of Henry Ford’s Model T had plummeted as he got his factory dialed in, to the point where most Oregon families could probably afford one. But Oregon’s dry summers and famously soggy winters meant that most roads would be pretty unpleasant to drive on most of the year.

So, Hill hired Lancaster at his own expense to scout a route and draw up a plan.

He scouted a route that threaded past waterfalls and scenic spots like the string in a pearl necklace — a “park to park highway,” as he put it several times.

The road would be specially oriented to frame picturesque vistas, and it would harmonize with the scenery in such a way that Sunday driving motorists would find themselves immersed in the scenery — actually being part of the aesthetic effect, rather than just observing it.

There would be long stretches of viaduct running right along the edge of the river, elegantly arched bridges spanning gullies and cliff faces, a spectacular windowed tunnel at Mitchell Point with views out over the water. Modern reinforced-concrete bridges would be faced with rocks carefully embedded to make the whole thing look like a rustic craftsman created it. Everywhere possible, drop-offs would be protected by a rustic stone-faced concrete guardrail, to stop cars from tumbling over the edge.

There was some resistance at first. One of the county commissioners dug his heels in, demanding that the project be narrower, uglier and cheaper, and demanding that some earlier less-thorough surveying work that had been done be built upon. Luckily, he was outvoted.

There was also a good deal of trouble with the county surveyor’s office, where professional jealousy was given free rein, to the point where the commissioners finally decided to hand the whole thing over to the state to manage — Oregon had just formed a new state highway commission.

There also were some property owners who didn’t want to play, or who were hoping to be paid more than their property was worth.

Jennie Griswold, the owner of Multnomah Falls, demanded $50,000 for it ($1.6 million in modern currency). She settled for $5,250 after the City of Portland threatened to condemn it under Eminent Domain. (Here is a link to the Offbeat Oregon article about Multnomah Falls, and the Griswold family's plan to use it to power a sawmill.)

In his account, C. Lester Horn tells of a Portland businessman whom he is careful not to identify by name. (I suspect it was Henry Wemme, the textile magnate who owned the first car in Portland.) But, whoever it was, he owned a business that did a lot of trade with hotels in Portland, including the Benson Hotel, owned by the highway’s number-one booster, Simon Benson. So Benson, after trying unsuccessfully to get the businessman to relent, canceled all his business with him. The businessman responded by promptly sending Benson a notarized easement to let the highway pass through the property.

For the most part, though, most property owners didn’t want to be caught dragging their feet on a project that almost everyone was enthusiastically in favor of — both Portland newspapers, almost all Portland civic and business leaders, and a significant majority of Oregon taxpayers were all in. Most landowners donated an easement to the highway without even being asked to do so.

Benson famously personally paid for the footbridge that crosses in front of Multnomah Falls personally. While chatting with Lancaster, Benson casually asked him how much he thought a bridge there would cost; when Lancaster came up with a figure, Benson wrote a check for it on the spot.

IF MULTNOMAH FALLS has any competition for the title of “crown jewel of the highway,” it would have to be Crown Point Vista House, which you could think of as America’s first rest area. It perches on the brow of a bluff just outside Corbett, overlooking the most spectacular part of the gorge’s big-picture scenery. It was designed by a German architect, built with cut sandstone, and features bathrooms with marble and polished mahogany walls.

The scenic part of the highway was built between 1913 and 1915, but crews were still working on odds and ends until 1921 or so. It was, of course, a huge success, both as a conduit for freight and for tourists visiting the waterfalls. Also, it was the first paved highway in the northwest.

By the 1930s, the freight hauling aspect had nearly taken over, and the highway was always clogged with heavy trucks. So engineers created a new highway along the water, designed for fast travel; this became, eventually, I-84. Meanwhile, the most scenic part of the old highway was preserved as a tourist route, so that folks could drive from park to park, the way Lancaster initially planned.

THE COLUMBIA RIVER Scenic Highway is undeniably a state treasure, although it never did achieve the Portland leaders’ goal of helping their town eclipse Seattle in West Coast prominence. What it did do, though, was set a tone in Oregon roadbuilding and especially bridgebuilding that would give the state its unique character for the rest of the 20th century and beyond.

(Sources: “S.C. Lancaster and the Columbia River Highway,” an article by Ronald J. Fahl published in the June 1973 issue of Oregon Historical Quarterly; “Oregon’s Columbia River Highway,” an article by C. Lester Horn published in the September 1965 issue of Oregon Historical Quarterly; “Columbia River Highway,” an article by Robert W. Hadlow published Sept. 19, 2022, in The Oregon Encyclopedia.)