The Historic Columbia River Highway is an approximately 75-mile-long (121 km) scenic highway in the U.S. state of Oregon between Troutdale and The Dalles, built through the Columbia River Gorge between 1913 and 1922. As the first planned scenic roadway in the United States, it has been recognized in numerous ways, including being listed on the National Register of Historic Places, being designated as a National Historic Landmark by the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, being designated as a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark by the American Society of Civil Engineers, and being considered a "destination unto itself" as an All-American Road by the U.S. Secretary of Transportation. The historic roadway was bypassed by the present Columbia River Highway No. 2 (now Interstate 84 [I-84]) from the 1930s to the 1950s, leaving behind the old two-lane road. The road is now mostly owned and maintained by the state through the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) as the Historic Columbia River Highway No. 100 (still partially marked as U.S. Route 30 (US 30); see Oregon highways and routes) or the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department as the Historic Columbia River Highway State Trail. The original highway was promoted by lawyer and entrepreneur Sam Hill and engineer Samuel C. Lancaster, to be modeled after the great scenic roads of Europe. From the very beginning, the roadway was envisioned not just as means of traveling by the then popular Model T, but designed with an elegance that took full advantage of all the natural beauty along the route. When the United States Numbered Highway System was officially established in 1926, the highway became the part of US 30. Since then, modern I-84 has been built parallel to the highway between Portland and The Dalles, replacing it as the main travel route and resulting in the loss of some of the original sections of road.
History
Planning and construction
The Columbia River Gorge is the lowest crossing of the Cascade Mountains, carved by the Columbia River during the Cascades' uplift. Rafting down the gorge from The Dalles was one of the most expensive and dangerous parts of the Oregon Trail, traveled by thousands of emigrants to the Oregon Territory, until the Barlow Road opened in 1846 around the south side of Mount Hood. A wagon road was finally built through the gorge in the 1870s, when The Dalles and Sandy Wagon Road was constructed along the south shore from The Dalles to the Sandy River east of Portland. However, this road had steep (20%) grades and a crooked and narrow alignment, and it was not until 1882 that the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company finally opened a water-level route, partially destroying the wagon road. With the onset of the automobile and the good roads movement of the early 20th century, a road was once again needed, and Multnomah County began constructing a 20-foot (6 m) roadway with 9% grades, but ran into difficulties relating to the railroad's location. At Shellrock Mountain to the east, long believed to be an impassable barrier, Governor Oswald West used prison labor in 1912 to prove that it was possible to build a road, at least temporarily.
The eventual highway was primarily designed by engineer and landscape architect Samuel C. Lancaster, a lifelong friend of good roads promoter Samuel Hill. His first contribution to the Pacific Northwest was as a consultant for Seattle's Olmsted boulevard system, part of its preparations for the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. In 1908, the two traveled to Europe for the First International Road Congress, where Hill represented the state of Washington. Hill was especially impressed by Switzerland's Axenstrasse, a road built along Lake Lucerne in 1865 that included a windowed tunnel, and wanted to build a similar scenic highway through the Columbia River Gorge. With Lancaster's help, Hill built the experimental Maryhill Loops Road from the river east of the gorge up the Columbia Hills to his planned Quaker utopian community at Maryhill. The road was the first asphalt road in the state, designed with gradual horseshoe curves to avoid steep grades. However, Washington's lawmakers denied his request for a cross-state trunk route on the river's north bank, and Hill crossed the river to Oregon, the last of the states in the far Western U.S. to create a highway department. With the help of his life-size model at Maryhill, he convinced the state legislature to create the State Highway Commission in 1913, which would work with the counties to build roads. The Multnomah County commissioners agreed later that year that the state should design the route to distance it from county politics, and set aside an initial $75,000.
In laying out the highway, Lancaster sought not only to create a transportation artery, but to make the gorge's "beautiful waterfalls, canyons, cliffs and mountain domes" accessible to "men from all climes". According to locating engineer John Arthur Elliott,
The ideals sought were not the usual economic features and considerations given the location of a trunk highway. Grades, curvature, distance and even expense were sacrificed to reach some scenic vista or to develop a particularly interesting point. All the natural beauty spots were fixed as control points and the location adjusted to include them. Although the highway would have a commercial value in connecting the Coast country with the eastern areas, no consideration was given the commercial over scenic requirements. The one prevailing idea in the location and construction was to make this highway a great scenic boulevard surpassing all other highways of the world. Lancaster began surveying near the Chanticleer Inn, where Larch Mountain Road, part of Multnomah County's existing road network, began climbing the hills of the gorge. For five months, from September 1913 to January 1914, he laid out a route for about 21 miles (34 km) to the Hood River County line west of Cascade Locks. The alignment generally had a maximum grade of 5% and curve radius of 200 feet (61 m), and was wide enough for 18 feet (5.5 m) of macadam (later asphalt) and two 3-foot (0.91 m) gravel shoulders. To accomplish this, Lancaster used curves similar to the road he had designed at Maryhill where the highway descended from Crown Point.
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