Influence & Legacy
"...the hopes and dreams of people like Ira Williams and Sam Lancaster, John Muir and Gifford Pinchot, have contributed much to the substance and form of our contemporary American ideas and ideals..."
Reddick xiv
Robert W. Hadlow, Columbia River Highway Historic District, National Historic Landmark Nomination
The CRH gained national and international attention through its appearance in professional periodicals such as Engineering News, Contracting, Engineering and Contracting, Good Roads, and Public Roads. It also received widespread coverage in more popular writing, such as Sunset, the Pacific Monthly, and Scientific American. Those in academia in the years immediately after the First World War offered the CRH in their highway engineering textbooks as a new standard in modern road building. 5
5 See Bowlby, “The Columbia Highway in Oregon,” Engineering News 73, no. 2 (14 January 1915): 62-64; K. P. Billner, “Some Bridges on the Columbia Highway,” Engineering News 72, no. 24 (10 December 1914): 1145-49; “The Multnomah County Mountain Boulevard,” Contracting August 1916, reprint, 9-10; Henry L. Bowlby, “The Columbia Highway,” Good Roads 11, n.s., no. 10 (4 March 1916): 124-27; F. J. Brady, “The Columbia River Highway in Oregon,” Good Roads, 6 October 1920, 168-71; A. A. Rosenthal, “Structural Features of a Great Scenic Highway,” Contracting, June 1916, reprint, 5-8; George C. Warren, “The Columbia River Highway,” Contracting, May 1916, 1-4ff; K. P. Billner, “Design Features of the Various Types of Reinforced Concrete Bridges Along the Columbia River Highway in Oregon,” Engineering and Contracting 43, no. 6 (10 February 1915): 121-23; [Conde B. McCullough] “Two Interesting Concrete Bridges in Oregon,” Engineering and Contracting, 26 October 1921, 389-91; “The Columbia River Highway in Oregon,” Good Roads, 1 January 1916, 3-8; “Substantial and Attractive Guard Rail on Oregon Road,” Public Roads, March 1920, 9-10; Joe D. Thomson, “The Columbia River Road,” Sunset, the Pacific Monthly, 29 (December 1912): 693-98; C. E. Fisher, “Interest in Westerner; A National Road Builder” Sunset, the Pacific Monthly, 31 (September 1913): 542-44; “A Beautiful Link in Our Highway System,” Scientific American 114, no. 25 (17 June 1916): 1. For textbooks, see, for instance, Crosby and Goodwin, Highway Location and Surveying.
Hadlow, Landmark Nomination, 47
"Linda Flint McClelland believed that the CRH established the state of the art for building scenic roads in mountainous areas. See her volume, Presenting Nature: The Historic Landscape Design of the National Park Service, 1916 to 1942 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1993), 103."
Hadlow, Landmark Nomination, 46
"In 1915, Harvard historian Frederick Jackson Turner toured the Columbia River Highway, as did many other important persons of the time, including Theodore Roosevelt and Gen. George W. Goethals, builder of the Panama Canal. Turner was quoted as telling Lancaster that the road had "set a standard" in highway engineering -- one that would be difficult to follow. That standard was in fact followed over the years as the design ideas and engineering solutions that had challenged Lancaster influenced the future builders of many roads and bridges, particularly those on the Oregon coast."
Reddick xiv
Robert W. Hadlow, Columbia River Highway Historic District, National Historic Landmark Nomination
The Columbia River Highway (CRH) National Historic Landmark District meets NHL Criterion 1 as an outstanding example of modern highway development in 20th-century America for its pioneering advances in road design. These include the adherence to grade and curve standards, and the use of comprehensive drainage systems, dry and mortared masonry walls, reinforced concrete bridges, and asphaltic concrete pavement on a rural, mountain road during the formative years of modern highway building in the United States. The district meets NHL Criterion 4 as the single most important contribution to the fields of civil engineering and landscape architecture by Samuel C. Lancaster and as an exemplar example of American landscape architecture, specifically as the first scenic highway in the United States. The CRH’s aesthetic and engineering achievements greatly influenced the design and construction of other scenic highways, including national park roads, in the 1920s and 1930s. A combination of advanced engineering with landscape architectural elements as embodied in the CRH put in practice the concept of “landscape engineering” in modern highway design a decade before it was employed by the National Park Service on the Going-to-the-Sun Road and throughout the national park system.
Nearly forty extant roads constructed in the United States during the first decades of the 20th century possess state or national significance. These range from the Bronx River Parkway, to the Generals Highway, to the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Often, the terms “scenic highways” and “parkways” are used synonymously. Scenic highways are best described as those roads constructed to provide motorists with the opportunity to see up-close the landscape’s natural beauty. Parkways, though, are roads or streets often associated with city beautiful campaigns, many of which swept the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Many scenic highways, and those parkways that are more accurately described as scenic highways, are associated with the country’s national park system and were constructed in the years following the First World War. True parkways were often part of a movement to create park-like settings out of wastelands. Other roads such as the Lincoln Highway, the Dixie Highway, and Route 66 are not considered scenic highways or parkways. They possess their significance largely for pioneering the nation’s modern, transcontinental highway system.
Constructed from 1913 to 1922, the CRH predates all other scenic highways in the United States, including the Storm King Highway, the Wawona Road, and Skyline Drive. The CRH is contemporary with the Bronx River Parkway. It predates, however, the Merritt Parkway, the Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway, and the Arroyo Seco Parkway.
Hadlow, Landmark Nomination 44
Regarding Frank A. Kittredge, who studied under Lancaster at the University of Washington:
Kittredge later became one of the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads’ (BPR) best locating engineers, gaining much experience in laying out park roads. By the mid-1920s, he established the alignment for what became Logan Pass on the Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier National Park and believed that it would “exhibit the grandeur of the park to the maximum.” The National Park Service thought highly of Kittredge and in 1927 promoted him to chief engineer.
Meanwhile, Elliott, then an engineer with the BPR, helped draw up a long-term agreement between his agency and the NPS in 1925 to cooperate on park road design and construction. He eventually became the ranking engineer for Region 6 of the BPR (Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Arkansas).16
16 McClelland, Presenting Nature: The History of Landscape Design of the National Park Service, 1916-1942, 109. See “National Historic Landmark Nomination, Going-to-the-Sun Road, Glacier National Park,” Susan Begley and Ethan Carr, 1996, pp. 28-31, copy held by the National Historic Landmarks Program, Washington, DC;
Hadlow, Landmark Nomination 50