C. C. Van Arsdol and the Lewiston Grade

This marker honors a railroad engineer whose surveys helped shape the country around Lewiston. According to the marker, Cassius Cash Van Arsdol, born in eighteen fifty-one, trained in civil engineering and became a chief draftsman for the Union Pacific by eighteen eighty. His work carried him across the West, including the rugged district where the Snake and Salmon Rivers cut through northern Idaho.

He joined the Northern Pacific and located rail lines through Whitman County and northern Idaho, then spent years building track from Saskatoon clear to the Pacific for the Grand Trunk Pacific. After the First World War he settled back in Lewiston as a consulting engineer, and he is remembered for his role in planning the original Lewiston Grade, the spiral highway that switchbacks down the steep canyon wall into town. Van Arsdol died in nineteen forty-one, his name tied to the rails and roads that opened this corner of the state.