Conde McCullough's Bridges: Oregon's Art Deco Depression

Before nineteen thirty-one, driving the Oregon Coast meant a series of interruptions. The major rivers, the Alsea, the Siuslaw, the Umpqua, the Coos, the Rogue, all required ferry crossings. Travelers waited for the ferries in all weather. Commerce moved slowly. The coast highway was not truly a continuous road.

Between nineteen thirty-one and nineteen thirty-six, one man changed that. Conde McCullough was Oregon's State Bridge Engineer, and in the depths of the Depression he designed five major highway bridges spanning those river mouths along what was then being consolidated as U S One Oh One. The money came from Depression-era federal public-works programs, the same political impulse that built Big Sur's Bixby Bridge in California. The design came entirely from McCullough.

He was an engineer who treated his bridges as architecture. The five spans, the Alsea Bay Bridge at Waldport, the Siuslaw River Bridge here at Florence, the Umpqua River Bridge at Reedsport, the Coos Bay Bridge, and the Rogue River Bridge at Gold Beach, are Art Deco structures with Gothic touches: decorative pylons, pointed arches, ornamental concrete that turns a utilitarian crossing into a formal statement. Four of the five original spans are listed on the National Register of Historic Places and remain in daily use. The Alsea Bay Bridge corroded so badly that it was torn down and replaced with a new bridge in nineteen ninety-one, built in a matching style but not to McCullough's original design.

The bridge you are looking at, or passing over, was not built because it was the cheapest option. It was built because McCullough believed a public road through a spectacular landscape deserved infrastructure that acknowledged where it was. That argument, made in concrete in the nineteen thirties, is visible every time you cross a river on this coast.