Construction of the Columbia River Highway

Construction of the Columbia River Highway began near this spot in nineteen thirteen. It was the first planned scenic highway in the United States, and it changed how Americans thought a road could meet a landscape. The entrepreneur Samuel Hill championed it, and the engineer Samuel Lancaster designed it with a radical idea for the time. The road should showcase the gorge, not conquer it, routed past waterfalls, around cliffs, and through tunnels carved in basalt at a gentle grade.

The lumber baron Simon Benson bought the bond issue that paid for the western stretch, and later gave the land at Multnomah Falls to the city of Portland. Much of the labor came from honor men, prison inmates detailed by Governor Oswald West, who had already used convict crews to prove such a road was possible. By nineteen sixteen the main highway was dedicated, and the whole road was finished in nineteen twenty-two.