Historic Columbia River Highway: The First Scenic Road in America

Samuel Lancaster studied the Via Appia in Italy. He studied the high roads along the Rhine in Germany. He was looking at how civilizations had built roads that were worthy of the landscapes they moved through, roads designed not only to get you from one place to another but to make the journey itself beautiful. Around nineteen thirteen, civic leader Sam Hill helped bring him to the Columbia River Gorge to apply that philosophy.

The road Lancaster designed opened in nineteen sixteen. It was the first highway in the United States explicitly designed as a scenic experience rather than a utilitarian route. Lancaster built it to specifications that seem almost paradoxical for their time: every grade gentle enough that a car could drive it without touching the brakes, every curve positioned to frame a view, every bridge made beautiful because a bridge could be beautiful. He hung the road on the cliff face above the river using Italian-style viaducts of Italian-style masonry. He routed it through the waterfalls in sequence, each one revealed like a chapter.

Standing at Crown Point, seven hundred thirty feet above the river, on a clear day, you can see the gorge extending east for forty miles, the basalt walls dropping to the water, Washington on the far bank, the Cascades framing everything. Lancaster believed this view would change how Americans understood their own country. He was not entirely wrong.

The Historic Columbia River Highway was designated an All-American Road in nineteen ninety-eight. Parts of the original alignment were bypassed by modern Interstate Eighty-Four and have since been restored as a state trail for cyclists and pedestrians. The waterfalls are all still here: Latourell, Bridal Veil, Wahkeena, Multnomah, Oneonta, Horsetail, all within a fifteen-mile stretch of cliff that Lancaster chose to reveal one by one. He treated the road as a curator treats a gallery. It remains the best evidence that he was right.