The Columbia River Highway: An Engineer's Impossible Dream

Samuel Lancaster was a civil engineer from Tennessee who had studied road design in Germany and come home convinced that American highway engineering was missing something: beauty. Most American roads of the early twentieth century were built to get from one place to another by the shortest route, which usually meant the flattest, the most direct, and the most indifferent to what the surrounding landscape looked like.

Lancaster had different ideas. When the Oregon state legislature authorized a highway along the Columbia River Gorge in nineteen thirteen, Lancaster was hired to design it. He spent weeks walking the canyon walls on foot, mapping grades, identifying viewpoints, planning pullouts. The road he designed, the Historic Columbia River Highway, follows contours that keep it within sight of the river and the gorge walls while maintaining grades that horse-drawn vehicles and early automobiles could manage. He built in overlooks specifically to stop traffic and force drivers to look at what they were passing through.

Vista House, completed in nineteen eighteen at Crown Point, is the most dramatic of those stops. It sits at a point where the Columbia River Gorge opens to the west, and Lancaster positioned it precisely to give drivers a view that took in the full scale of the gorge. The building itself is octagonal basalt, designed by Edgar Lazarus, and contains a memorial hall for Oregon pioneers.

The highway was called the King of Roads when it opened. Parts of it were eventually bypassed by the interstate system. The sections that remain are maintained as a scenic byway and National Historic Landmark. You cannot drive the full original route continuously; pieces have collapsed and not been rebuilt.

Lancaster is buried in Portland. He watched the highway he built for beauty become what it became.