Samuel Lancaster established himself one of the pioneers of modern American highway construction with his connection to the Columbia River Gorge highway project in 1915.  That highway was only one of a myriad of programs involving Lancaster over a busy lifetime.

SOUTHERN HERITAGE

Samuel Lancaster was born in Magnolia, Mississippi in 1864 at the height of the Civil War.  Magnolia, in the far southern reaches of the state, was not home for the Lancaster family for long.  With the end of the war, the family relocated to Jackson, Tennessee, a city in the middle of western Tennessee about fifty miles northeast of Memphis and forty miles north from the old battlefield at Shiloh.  Jackson was Samuel’s mother’s hometown.

Jackson is where Samuel grew up and where most of his family lived out their lives.  He attended the local Southwestern Baptist University (Union University, today) for one year.  Short of funds, Samuel went out to work on the Illinois Central railway. That rail line connected New Orleans and Chicago through both Jackson and Magnolia.  His younger brother, John, followed him out on the lines.  Both worked in the engineering department of the railroad gaining invaluable experience for their careers to come.

John went on to become the president of the Texas and Pacific Railroad, as well as president of several other lines.  He saw that rail company out of receivership in 1916-1917.  The line made solvent with his management and WWI. The T&P became a powerhouse fixture in the South, especially in Fort Worth where John called home.

INSPIRATION THE HARD WAY

Samuel came to drink some contaminated water while out working with a crew on the Illinois Central.  Two men died while another man and Samuel went home to try and recover from the typhoid fever the water caused.  But while recovering from the typhoid, Lancaster developed paralytic polio.  For a while, he could only move his head and neck.  Slowly and painfully, he regained the use of his limbs.  The effort of overcoming his paralysis, like other polio survivors, became a powerful source of inspiration for Samuel.  It also fired up his Baptist upbringing with God never far from his thoughts for the rest of his life.

As he was recovering, an official from the city of Jackson came to him with an engineering problem to solve.  From there, Samuel became engineer for the city and Madison County. There, he designed and supervised the construction of a slew of civic engineering projects covering water, sewer, lighting, and road and park construction keeping close account on the monies he spent in doing so.

The city developed a 54-acre park around an artesian well discovered during the development of the city’s waterworks earlier.  The park included a man-made lake with boats for rent and trails through the park.  Today, with the park is gone, a little gazebo stands over the well still bubbling up through a fountain.  The little park is a stone’s throw from the former North Carolina & St Louis rail depot – today a museum.  People would come to take the waters thought to be therapeutic due to the iron content.

ON TO A HIGHER CALLING

The roads created in and around Jackson came to the attention of James Wilson, the federal Secretary of Agriculture.  Calling him to Washington D.C., Wilson made him consulting engineer with the Bureau of Public Roads in 1904.  Given the task of spreading the idea of good roads, what they could accomplish and the how’s of construction, Samuel went on a nationwide tour giving lectures.  At the same time, he maintained his position of City Engineer in Jackson. 

While out preaching about the need for a better roads in Los Angeles in 1906, Samuel Lancaster received word to head north to Yakima, Washington.  There, he met with Samuel Hill, another “Good Roads” enthusiast and member of the Washington State Highway Board – among many other things.  They hit it off and Hill offered to bring Lancaster and his family to Seattle to work for six months. His job was to assist him in lobbying the state legislature for increased aid in road construction.

WEST TO WASHINGTON

After six months were up, Lancaster resigned from his federal position. He joined with the Seattle Parks Commission helping on a $7 million dollar project of boulevards and parks designed by John Charles Olmstead.  That plan added fifty miles of boulevards and 2,000 acres of parks to the city.  Seattle was in the process of sprucing itself up for the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, that city’s answer to the 1905 Lewis & Clark Exposition in rival Portland to the south.

Hill also persuaded the University of Washington to start a Highway Engineering department with Lancaster hired as a full professor.  Samuel Lancaster was one of only three faculty members at the university without a college degree and the only full professor.

FIELD TRIP

In October 1908, Hill went to Paris attending the First International Road Congress.  He took along, at his expense, Lancaster, Reginald Thomson – Seattle’s City Engineer, and Henry Bowlby, an instructor at the university with Samuel.  After the meeting, the three toured the Rhine River, as well as roads in both Italy and Switzerland, seeking inspiration for the possible back in the US.

Back a year, in 1907, Hill purchased seven thousand acres which he hoped would become a Quaker farming community.  He also planned for his mansion – “country house” – today’s Maryhill Museum.  To access both, Hill planned on a road for the north bank of the Columbia River to connect to Vancouver and Portland.

MARYHILL LOOPS

After playing a role in Seattle’s fair in 1909, Hill brought Lancaster out to Maryhill. There, Lancaster built a system of experimental roads heading up from the river over the hills to Goldendale.  Samuel used the time to work on using long sweeping curves to enable the road to ascend at grades not exceeding 5%.  He also compared road construction on different sections noting how the separate techniques held up over time, a perfect practice ground.

Henry Bowlby, in the meantime, became Washington’s first highway commissioner.  That post did not last long, however.  He used convict labor to start on a section of just such a north bank highway Hill hoped for in 1910.  Bowlby was often not successful politically.  He made it through four years at West Point before getting bounced in his final year for a role in a food throwing prank in the mess hall at the Point. 

Here, in Washington, his use of convict labor hit a sore spot with organized labor.  Governor Marion Hay was initially elected as lieutenant governor in 1909 with Sam Hill’s support.  He became governor only two months into his term when Samuel Cosgrove died following a heart attack. 

Several road projects began as well as a Columbia River Road in 1910.  Organized labor complaints, prisoner escapes and conditions in the highway camps all led Hay to shut down the use of convicts in 1911, Bowlby resigning about the same time. To proceed on the Columbia River Road with regular laborers was simply too expensive. 

Remains of the one mile stretch just east of Lyle still visible above today’s highway 14.  Governor Hay was defeated for re-election in 1913 with a vengeful Hill supporting his successor.

FOLLOWING SAM HILL SOUTH

Abandoning his attempts to build a Washington road on the north bank of the Columbia, Sam Hill moved south to Oregon.  Oregon attempted to build a road over Shellrock Mountain – the twin peak of Wind Mountain on the north side of the river – using prison labor in 1911.  That attempt failed, but Sam Hill was inspired to give the entire Oregon legislature along with Governor Oswald West – February 1913 – to take a day tour – at Hill’s expense – to see the roads Lancaster had built at Maryhill.  The result became the establishment of the Oregon Highway Commission headed by one Henry Bowlby. 

The commission was somewhat toothless, however, with little money or power.  Road construction was still a county-by-county affair.  In 1913, at the Chanticleer Inn – site of the present-day Women’s Forum State Park overlooking Crown Point and the Gorge – the Multnomah County commissioners, under Hill’s guidance, voted to support the building of a highway from Portland to Cascade Locks just across the east side of the county.

COLUMBIA RIVER HIGHWAY

At the meeting, Samuel Lancaster became the designing architect for the Columbia River highway.  The next day, Lancaster was out in the field surveying and deciding upon routes and the location of work camps for the following year.

Lancaster designed a road he hoped to compete with some of the magnificent roads he had been over in Europe.  His work in Tennessee and Seattle already attuned him to maintaining an aesthetic approach to road building.  In his 1916 book, The Columbia:  America’s Great Highway. He wrote: “I studied the landscape with much care and became acquainted with its formation and its geology. I was profoundly impressed by its majestic beauty and marveled at the creative power of God, who made it all.”   He wanted the highway to be built so no tree or fern to be sacrificed needlessly. 

Reinforced concrete was used in seventeen beautifully arched bridges and viaducts.  He utilized masonry retaining walls to contain steep slopes.  Italian masons, many brought out from Massachusetts where Hill had met them constructing near to a home he had there – at Hill’s expense, again – utilized along the new route.  The Gorge portion of the highway in Multnomah County finished by the summer of 1915.

THOR’S HEIGHTS AND THE DELL

The most impressive part of the Multnomah County section of the highway occurs at Crown Point.  There was little space for a highway at the river level, so Lancaster’s route ascended east above the Sandy River to Chanticleer Point.  It then traversed a cliff to make its way over to the point then known as Thor’s Heights.  Wrapping the highway around the peak, he with a sidewalk provided for travelers to revel in the glorious views.  The prominent Vista House – “An observatory from which the view both up and down the Columbia could be viewed in silent communication with the infinite.” – would have to wait for future appropriations from the county.

The next hard part of the highway to complete was the section around Shepperd’s Dell.  Staying high above the Columbia, Lancaster convinced George Shepperd to part with a section of his land around a waterfall on Youngs’ Creek.  He designed the short walkway going down from the bridge to a close-up view of the waterfalls, now named Sheppard’s Dell.

More bridges and viaducts, Lancaster finished the Multnomah County portion of the road to Cascade Locks by 1915 stretching over 48 miles.  The road dedicated on 6 June 1916. 

HIGHWAY COMPLETED

Hood River County was helped by the money of lumber baron Simon Benson.  The citizens passed a building bond in 1913.  That portion of the road was engineered by John Elliott, one of Lancaster’s students at the University of Washington.  He tackled the difficulties of Shellrock Mountain and Mitchell Point before his successor, Roy Klein finished the Hood River section with the twin tunnels above Mosier.  Elliot and Klein were also employed by Wasco County to finish that section of the Gorge highway.   Here was the last obstacle, Rowena Butte. The highway descended the east side similar to Crown Point, in a series of hairpins or figure eights.

Interestingly, just as the Multnomah section was near completion, a couple of county commissioners decided to not approve of overruns Lancaster’s team incurred.  In April 1915, with only a few months to go, Samuel Lancaster resigned. His back wages were covered later by John Yeon, a wealthy Portland businessman who served as Lancaster’s roadmaster for construction. 

A NEW TRAIL

A last project Samuel was involved in before moving on was the construction of the Larch Mountain trail. This path led from Multnomah Falls on the Columbia River to the top of the 4,055-foot peak. Today, the trail covers 7.2 miles one-way gaining just over 4,000 feet on the way up to the peak. The trail was built with money and the efforts of the Progressive Businessmen’s’ Club of Portland. The club included men like store owners Julius Meier and Aaron Frank, newspaperman Henry Pittock, and Simon Benson, the latter contributing $3,000. All of these men had been instrumental in the development of the Columbia River highway.

The trail also linked up with a shorter loop – just under five miles – including the three falls on Multnomah Creek and more waterfalls on nearby Wahkeena Creek to the west.

Many of the men became members of the new Trails Club of Oregon electing Samuel Lancaster as their president. Quite an accomplishment for a survivor of paralytic polio. The club inauguration was done atop Larch Mountain after a long day of climbing the mountain. A large American flag was unfurled atop the former lookout on the peak. The club hoped to create many more trails like the Larch Mountain trail in Oregon. The club still exists maintaining the small Nesika Lodge. The lodge found just off the main trail to the east about one third of the way up.

NEWER PROJECTS

In the meantime, Samuel left to oversee the construction of improvements of the road up to Paradise from the Nisqually River, but before, he offered up some views on how the “rest area” atop Thor’s Heights should proceed – the Crown Point Vista House was finished in 1918. 

In 1922, he bought a seventy-two-acre site just west of where Bonneville Dam is.  With the help of Reed College students, Lancaster oversaw the construction of a rustic resort called Camp Get-A-Way.  After it burnt down later in the 1920’s, he sold the land to the State of Oregon. The land later transferred to the federal government in the building of the dam.

THE GOLDEN CIRCLE

In 1923, we find Lancaster as a consulting engineer for the Union Pacific. Here, he helped lay groundwork for what became the “Golden Circle”. The railroad’s development of a package tour taking in Bryce, Zion, Grand Canyon and Cedar Breaks.  Lancaster’s biggest role was to oversee the building of a road to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon where the railroad’s subsidiary company, Utah Parks Company, built the North Rim Lodge.

Back in Oregon, Lancaster was employed by Linfield College in McMinnville to help redesign the campus grounds in 1928.

Samuel Lancaster would die of leukemia in 1941 buried in the Rose City Cemetery in northeast Portland.

LAST WORD

Giving Samuel Lancaster the last word, this is from Lancaster’s 1916 book. Specifically, it is from the dedication to Samuel Hill, Road Builder:

Who loves this country and brought me to it. Who showed me the German Rhine and Continental Europe. Whose kindness made it possible for me to have a part in planning and constructing this great highway.

There is a time and place for every man to act his part in life’s drama and to build according to his ideas.

God shaped these great mountains round about us, and lifted up those mighty domes into a region of perpetual snow.

He fashioned the Gorge of the Columbia, fixed the course of the broad river, and caused the crystal streams both small and great to leap down from the crags and sing their never ending songs of joy.

Then He planted a garden, men came and built a beautiful city close by this wonderland. To some He gave great wealth — to every man his talent — and when the time had come for men to break down mountain barriers, construct a great highway of commerce and utilize the beautiful, which is “as useful as the useful”, He set them to the task and gave to each his place.

I am thankful to God for His goodness in permitting me to have a part in building this broad thoroughfare as a frame to the beautiful picture which He created.

Samuel Lancaster survived paralytic polio becoming one of America’s foremost road designers. His best-known road is the Columbia River Highway.