State's distinctive scenic bridges are McCullough's legacy

Anyone who’s done much driving around Oregon — especially along the coast — knows the state’s bridges have a particular and distinctive style.

That style is hard to put your finger on, isn’t it? The bridges themselves are very different from one another. Many of them aren’t even built with the same materials. The spectacular structure that soars over Coos Bay could not be much different in size, technique, and style from the elegant little archway that links Oregon City with West Linn; but even if you’d never seen them before, you could just look at either one of them and instantly identify it as an Oregon bridge.

The common thread linking these classic Oregon bridges was Conde McCullough, the legendary bridge designer and engineer who led the teams that designed and built them.

McCullough, as you’ll likely recall from last week’s Offbeat Oregon article, moved to the state in 1916, almost certainly inspired by the Columbia Gorge Scenic Highway, which had started carrying traffic a year or two before. He took a job at Oregon State University (then known as Oregon Agricultural College) and got busy teaching bright young engineering students how to build bridges right; and, when the state of Oregon finally got its ducks in a row and started looking for a good bridge engineer to lead the Highway Department, he was the obvious choice.

And so, in 1919, Conde McCullough moved to Salem, hired his entire senior class of bridge engineering students, and started a career that would put Oregon on the map ... literally.

By that time, McCullough was halfway through his career. His first 20 years of experience in the field had taught McCullough some important things, which he brought to his new position as a kind of guiding philosophy.

First off, he felt that in almost all cases, cheap bridges were strictly for suckers. A bridge made of green lumber might be slapped across a river for a quarter of the cost of a reinforced concrete design; but even if it was built very solidly and well, it would last for only a decade or two. Shorter spans could be handled with covered bridges, but those don’t last forever either — also the maintenance costs are high, and they don’t work for anything much larger than a creek.

By the time a wooden bridge had been replaced two or three times, the government agency responsible for it would have paid several times more than it would have if it had just done the job right in the first place.

So McCullough’s philosophy was to build 100-year bridges, anticipating every possible stress that the environment could put upon them and designing them to meet the challenges of centuries to come.

Part of that, of course, was picking the right kind of material for a bridge. Lumber was out, of course, and McCullough was sharply criticized over the years by timber interests that had hoped for a larger slice of the state’s bridge-building budget.

Even if the material was right, a bridge could be ruined by choosing the wrong design. McCullough had seen what happened when a national bridge company parachuted into a small rural county and sold its leaders on a pretty, patented design that didn’t fit into the local geography. A bridge had to be the right design for the setting, or it would collapse or wash away the first chance it got.

But McCullough also had a deep appreciation for scenic beauty. Aesthetics were very important to him, and he wanted his work to harmonize with its surroundings. He clearly had a sense of how that could be accomplished, and that’s why every time you come up on one of his bridges, it just looks right.

In a sense, that’s because McCullough was lucky — lucky he was a designer of bridges and not of office buildings or parking garages. In most architecture, there’s a tension between aesthetics and utility. A super pretty building with lots of gingerbread touches surrounded by ornamental plantings is more aesthetically pleasing than a plain shoebox-shaped building in the middle of a parking lot; but it’s also a lot more expensive, both to build and to maintain.

Bridges aren’t like that. Most of their function follows their form; you can’t take many liberties with a basic arch, or concrete pier. So the difference between a classically designed span, with obelisks at the entrances and a tasteful concrete handrail along the sidewalks at each edge, and a minimally ornamented “brutalist” design, is way less than one percent of the budget.

McCullough recognized this. He knew that he could deliver bridges that cost less than expected while looking and working far better. Plus, he’d seen what had happened when Samuel Lancaster created the highway-engineering work of art that was the Columbia Gorge Highway a decade before. The extra expense paid to design something special had been more than made up for by its contribution to tourism; people from all over the country were still coming to Crown Point to drive on that highway.

There’d been a lot of extra expenses on Lancaster’s project: Italian stonemasons, the marble walls at Crown Point, the spectacular tunnel arch at Mitchell Point. On McCullough’s bridges, there was hardly any, so it was a no-brainer. In many cases, his projects came in under budget.

This, then, was Conde McCullough’s particular genius: figuring out how to make the most gorgeous soaring arches and architecturally sophisticated designs cost less, rather than more, to build and maintain.

There is no typical Conde McCullough bridge. McCullough knew picking the right design and material for each project could save huge amounts of money. So each bridge he built was different — sometimes radically so — from the next.

In general, though, he preferred to build in reinforced concrete, using the cleanest and most elegant arch design possible, sparely but significantly decorated in motifs that felt appropriate to the scenery.

Knowing he was building a bridge for the ages rather than just for his age, he avoided architectural trends of the moment and drew from motifs going throughout history. The Cape Creek Bridge at Devil’s Elbow, for instance, looks like a Roman aqueduct. The obelisks at the entrance of most of his larger bridges set an art-deco tone, like miniature skyscrapers. (They are there to protect the bridge’s vulnerable structure points in case a truck hits them, and sometimes to provide additional mass.)

The result is that, unlike something like Oregon City’s municipal elevator or the Oregon state capitol building (both of which scream “I was built in the mid-1950s” at the top of their metaphorical lungs), a Conde McCullough bridge looks like it’s been there forever — like it grew there, stalagmite-like, over the centuries.

McCullough’s first major bridge project for the state was the Rock Point Bridge over the Rogue River, in Jackson County; it opened the year after McCullough was hired, in 1920.

By the end of 1922, he’d designed and built five more bridges, including his first multi-arch design in Myrtle Creek and the remarkable soaring concrete-covered steel arch bridge in Oregon City.

But he’s most famous today for the bridges he designed to replace the slow, expensive ferries along the Roosevelt Military Highway — now known as Highway 101. These include the bridges at Gold Beach, Reedsport, Florence, Newport, Depoe Bay, and the mile-long piece de resistance that bears McCullough’s name today over Coos Bay. These classic bridges are, today, almost as much a part of Oregon Coast’s attractiveness to visitors as are the beaches.

Conde McCullough was a high-energy man, seeming to be never so comfortable and relaxed as when he was charging ahead on a project. By the early 1940s this hard-charging lifestyle, along with thousands of packs of cigarettes, was starting to take a toll. In 1942 McCullough suffered a mild heart attack, which he recovered from; his doctor ordered him to slow down and quit smoking, which he did for several weeks before grumbling, “The hell with this,” and resuming his old habits.

He made it long enough to see his son back from the Second World War, but only just. He died abruptly of a brain hemorrhage while gardening in 1946, just shy of his 59th birthday.

Landscape painters often “remove” unsightly elements from their work — deleting telephone poles, railroad tracks, and flashy commercial buildings from their landscapes to make them more appealing and harmonious. In all the time Oregon’s scenery has been attracting landscape artists to set up their easels and create paintings from its vistas, the number of times a Conde McCullough bridge has been “removed” from a painting is zero. Most of the time, the bridge is the central element in the artist’s picture. The same is true with most of the bridges created after McCullough passed on his mantle to a new generation of bridge designers.

That’s the true legacy of what Conde McCullough gave our state.

(Sources: Elegant Arches, Soaring Spans, a book by Robert W. Hadlow published in 2001 by Oregon State University Press; Historic Highway Bridges of Oregon, a book by Dwight Smith & al. published in 1989 by OSU Press.)

Finn J.D. John teaches at Oregon State University and writes about odd tidbits of Oregon history. His most recent book, Bad Ideas and Horrible People of Old Oregon, was published by Ouragan House early this year. To contact him or suggest a topic: [email protected] or 541-357-2222.