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WINTER 2004
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>>Bridges: Designing, Building, Preserving

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Celebrating 125 Years

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THE LEGACY OF CONDE B. McCULLOUGH:
OREGON'S MASTER BRIDGE BUILDER

"From the dawn of civilization up to the present, engineers have been busily engaged in ruining this fair earth and taking all the romance out of it.”

Those are strong words from a man who spent his career as an engineer. But Conde B. McCullough was no ordinary engineer. The 1910 Iowa State civil engineering graduate – who today is posthumously considered one of the most important bridge designers in the past 125 years – believed that bridges were more than merely the means to travel from one side of a stream to the other. His bridges – with their Art Deco-inspired pylons and obelisks, Gothic piers, towering spires, and elegant arches – were designed to enhance, not detract from, their natural settings.

McCullough’s bridge designs are legendary in the state of Oregon. The bridges along Oregon’s historic coastal Highway 101 transformed Oregon into a “traveler’s paradise” according to McCullough biographer Robert W. Hadlow, senior historian for the Oregon Department of Transportation. In his book, Elegant Arches, Soaring Spans, Hadlow describes McCullough’s large-span structures as representing the pinnacle of bridge design for their use of engineering advances and their architectural style to fit the natural setting. Critics, Hadlow says, saw them as masterpieces in design.

Iowa State can take considerable credit for McCullough’s success. Raised, educated, and married in Iowa, McCullough studied at Iowa State under Anson Marston, dean of the School of Engineering. Marston, according to Hadlow, was one of the foremost American engineering educators of his time because of his commitment to a curriculum that prepared students for employment through practical education – the land-grant philosophy.

“Technical ability combined with a well-rounded education, Marston believed, provided the foundation for creating sensible highway bridge designs for local, state, and national interests,” writes Hadlow. “McCullough’s training under Marston… prepared him to become one of the nation’s most accomplished bridge designers.”

In an interview at his office in Portland, Hadlow reinforced the importance of McCullough’s Iowa State education. “Here’s someone who really did well as an engineer, and much of it had to do with the years he went to school at Iowa State, those years when
he was a student in a very progressive engineering program and had a mentor who wanted him to think.”

According to the September 1916 Barometer of the Oregon Agricultural College, Marston considered McCullough “one of the brightest men that ever graduated from the [ISC] civil engineering department.”

After McCullough graduated from Iowa State in 1910, he went to work for Marsh Engineering Company in Des Moines. In 1911, he left Marsh to work for the Iowa State Highway Commission as its bridge engineer and assistant highway engineer. There, he created standardized plans for Iowa’s bridges, improved the quality of state’s road system, and honed his skills
as a bridge designer.

“McCullough fell in with good people,” Hadlow said. “Thomas MacDonald, another Iowa State graduate, was the state highway engineer at the time, and McCullough worked for him for enough years that he gained the experience he needed to go on his own.”

McCullough left the Iowa State Highway Commission in 1916 and moved with his wife, Marie Roddan McCullough, and son, John, to teach structural engineering at Oregon Agricultural College (now Oregon State University), the state’s land-grant school. He was hired in 1919 by the Oregon State Highway Commission as the state’s bridge engineer. It was there McCullough ascended to national and international prominence as a bridge designer.

In the late teens, the federal government initiated the Federal-Aid Road Act, and states were encouraged to create highway departments in order to receive federal dollars. As luck would have it, McCullough’s old Iowa State friend Thomas MacDonald became President Woodrow Wilson’s director of the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads – which administered the Federal-Aid Road Act – the same year McCullough became Oregon’s state bridge engineer. Within a span of six years McCullough had designed nearly 600 bridges at a cost of $6.4 million.

Although other U.S. states formed highway commissions, Oregon’s road and bridge program was extraordinarily successful under McCullough.

“McCullough may have had an advantage because of his link with MacDonald,” said Hadlow. “Who knows? All you can say is he was a known quantity. They knew each other’s qualifications, knew each other’s integrity.

“There were very few state highway bridge engineers in the country in the twenties and thirties, during the heyday of highway building, who commanded a program such as this. I think it was possible that it could have happened in any state, but it didn’t.”

Of McCullough’s 600 bridges, the coastal bridges draw the most attention. Driving north from California, travelers first encounter the Rogue River Bridge, also known as the Isaac Patterson Bridge, in Gold Beach. Built in 1931, the Rogue River Bridge was named an Historic National Civil Engineering Landmark in 1982. Further north are the massive 5,305-foot Coos Bay Bridge (named the McCullough Memorial Bridge in 1947, one year after McCullough’s death), the Umpqua River Bridge in Reedsport, the Art Deco-inspired Siuslaw River Bridge in Florence, the Cape Creek Bridge near Heceta Head, and the spectacular Yaquina Bay Bridge in Newport.

Recently featured in the Oregon Stater and VIA, the AAA magazine for California and Oregon, McCullough’s bridges are heaped with praise. George Edmondson Jr. of the Oregon Stater calls the bridges “coastal jewels” and says McCullough’s Highway 101 bridges “represent what may be the finest continuous set of concrete-reinforced, steel-arched bridges
in the United States.”

What makes McCullough’s bridges so unique? The details: massive pylons, Empire State Building-inspired spires, Gothic arches, Art Deco detailing, and grand, sweeping staircases.

“Other designers don’t always get it all together,” Hadlow said. “The columns will look heavy, or they’ll look like there’s something missing. It’s like getting dressed and forgetting to put on a belt, or having mismatched shoes. Conde McCullough had it all together. And what’s really significant about his bridges is not just that they look nice. It’s the engineering involved.”

Oregon’s harsh climate – rain, wind, and sea salt – has taken its toll on the coastal bridges. Most of them are now around 70 years old – a long life for a bridge under any condition – and have begun to show affects of the hostile environment. One major bridge, the 1936 Alsea Bay Bridge in Waldport, was so deteriorated that the Oregon Department of Transportation was forced to remove McCullough’s original bridge and replace
it with a new structure in 1991. An interpretive center, located at the south end of the New Alsea Bay Bridge, documents the old bridge and features the life and work of Conde McCullough.

To prevent the other bridges from befalling the same fate as the Alsea Bay Bridge, the Oregon DOT is systematically preserving each of the bridges by using cathotic protection to slow deterioration in the steel and concrete.

Bob Hadlow is currently working on a National Register nomination for 11 of McCullough’s coastal bridges. Many of his structures are featured in Historic Highway Bridges of Oregon, produced in 1985 by the Oregon Historical Society. And in 1993, Eric N. DeLony published Landmark American Bridges, a book featuring the best of American bridge construction. DeLony characterizes McCullough’s bridges as “some of the best and most innovative concrete and steel bridge designs in the world.”

In 1998, Oregon State University’s College of Engineering inducted McCullough into its Engineering Hall of Fame, and in 1999, the Engineering News-Record (ENR) published a list of the 10 top bridge engineers since 1874, among them C.B. McCullough.

McCullough’s legacy of bridges on the Oregon coast has proven that bridges can be beautiful, elegant … and even romantic.

Read on | Bridging the Iowa River Greenbelt