Photo: Finetooth / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
A century ago, getting up or down the Lincoln County coast meant beach driving at low tide, wagon roads over the headlands and ferries across the bays. The road that replaced them, today’s U.S. 101, owes much to a Newport legislator named Benjamin F. Jones.
A road for the coast
Jones represented Lincoln County in the Oregon Legislature, and in 1919 he sponsored a bill to build a highway along the length of the Oregon coast. It was named the Roosevelt Coast Military Highway, after Theodore Roosevelt, who had died earlier that year, and its backers argued it would aid coastal defense as well as connect isolated towns. The plan relied on state bonds, with backers hoping federal money would cover much of the rest.
Slow going
Building a highway along cliffs, dunes and river mouths took nearly two decades. Sections opened through the 1920s and early 1930s, and the last major gaps, the bay and river crossings, were closed by the bridges that opened in 1936, among them the Yaquina Bay Bridge in Newport. The road became part of U.S. 101 and is still the spine of life in Lincoln County.
The Ben Jones Bridge
Jones is remembered by a small concrete arch bridge near Otter Rock, between Depoe Bay and Newport, built in 1927 on the original highway alignment. Later realignment moved through traffic inland, and the bridge now carries the Otter Crest Loop, a slower scenic road that passes Devil’s Punchbowl and Otter Crest. It is one of the older bridges on the coast route.
For the engineer who designed the bridges that finished Jones’s highway, read our profile of Conde McCullough.
Rosalind Teague covers ocean science, coastal hazards and the people who shaped the central coast.
