Photo: Lynn Ketchum, Oregon State University / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
Drive U.S. 101 through Lincoln County and you cross the work of one engineer again and again. Conde B. McCullough led Oregon’s bridge program in the 1920s and 1930s, and his designs, with their arches, Gothic-style railings and art deco pylons, still define the look of the coast highway.
From Iowa to Oregon
McCullough was born in 1887 and studied civil engineering at Iowa State. He came to Oregon in 1916 to teach at Oregon Agricultural College, now Oregon State University, in Corvallis, and in 1919 became the state highway department’s bridge engineer. Over the next decade and a half his office designed hundreds of bridges across Oregon.
Bridges as public places
McCullough believed bridges should be both economical and handsome, and that a public structure in a beautiful place owed something to its setting. He favored reinforced concrete arches, which suited Oregon’s materials and climate, and used steel where long spans demanded it. Along the coast, he added the observation alcoves, stairways and decorative detail that make many of the bridges places to stop rather than just cross.
The 1936 bridges
The coast highway’s last gaps were river and bay mouths crossed by ferries. With federal Public Works Administration money during the Depression, McCullough’s office designed five major bridges that opened in 1936: across Yaquina Bay at Newport, the Alsea at Waldport, the Siuslaw at Florence, the Umpqua at Reedsport and Coos Bay at North Bend. The Alsea bridge was later replaced, but the Yaquina Bay Bridge remains in service.
His legacy
McCullough later worked on highway projects in Central America and served as an assistant state highway engineer. He died in 1946, and the following year the Coos Bay bridge was renamed in his honor. Several of his coast bridges are on the National Register of Historic Places. Read about the upkeep of the Yaquina Bay Bridge.
Rosalind Teague covers ocean science, coastal hazards and the people who shaped the central coast.
