CLNP: National Register Listing for Army Corps of Engineers Road System
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Crater Lake Rim Drive (Image: Don Graham, Flickr)
Army Corps of Engineers Road System at Crater Lake National Park Listed in National Register of Historic Places
CRATER LAKE, Ore. — The Army Corps of Engineers Road System (ACERS) at Crater Lake National Park in Klamath County is among Oregon’s latest entries in the National Register of Historic Places.
The National Park Service staff at Crater Lake prepared and nominated this property to the National Register and Oregon’s State Historic Preservation Office supported the listing of this nomination. The National Park Service - which maintains the National Register - accepted the nomination August 12, 2019.
National Park Service staff historian Stephen R. Mark took the lead in writing the nomination, which centers on a previously little-known effort by the Army Corps of Engineers in highway engineering and construction that occurred from 1910 to 1919 in the park. Crater Lake National Park Archaeologist Kelly Kritzer, with the help of Jessica Gabriel, who is currently with Oregon Parks and Recreation, inventoried the ACERS at Crater Lake as an initial step for the nomination from 2015 to 2017.
The Army Corps of Engineers Road System, a precursor to the historic Rim Drive, is significant for its association with the earliest period of highway engineering in Oregon as a pivotal example of a road that used the latest standards in road design. As the first federally funded and supervised highway project in Oregon, ACERS is the only road project in Oregon attributed to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Construction of the ACERS was contemporary with the locally financed Columbia River Highway in Multnomah and Hood River counties. Both of these projects are the immediate forerunners to the creation of an Oregon State Highway Department in 1917, which began building a highway system in the state with funding from bonds, federal aid, and other sources by 1919.
Crater Lake National Park visitation in 1913, when the work started on ACERS, was only 13,000 for the year - a figure that grew to 170,000 in 1931, at the point when contractors began to build what motorists over the summer months still enjoy as “Rim Drive.” Portions of the preceding Rim Road, however, can be encountered by current visitors as trails - most notably along the western rim of Crater Lake - including part of the trail to Watchman Peak.
The ACERS is the fourth historic district listed at Crater Lake National Park, with others at Rim Village, Park Headquarters, and along Rim Drive. The National Register of Historic Places was established as part of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966.
More information about the National Register of Historic Places and recent Oregon nominations is online at www.oregonheritage.org (click on “National Register” at left of page).
