| To appreciate the significance of the Colorado Street Bridge as a California Historic Civil Engineering Landmark, it would be helpful to review the chain of events that were set in motion when the U.S. Congress passed legislation allocating the sum of $30,000 for the building of the National Road, the first federally-funded highway in the United States, signed into law by President Thomas Jefferson on March 29, 1806. |
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| Planning for the National Road began in the late 1700's. Construction began in Cumberland, Maryland, in 1811, and ended in Vandalia, Illinois, in 1852, the year that the American Society of Civil Engineers was founded. Planning for the Colorado Street Bridge began in the late 1800's. Construction was started in 1912 and the bridge was opened to traffic on December 13, 1913, the same month and year that the Los Angeles Section of the American Society of Civil Engineers was founded. |
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| The idea of a transcontinental highway had been around since the 1890's. General Roy Stone, head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Office of Road Inquiry, predecessor to the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), suggested in about 1894 that a continental highway be built from Washington to San Francisco. General Stone's successor, Martin Dodge, also endorsed the idea of a transcontinental highway shortly after taking office in 1899. |
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| By the 1910s, local organizations, chambers of commerce, towns, and good roads advocates throughout the country began to select old roads for improvement, with the hope of obtaining federal funding, and to give them names as a rallying point. One of the earliest was the National Old Trails Road, which was an outgrowth of two movements in Missouri. The first was the drive for a cross-State highway from St. Louis to Kansas City. The second was an effort by the State chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (D.A.R.) to mark the historic Santa Fe Trail, the old trader's route to New Mexico. The D.A.R.'s ultimate vision was to make an automobile pilgrimage over the Old Trails Road to the Panama Exposition in San Francisco in 1915. The Woman's National Old Trail Roads Association was initiated by Elizabeth Butler and other women of the Missouri Daughters of the American Revolution. |
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| The Old Trails Association of Missouri was formed on December 19, 1911, in Kansas City, with the purpose of forming a Transcontinental Highway Association, extending a transcontinental highway from the cities of Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, along the line of the Old Cumberland Pike (National Road), through the States of Maryland, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, to the cities of St. Louis and Kansas City, Mo., then following the Santa Fe Trail through Kansas and Colorado to Santa Fe, N.M., and on through New Mexico, Arizona, and California to the Pacific Ocean. |
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| On the following day, December 20, 1911, the Ocean-to-Ocean Highway Association, comprised of the states of Arizona, California, and New Mexico, was formed at the Tri-State Road Convention in Phoenix. John S. Mitchell of Los Angeles was elected president, J. S. Cornwell, also of Los Angeles, treasurer, and George Purdy Bullard of Phoenix was elected as secretary. |
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| That organization's mission was to select a route for the Ocean-to-Ocean Highway between Santa Fe and the Pacific Ocean. Two routes were selected for final consideration: a southern route through Prescott, Phoenix, Yuma and the Imperial Valley to San Diego, and a northern route through Flagstaff, Needles, Barstow, and San Bernardino to Los Angeles. Because of the prohibitive costs of constructing and maintaining a road through the constantly shifting sand dunes of eastern Imperial County, the Ocean-to-Ocean Highway Association selected the route through San Bernardino and Pasadena, over the proposed Colorado Street Bridge, to Los Angeles. |
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| The two routes are shown on the following maps. |
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| The National Road opened up the West from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arroyo Seco. The Colorado Street Bridge opened up West Los Angeles County from the Arroyo Seco to the Pacific Ocean. |