Medford, Oregon (January 19, 2022)—Steve Mark presents the Windows in Time lecture “A ‘Skyline Boulevard’ for Crater Lake: The Army Corps of Engineers and Building Rim Road, 1910-20” on Wednesday, February 2 from 12 Noon–1:00 p.m. via the Zoom video conferencing app. All are welcome to attend this free lecture; registration is required.
Rim Road is part of a road system built more than a century ago for the newly established Crater Lake National Park and the subject of a historic district recently listed in the National Register of Historic Places (2019). It is the first vehicular circuit around the rim and surprisingly intact, despite being displaced by Rim Drive just before the onset of World War II. Its construction is an epic tale about the perils and challenges of early road construction, when a state highway system in Oregon still lay squarely in the future. Although better known for their navigational projects and dams, building a road system for Crater Lake National Park represents one of the Corps’ few forays into road construction in the western United States, and it left a lasting imprint at the park and on the newly created National Park Service, with some surprising twists.
Presenter Steve Mark has worked for the National Park Service for more than three decades, most of that time as a historian stationed at Crater Lake. In 2019 he was the lead author for a nomination that was listed on the National Register of Historic Places and called the “Army Corps of Engineers Road System Historic District.” It involved extensive research, much of it at the National Archives branch in Seattle and a multi-year archaeological survey conducted by a small team of NPS employees. Steve was born in Eugene and resides in Fort Klamath.
Program registration can be found at jcls.libcal.com/calendar/jcls_event/WIT-Feb-2022. A recording of the program will later be made available on the Jackson County Library Services YouTube channel; subscribe at youtube.com/c/JCLSBeyond.
The monthly Windows in Time lunchtime lectures feature well-known writers and historians and bring alive the people, values, and events that shaped our Southern Oregon heritage. Lectures are jointly sponsored by the Southern Oregon Historical Society and Jackson County Library Services. For more information, please contact the Southern Oregon Historical Society at (541) 773-6536 or sohs.org or Jackson County Library Services at 541-774-8679.