Cornell Road is an east–west street and traffic corridor in the

Portland metropolitan area The Portland metropolitan area is a metropolitan area, metro area with its urban area, core in the U.S. states of Oregon and Washington (state), Washington. It has 5 principal cities, the largest being Portland, Oregon. The U.S. Office of Man ...

, in Multnomah and

Washington Washington most commonly refers to: * George Washington (1732–1799), the first president of the United States * Washington (state), a state in the Pacific Northwest of the United States * Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States ** A ...

counties in the U.S. state of

Oregon Oregon ( , ) is a U.S. state, state in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. It is a part of the Western U.S., with the Columbia River delineating much of Oregon's northern boundary with Washington (state), Washington, while t ...

. It crosses the

Tualatin Mountains The Tualatin Mountains (also known as the West Hills or Southwest Hills of Portland) are a range on the western border of Multnomah County, Oregon, United States. A spur of the Northern Oregon Coast Range, they separate the Tualatin Basin of Wa ...

(West Hills) between the

Willamette Valley The Willamette Valley ( ) is a valley in Oregon, in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. The Willamette River flows the entire length of the valley and is surrounded by mountains on three sides: the Cascade Range to the east, the ...

and the city of

Portland Portland most commonly refers to: *Portland, Oregon, the most populous city in the U.S. state of Oregon *Portland, Maine, the most populous city in the U.S. state of Maine *Isle of Portland, a tied island in the English Channel Portland may also r ...

on the east and the

Tualatin Valley The Tualatin Valley is a farming and suburban region southwest of Portland, Oregon. The valley is formed by the meandering Tualatin River, a tributary of the Willamette River at the northwest corner of the Willamette Valley, east of the Northe ...

and the city of Hillsboro on the west. Cornell Road runs between the western end of Northwest Lovejoy Street in the Hillside neighborhood of Portland to East Main Street in Hillsboro, passing through unincorporated parts of Washington County and through Beaverton on the way. On the west side of NW 185th Ave, it is called ''Northeast'' Cornell Road, as it runs through the northeast quadrant of Hillsboro. Although intended, on its section within the city of Portland, to be a neighborhood collector street with relatively low traffic volumes, it has often functioned as a major traffic street and commuter highway between downtown Portland and its western suburbs. It shares this role with more intensely busy traffic corridors along West Burnside Street and

U.S. Route 26 U.S. Highway 26 (US 26) is an east–west United States Numbered Highway that runs from Seaside, Oregon, to Ogallala, Nebraska. When the U.S. Numbered Highway System was first defined, it was limited to Nebraska and Wyoming; by the 1950s, it c ...

(US 26). The road has at least two lanes in each direction the entire length while south of US 26, while those portions north of US 26 are largely one-lane in each direction.

History

Cornell Road and proposed Pacific Highway alignment 1917

The first section of the road was already in existence in the 1850s. It is named for William and Emily Castle Cornell, who moved onto a

donation land claim The Donation Land Claim Act of 1850, sometimes known as the Donation Land Act, was a statute enacted by the United States Congress in late 1850, intended to promote homestead settlements in the Oregon Territory. It followed the Distribution-Pree ...

on what is now Cornell Road, just east of the present-day western boundary of Multnomah County, in 1852. William Cornell, a descendant of Thomas Cornell, worked as a

preacher A preacher is a person who delivers sermons or homilies on religious topics to an assembly of people. Less common are preachers who Open-air preaching, preach on the street, or those whose message is not necessarily religious, but who preach com ...

and

Sunday-school ] A Sunday school, sometimes known as a Sabbath school, is an educational institution, usually Christian in character and intended for children or neophytes. Sunday school classes usually precede a Sunday church service and are used to provide ...

teacher in the Cedar Mill, Oregon, Cedar Mill area, in nearby Washington County. Businessman John B. Yeon was the roadmaster as of 1915 for the Portland section, on what was described that year as "delightfully smooth" for the stretch in Portland. Plans for the Pacific Highway from 1917 show Cornell joining it near present-day 185th, with that highway then continuing to downtown Hillsboro. That highway was never built as such, but the alignment is similar to the route followed by U.S. 26 and Cornell's route from approximately 185th Avenue to its western terminus. The section between 185th and 173rd was widened to three lanes in 1981.

Mass transit

The main

TriMet The Tri-County Metropolitan Transportation District of Oregon (TriMet) is a Transit district, transit agency that serves most of the Oregon part of the Portland metropolitan area. Created in 1969 by the Oregon Legislative Assembly, Oregon legi ...

bus line along Cornell Road is number 48-Cornell. Serving communities on the western side of the West Hills, it has stops between Northwest Cedar Hills Boulevard/Northwest 113th Avenue (opposite sides of the same intersection), in Cedar Mill, Oregon, Cedar Mill, and Cornell Road's western terminus in Hillsboro. This bus line continues west from the end of Northeast Cornell Road to the Hillsboro Transit Center, with connections to other bus lines and to the

MAX Blue Line The MAX Blue Line is a light rail line serving the Portland metropolitan area in the U.S. state of Oregon. Operated by TriMet as part of MAX Light Rail, it connects Hillsboro, Oregon, Hillsboro, Beaverton, Oregon, Beaverton, Portland, and Gres ...

, linking Hillsboro to Beaverton, Portland, and other communities by

light rail Light rail (or light rail transit, abbreviated to LRT) is a form of passenger urban rail transit that uses rolling stock derived from tram technology National Conference of the Transportation Research Board while also having some features from ...

. Other bus lines stopping along shorter segments of Cornell Road include line 62-Murray Blvd., between Northwest Murray Boulevard and Cedar Hills Blvd. The easternmost segment of Cornell, between Northwest Lovejoy Street and Northwest Westover Road in Portland's Hillside neighborhood, is served by bus line 18-Hillside.

Tunnels

West portal of NW Cornell Road Tunnel 1 in 2019

Cornell Road passes through two tunnels drilled through

basalt Basalt (; ) is an aphanite, aphanitic (fine-grained) extrusive igneous rock formed from the rapid cooling of low-viscosity lava rich in magnesium and iron (mafic lava) exposed at or very near the planetary surface, surface of a terrestrial ...

in the West Hills. Laborers hired by the

Works Progress Administration The Works Progress Administration (WPA; from 1935 to 1939, then known as the Work Projects Administration from 1939 to 1943) was an American New Deal agency that employed millions of jobseekers (mostly men who were not formally educated) to car ...

built both, the first and easternmost in 1940 and the second in 1941. Northwest Cornell Road Tunnel 1 is long and has a horizontal clearance of about . Tunnel 2 is long with a horizontal clearance of about . Both are lined with concrete and have portals of stone masonry.

Realignment

The nearly current section of Cornell Road between N.W. 192nd Avenue (now N.E. 102nd Avenue) and N.W. 229th Avenue (now N.E. Century Blvd.) was built as a completely new – and wider – alignment between about 1986 and 1995, to replace the original alignment on that section, which was located about one-fifth of a mile south of the current alignment. The section between 229th and Cornelius Pass Road opened in 1987, while the section between Cornelius Pass Road and Stucki Avenue opened in stages in the mid-1990s, the final phase being the stretch between John Olsen Avenue/206th and Cornelius Pass Road, completed in 1995. The old alignment had been two lanes wide, whereas the new one had four to five lanes. Some portions of the old alignment were abandoned, but the section east of Cornelius Pass Road, initially renamed Old Cornell Road, became N.W. Amberwood Drive (and years later, in 2018, was renamed N.E. Walker Road). The realignment projects, together with widening of certain other two-lane sections of Cornell to four or more lanes during that period, were intended by Hillsboro and Washington County officials to transform the road into a major arterial in the Beaverton–Hillsboro area, the "third-largest east–west thoroughfare" on the

's west side (after the Sunset Highway/US 26 and

Tualatin Valley Highway The Tualatin Valley Highway No. 29 (see Oregon highways and routes) is an Oregon highway which passes through the Tualatin Valley, between the cities of McMinnville and Beaverton. Between McMinnville and Forest Grove, the highway is signed ...

References

External links