US 395, Part 19: "US 20 to US 20" (Harney County and Burns)

Harney county, which we entered in the last Part, is only marginally less uninhabited than Lake county at 7,609 [2000]. It was named for local hero Brig. Gen. William S. Harney who fought in the Black Hawk, Mexican and Civil Wars, and formed from the southernmost two-thirds of Grant county to the north (which we will see in the next Part) in 1889. A contentious internal battle between the original seat, Harney (established 1874), and Burns to the west finally led to the establishment of the county seat in Burns (3,064 [2000]) in 1890, named for Scottish poet Robert Burns by pioneer fan George McGowan and first settled in 1882 as Egan (named for Chief Egan, a prominent Paiute leader -- more about him when we get to Battle Mountain in Part 22). The new name was assigned in 1884. Primarily a logging and agricultural town, its fortunes and that of the county have waned with the closure of the local mill in the 1980s. This is a nice collection of anecdotes about the history of Harney county.

Grant county used to be Oregon's largest county, but thanks to the split, Harney is today. Interestingly, a fair bit of Harney county is actually in the hands of the federal government. Between the Malheur Wildlife Refuge (established 1908, now 159,872 acres), the Malheur River Indian Reservation, the National Forest lands and whatever the Bureau of Land Management has on its books, over three million acres of the county are national lands of some sort.

This section of US 395 is entirely co-routed along US 20 (which appears to be the legislative definition of the road based on milepost continuity) between Riley and Burns. US 20 is the longest highway in the United States, longer than any Interstate (Interstate 90, which we'll reach in Part 25, is the longest Interstate at "only" 3,020 miles). It was not always the longest; until 1964, US 6 (which we saw back in Part 5) stretched 3,652 miles across the country and was the clear winner until California chopped it down as part of the Great Renumbering. Not counting the portion through Yellowstone, which is National Park road and not maintained as a U.S. Numbered highway, modern US 20 runs between Newport, OR and Boston, MA for a total of 3,237 miles today. Nevertheless, because of the discontinuity introduced by the National Park, US 6 is still the USA's longest continuous highway even to the present era.

US 20 is the reason why Bend was listed as a control city on US 395 all the way back in Lakeview, by the way. If one takes US 20 west, it will pass through Bend on its way to Corvallis (and Portland by extension along I-5/old US 99) and the Oregon coast.

Those of you who have been paying attention to the transcontinental routes we've crossed will have noticed we reached US 20 before US 30 (we won't meet US 30 until Part 22). For the virginal road dweebs in the audience, US highways are supposed to be numbered in ascending order from north to south, so therefore, US 30 should be south of US 20 (see the Conventions glossary for an explanation of the planned national grid). This anomaly was introduced in 1940 when the portion of US 20 west of the Park was added to the Federal highway network at the request of Oregon; as originally signed in 1926, US 20 ended at Yellowstone. For this to happen, US 20 and US 30 must cross at some point, and they do; US 20/US 26 and US 30 even today meet in Mountain Home, ID and travel together (now along I-84, which we'll see again in Part 23) to Boise, ID, split apart briefly with US 20/US 26 to the north through Boise, and then join again in Caldwell, ID only to have US 20/US 26 sneak off to the south. From then on, US 20 keeps south of US 30 until US 20's termination at US 101 on the Oregon coast in Newport.