History
The alignment road was first surveyed in 1890 by London-born engineer Robert Holmes, who later became the Engineer-in-Chief of the Public Works Department. Holmes initially preferred a route starting at Lake Wakatipu and running northwest, but the decision was instead made to start from Te Anau.
However, the project then languished in planning for 40 years, possibly because in 1889 road building had been removed from the brief of the Public Works Department, and only reinstated with much more limited authority in 1909.
It took until 1935, to construct a rough road to the entrance of what would become Homer Tunnel.
Read more about this topic: New Zealand State Highway 94
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“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)