State Route 149 (SR 149) is a short state highway in the U.S. state of California that helps to connect Oroville and Chico through rural Butte County. Connecting State Route 70 at Wicks Corner with State Route 99 east of Durham, it forms part of the primary north–south highway through the eastern Sacramento Valley, a Focus Route of the Interregional Road System. SR 149 was formerly part of the Oroville-Chico Highway; the majority of the latter was merged into other routes. In the mid-1970s, the highway was reallocated onto a newer two-lane alignment. A project to widen the two-lane road to a four-lane expressway was completed in late 2008, removing the bottleneck from the Oroville-Chico highway. Route description State Route 149 begins at Wicks Corner as a divided highway, at an interchange with SR 70 several miles north of Oroville. This is the north end of the State Route 70 freeway, which passes through a gap between the Campbell Hills and South Table Mountain on its way from Oroville. SR 149 heads northwest across gently rolling terrain before descending into the valley of the Dry Creek. As it begins to climb out of the valley, SR 149 ends at an interchange with SR 99. The latter highway continues the corridor northwest to Chico, quickly dropping back into the Butte Creek valley. The route is a divided highway with four lanes. SR 149 is part of the California Freeway and Expressway System, and is part of the National Highway System, a network of highways that are considered essential to the country's economy, defense, and mobility by the Federal Highway Administration. History By the late 1910s, a "natural prairie road" linked Oroville to State Highway Route 3 southeast of Chico, following the present Table Mountain Boulevard, Openshaw Road, and Oroville-Chico Highway to Midway (Route 3). The primary route between these two cities was the all-state highway route, following Route 21 (now SR 162) west from Oroville to Route 3 near Richvale. Butte County dedicated a newly improved Oroville-Chico Highway on July 4, 1926; it became part of the state highway system in 1933 as the northern portion of the Woodland-Chico Route 87. (The rest of Route 87 became part of Sign Route 24, which turned east at Oroville along present State Route 70, in 1934.) In the 1950s and 1960s, about three-quarters of the Oroville-Chico Highway was absorbed by other routes. A