Wall Street History

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Wall Street History

09/03/2004

America's Roads

During this last week of the ‘summer driving season,’ I’m sure
we all take for granted the road and highway systems we travel
on. I know as a kid, though, that I used to think “How did it all
start?” So I thought we’d take a brief look at this question,
relying on information gleaned from a terrific book, “The
Encyclopedia of American Facts and Dates,” edited by Gorton
Carruth. [HarperCollins, publishers]

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1673 Jan. 1 – “The first regular mounted mail service was
inaugurated between New York and Boston. A postman rode
without a change of horse from New York to Hartford, through
woods and over streams, keeping a lookout for runaway servants
and soldiers. The road was little more than a trail but it would
soon become the Boston Post Road, the first important highway
in the colonies. A post road was so called because men or horses
were posted at intervals along the route. They would take
packages or messages and carry them to the next post. In this
way goods and information were relayed with relative speed.
Nonetheless, it still took three weeks to get the mail from Boston
to New York City.” [Carruth]

1712 – The first fines levied for speeding were against “reckless
carters” in Philadelphia.

1717 – There was a semblance of a continuous road along the
East Coast linking all the colonies by this time.

1736 – Boston to Newport, R.I. formal route.

1740s – Greater Philadelphia Wagon Road ran west to Lancaster
and then York.

1756 – A through stage route opened linking New York City and
Philadelphia. Settlements were growing into towns and then
cities, necessitating a better road network.

1766 – The Flying Machine wagons operated between Camden,
N.J. and Jersey City with the 90-mile trip taking two days.

1785 – Regular stage routes linking New York City, Boston,
Albany, and Philadelphia are established. The trip from Boston
to New York took six days with coaches traveling from 3:00 AM
until 10:00 PM. The same year, the first American “turnpike,”
known as the Little River Turnpike, was authorized by the state
of Virginia.

[Side bar: Just noticed that the first recorded “strike” in the U.S.
was in 1786, called by the printers of Philadelphia who were
successful in obtaining a wage of $6 a week.]

1789 – First known road maps were published in the U.S.,
contained in “A Survey of the Roads of the United States of
America” as compiled by Christopher Colles.

*Around this time, scientists were traveling widely across
America, “because there was much to study that was new and
because there were unique flora and fauna. Invariably, such men
wrote about their journeys. While (they) wrote as scientists, their
writings can also be categorized as travel books. The travelers
gloried in the beauty and magnitude of American scenery and
often were imbued with the spirit of the Romantic movement.”
[Carruth]

Authors included naturalist William Bartram, who wrote
“Travels Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and
West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of
the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the
Chactaws (1791).” I might have shortened this up a bit,
something like “How I managed to escape the Indians while
traveling in the South.” To give Bartram his due, his writings
then influenced the likes of William Wordsworth and Samuel
Taylor Coleridge.

1790 – By this time, more than 90% of Kentucky’s 75,000
people had used what was called the Wilderness Road to reach
the new territory.

1794 – The first major turnpike in America was completed
between Philadelphia and Lancaster, Pa. Large profits could be
realized and many similar roads were then built by companies
specializing in the work. The Lancaster Turnpike, 62 miles long,
was the first macadam road in the U.S.

1806 – Many trails long used by Indians became roads for
settlers, including the Natchez Trace, which ran from present-day
Nashville, Tenn., southwest to Natchez, Miss. By 1806,
Congress passed legislation to construct a better road over this
heavily traveled route. In the War of 1812, Andrew Jackson
used it to move his troops on New Orleans to oppose the British.

1811 – An important road in the development of Illinois was
chartered, called the Kaskaskia and Cahokia Road, running from
Kaskaskia, a town on the Mississippi River, about 75 miles north
to Cahokia, opposite St. Louis, Mo.

1822 – President Monroe vetoed a bill appropriating money for
repair of the Cumberland Road and authorizing toll charges,
claiming that the federal government “did not have the right to
operate and hold jurisdiction over a public road.” [Carruth] The
veto was not overridden.

1830 – But the above debate reemerged under President Andrew
Jackson. He vetoed the Maysville Road bill, which sought
government support for a 60-mile construction project entirely in
Kentucky, but on May 31 approved a bill to provide funds for the
Cumberland Road because it involved more than one state.
“Jackson believed in internal improvements in principle but felt a
constitutional amendment was necessary. His stand helped him
politically. The South’s belief in states’ rights was supported by
his veto, which was also aimed at Henry Clay.” [Carruth]

[By the way, the U.S. Census determined the nation’s population
to be 12,866,020 in 1830.]

1838 – Turnpikes in Pennsylvania now totaled 2500 miles, at an
estimated cost of $37,000,000.

1913 – The Lincoln Highway Association was formed to
promote road construction with the group’s goal being a route
from New York City to San Francisco. It then constructed
sections of ideal highway designed to stimulate road building
across the country but by 1925, when U.S. route numbers came
into use, the association had largely curtailed its activity and
today there is no officially designated Lincoln Highway between
the East and West coasts.

[The numbering system started with U.S. 1, following the
Atlantic Coast. U.S. 2 paralleled the Canadian border.]

1916 – Total auto and truck production surpassed the 1,000,000
mark for the first time. Henry Ford’s Model T sold for about
$360, down from $850 just eight years earlier. It was estimated
there were about 3,500,000 cars on the nation’s roads. None of
these were SUVs that I’m aware of.

That same year President Wilson signed the Shackleford Good
Roads Bill authorizing the federal government to turn over
$5,000,000 to the states for road-building programs, though
states had to contribute equal amounts to benefit.

1951 – The first section of the New Jersey Turnpike, a 51-mile
stretch from Bordentown to Deepwater, was opened to traffic.
On Nov. 30 the still incomplete toll road was dedicated by Gov.
Alfred E. Driscoll, who opened a 40-mile section between
Woodbridge and Bordentown. My state has never been the
same.

1954 July 12 – President Eisenhower proposed a four-point
highway modernization program, with the cost to be shared by
federal and state governments. [90% federal / 10% state.] The
creation of the Interstate Highway system was his
administration’s most effective public works initiative, in the
estimation of presidential historian Michael Beschloss, as well as
being the most extensive single public works project in U.S.
history. 42,500 miles of limited-access interstate highway was
built to serve the needs of commerce and defense.

But in the words of historians George Brown Tindall and David
E. Shi, “It was only afterward that people realized that the huge
national commitment to the automobile might have come at the
expense of America’s railroad system, already in a state of
advanced decay.” [“America: A Narrative History”]

Finally, I found the following passage in “The Growth of the
American Republic,” by Samuel Eliot Morison, Henry Steele
Commager and William E. Leuchtenburg. In describing the
decline of the cities in 1960s:

“The automobile not only made it possible to live in the suburbs,
or far out in the country, and do business in the city, but also, by
creating insoluble traffic problems, ruining public transportation,
devouring space for parking lots (2/3’s of central Los Angeles
had been given over to streets, freeways, parking lots, and
garages by this time) and filling the air with noxious fumes,
make it disagreeable to live in the central city. Intended as a
vehicle for quick mobility, the automobile no longer served this
function in many cities. In 1911 a horse and buggy paced
through Los Angeles at 11 mph; in 1962 an auto moved through
the city at rush hour at an average 5 mph. Yet while commuter
railroads received little government aid, federal and local
governments poured money into highways which funneled yet
more traffic into the city.”

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Wall Street History will return September 10.

Brian Trumbore

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