America's Roads
Brian Trumbore
President/Editor, StocksandNews.com

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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Brian Trumbore