The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways

by Earl Swift

  If the national clamor over Fisher's coast-to-coast dream seems a bit over the top today, bear in mind that it was, at least in theory, the sort of long-distance touring road that thousands of autoists coveted but had seen little sign of becoming reality. Just about every state was desperate for better roads but exasperated by its inability to provide them. The cost of bringing highways up to even minimal " surfaced" standards was beyond the means of most, and the technical capabilities of many; only a few states had full-fledged highway departments.

  The federal government's Office of Public Roads, the successor to General Stone's Office of Road Inquiry, was stymied, as well. It had built 410 short " object lesson" roads using local materials over the past decade and talked itself hoarse about the benefits of new construction: Rural school attendance averaged 57 percent before road improvement; after, it jumped twenty points. The costs of moving a ton of freight stood at 21 to 23 cents a mile on an unimproved road; with surfacing, the rate averaged about 12 cents, raising the profit margin on farm and industrial products and lowering prices to everyone. Road work also promised to " materially raise the value of farm property," the top federal roads man, Logan Waller Page, wrote in a 1915 memo, and " lighten the labors of American horses, save wear and tear on harnesses and wagons, and add to the comfort and happiness of all rural residents."

  Recognizing their merits didn't get roads built, however. No consensus had emerged among politicians on exactly how to apply federal money and muscle to the situation. Drivers—voters—were growing impatient. Something had to be done. But what? Page, a former geologist who'd led Public Roads since 1905, favored a strong Washington role in road building, and he wasn't bashful about it. He and his lobbyists pushed a financing scheme called " Federal Aid," under which the states would develop road projects to suit their needs, the feds would lend them technical support, and both sides would share construction costs. This bottom-up approach left most decisions about how and where to build roads to the experts, the people who would actually use them.

  To a vocal group of taxpayers and highway officials, however, Federal Aid seemed fatally complex, involving too many players, too many levels of government, too much opportunity for local politicking, and far too much delay in addressing already critical needs; how much simpler it would be to have the feds build a network of highways directly, without the nettlesome involvement of states and counties unprepared for the job. Washington would own the network outright, ensuring that standards of design, construction, and maintenance did not vary across state lines.

  This approach had precedent. A century before, Congress had devoted more than $6.8 million, a mint at the time, to the construction of an unpaved toll road from Cumberland, Maryland, to St. Louis. Construction had reached Vandalia, Illinois, when the feds abandoned the project in the 1840s with the advent of railroads. Over the next several decades, Washington invested its transportation energies in train travel. States, cities, and towns did likewise, and rails snaked their way to every corner of the continent. In 1840, the United States had 162 miles of main line track per one million inhabitants. Fifty years later, despite a fivefold increase in population, it had 2,600. Meanwhile, the turnpike out of Cumberland reverted to weeds. Roads, as Page put it, had been " relegated to the background as a purely local affair."

  The competing approaches to resurrecting federal involvement turned on a question that at first glance seems semantic: Should America have a national system of highways, as Page and his allies urged, or a system of national highways? A related decision divided roads advocates, as well: For whom should such a system, of whatever type, be built—the farmer, who would use it to get his produce to town, or the commercial and recreational driver who sought travel between cities? Page consistently stressed that getting farmers " out of the mud" with farm-to-market roads was his first priority. Many East Coast highway men facing greater demand for urban and intercity connections differed with him; so did auto executives, motor tourists, and leaders of the AAA, all of whom favored long-distance highways.

  In the months before Carl Fisher unveiled his proposal for the Lincoln Highway, Capitol Hill had witnessed the introduction of sixty separate bills proposing solutions of great variety—for Federal Aid, for federal construction of post roads, for a web of hard interstate roads, for replacing Page's agency with a federal highway commission. In 1912, Congress authorized an experiment in federal assistance, ponying up $500,000 for upgrading roads used in rural mail delivery. The program was cumbersome and beyond the means of most local governments, however; it saw only 450-odd miles of road improved and quelled neither the public pressure for action nor the flood of new roads legislation. The following year, fifty-odd bills were pending in the Capitol.

  Among the backers of a federally owned and managed system was Virginia's recently appointed highway commissioner, George P. Coleman. Like many of his eastern colleagues, Coleman oversaw an established state roads network, though that term is strictly relative; in wet weather, Virginia's highways were as mired as those in Indiana, Iowa, or anywhere else. He viewed Page's farm-to-market roads as going from nowhere to nowhere, and of little benefit to motorists at large.

  Coleman had limited opportunity to confer with others of like mind. The existing highway organizations were peopled not only by the state engineers actually pressed to solve America's road problem, but by representatives of the automakers, construction trades, and materials industries. " None of the associations," Coleman wrote years later, " seemed to a small group of engineers here in the East and South to meet the requirements of the fast-developing highway movement."

  The solution was simple enough: he would create his own association and limit membership to engineers and state highway commissioners. Coleman floated the idea in letters to several colleagues, and when state engineers met at a big American Road Congress in Atlanta in November 1914, a group of them adopted a resolution calling on " all State highway commissions or departments to send a representative with power to act to a meeting" in Washington. With that, representatives of seventeen state highway departments, along with Page and other federal reps, convened at the Raleigh Hotel on December 12, 1914, to create the American Association of State Highway Officials.

  It was a turning point, though it went largely unheralded at the time. With AASHO was created the first key ingredient of government's involvement in the interstate highways to come. Named to the group's executive committee was the tense, unsmiling Iowa engineer who'd spoken at the Lincoln's dedication: Thomas MacDonald.

  By its first anniversary, the Lincoln Highway's secretary, A. R. Pardington, boasted that it was " the longest road in the world," and " the most traveled road in the world," and " the one road on which more has already been spent, on which more is now being spent, and on which, during the years to come, more money and effort will be expended, than on any other single road known."

  Its path through New Jersey was being remade in brick and concrete. Counties in Ohio and Indiana had committed to improving the stretches of the Lincoln within their borders. One day in April 1914, thousands of businessmen and children wielded picks and shovels on the highway in Illinois; each received a check for a penny and honorary membership in the American Federation of Labor. Throughout the East, improving the highway had become a point of local pride.

  The going remained rough west of the Mississippi. Though Pardington claimed that in Iowa, " there remains but one bridge or culvert to be replaced by concrete," and that the Lincoln was " being resurveyed, straightened and broadened," travel in the Midwest remained a function of the weather. Farther west, little had changed from the days when Mark Twain had ventured to Nevada's gold fields by stagecoach and in Utah crossed " a vast, waveless ocean stricken dead and turned to ashes," under a sun of " dead, blistering, relentless malignity," while breathing alkali dust that " cut through our lips" and " persecuted our eyes" and " ate through the delicate membranes and made our noses bleed and kept them bleeding."

  That
was the nature of the West, however, and much of its appeal. In an automobile, the adventurous might explore territory forsaken by trains and unimagined by the city-bound. By 1915, the highway's cheerleaders insisted that a coast-to-coast drive was more exciting than it was arduous. The first official Lincoln guidebook, published that year, jauntily acknowledged that it was " still something of a sporting trip, and one must expect and put up cheerfully with some unpleasantness, just as you would on a shooting trip into the Maine woods for example." Those who expected otherwise " should take a de luxe train."

  A.L. Westgard, the AAA's field agent, pooh-poohed any " fear of danger, insurmountable obstacles or serious discomforts," assuring the readers of Motor magazine that " they no longer exist." Joy figured that as long as the weather was fair, a coast-to-coast drive was easy " every foot of the way," and marveled at the burgeoning traffic he encountered on his annual drive to California in 1915: " Two years ago, when I made this same trip, I was doing something out of the ordinary, one perhaps of fifty tourists who took the same journey. This spring I do not believe it is an exaggeration to state that I was but one out of five thousand."

  Informal counts bore him out. The Lincoln carried more than double the traffic through Ely, Nevada, in 1915 than it had a year earlier. The mid-desert oasis of Fish Springs, Utah, logged 225 cars in June 1915, up from 52 two years before. And the trend promised to continue. In 1916, a casual motorist drove the highway in six days, ten hours, and fifty-nine minutes, prompting the association to boast it promoted " a real road which will permit a traveler to average twenty miles per hour each of the twenty- four."

  If the highway's chief promoter was uncharacteristically quiet through these first seasons of success, it was because Carl Fisher was already busy with a new project. A few years before, charmed by a visit to Miami, Fisher and Jane had bought a winter home there and taken up speedboat racing. Their place overlooked Biscayne Bay to a low, mangrove-laced sandbar that protected the city from the open Atlantic; ferries rounded its tip every day to deliver sun worshipers to the lovely white sand beaches and arcing coconut palms on its ocean side.

  Others had attempted to develop the sandbar, on and off, as a coconut plantation, an avocado farm, a beach resort. All had limped along, at best. Development was foiled not only by access to the spit but by the jungly swamp that consumed its west side and interior, a thicket so well rooted, so dense and dark and twisted, that clearing the property seemed beyond hope. The latest scheme, involving the construction of a two-and-a-half-mile wooden bridge across the bay, had run out of steam, like so many before it. The bridge stood half-finished when Fisher decided that the sandbar might make an interesting investment.

  He gave the old-timer who owned the bridge the money to complete it and in exchange took possession of 200 acres of sand. He also loaned money to an outfit trying to develop housing on the bar, and for his troubles earned not only 8 percent interest but another 105 acres. He ripped out the mangroves with tractors, filled in the swamp with sand and mud dredged from the bay, bulkheaded the shoreline, and started to build a city. We know it today as Miami Beach.

  Money was no worry; Fisher and Allison had agreed to sell Prest-O-Lite to Union Carbide and wound up splitting $17 million. Fisher spent his share in Florida. Once he'd tamed the sandbar, he laid down a main drag, which he called Lincoln Road, and opened a land-sales office on it. He built an enormous house, the biggest on the spit. He began planning a modest, thirty-five-room hotel, named, again, for Lincoln. And he envisioned an artery to supply his venture with auto tourists, a tributary of the Lincoln Highway that would connect the industrial Midwest with Miami Beach. He initially called it the " Hoosier Land to Dixie Highway," envisioned it starting in Indianapolis and following existing roads, just as the Lincoln did, down through the Ohio River country and across Kentucky and Tennessee and over mountains as uncharted and fearsome as those out west.

  He stood to gain from the highway's success—this was far less selfless a mission than his first road venture had been. Even so, it was overdue. " The biggest part of the South might just as well be a foreign country as far as the automobile is concerned," Fisher correctly observed. " The average automobile is almost a wreck by the time it gets over the Cumberlands."

  In early 1915, he organized a summit in Chattanooga that drew thousands of delegates and hangers-on. Equal parts convention, circus, and utter chaos, the blur of shouts and arguments, florid speech, and brass bands managed, somehow, to birth a corporate entity called the Dixie Highway Association, modeled closely on the Lincoln.

  Cities, towns, and states so shrieked for inclusion that Fisher suggested two roughly parallel Dixie Highway branches, an eastern from Detroit through Cincinnati and Knoxville, and a western from Chicago through Indianapolis and Nashville. The two were connected in every state through which they passed by perpendicular rungs; all told, the Dixie covered nearly four thousand miles. Over the next few years it grew even more inclusive, stretching north to Michigan's Upper Peninsula and east to Savannah, and wandering so indirectly, in spots, that it seemed little more than a vague southward inclination. Even so, it was celebrated as the first major highway between the Deep South and the industrial North, as a conduit for Yankee dollars, and as a gateway to romanticized, almost mystical, country. The Atlanta Constitution ranked its importance with the roads of ancient Rome.

  Other newspapers, both Yankee and southern, devoted pots of ink to the Dixie, too, especially when Fisher and an " official" inspection party of autoists embarked on a Dixie Highway Pathfinding Tour reminiscent of his Lincoln expedition. The pathfinders inspired the highway-minded all over the country. Private " auto trail" associations materialized by the dozens, each promoting its route as the straightest, or fastest, or most scenic, or safest way to travel between far-flung points, and the few highway groups already doing business kicked their efforts up a gear.

  Soon the Yellowstone Trail was mapped from Plymouth Rock to Puget Sound. The Jefferson Davis Highway, a pet project of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, theoretically stretched from D.C. to San Francisco via New Orleans. The 3,568-mile Midland Trail coincided with the Lincoln from New York to Pittsburgh, with the Old Trails Road to Kansas City, then veered alone through the Rockies and into Utah, where it again joined the Lincoln through the desert before cutting south at Ely, Nevada. The Lakes to Gulf Highway linked Duluth, Minnesota, to Galveston, Texas, and lent a nickname to its headquarters town of Chillicothe, Missouri— " The Highway City"—that was popular in Chillicothe, if nowhere else.

  Like the Lincoln and Dixie, most of the new trails followed existing roads and relied on a mix of private subscription and local government labor. Many were more abstractions than fact, outlets for sloganeering and self-promotion rather than any real road building. For all that, the forty-eight states soon were crisscrossed with colorfully named highways, real and imagined. Primitive though it was, America had its first interstate road network.

  Regardless of what labels they went by, the country's highways were dependent on government for their construction and maintenance, so AASHO's first order of business was to draft a federal highways bill to propose to Congress. Meeting frequently, and usually in the East, its executive committee drafted a measure advocating a network of federally owned highways, then offered it to Congress before much of the association had seen it. Several members in the Midwest immediately objected that they'd been blind-sided; since when had AASHO discussed, let alone agreed to, a system owned by the feds?

  With a sizable piece of the membership in revolt, AASHO's bosses thought it wise to take a second crack at the bill. A gathering of automotive interests, the Pan-American Road Congress, was already scheduled for mid-September 1915 in Oakland; the association piggybacked on the congress with a special meeting on September 11.

  Eighteen departments were represented, including Iowa's. That odd, uncomfortable engineer, MacDonald, took command of editing the measure and, despite his quiet manner and the strong pers
onalities with whom he shared the room, managed to turn the thing on its head. The bill became a call for Federal Aid; it favored rural projects and required federal and state governments to share the costs of construction, dollar for dollar. More than a million miles of public road would be eligible for improvement—any country lane on which the mails were, or might be, carried. Because some of the most urgent needs were felt in big states with small populations, the group devised a formula for doling out the federal money that combined square mileage, population, and mail route mileage. In no case would the feds pay more than $10,000 per mile, and there would be no money for toll roads.

  Perhaps most important, the bill reserved most big decisions for the states. They'd initiate the projects, choose routes, and do the actual building. They'd develop their own standards, too, though they'd need Washington to review and approve their plans before they'd get any of its money. Maintenance was solely a state responsibility, subject to federal inspection and penalties. In what was perhaps its most lasting provision, the bill required that each participating state have a bona fide highway department. When Page's staff later undertook an " exhaustive examination of state laws" to ascertain which met the bill's definitions, it found that eleven states were without " departments in the sense contemplated," and that " the highway departments of five other states might be considered as in the doubtful class." All told, " few of the states were in position . . . to begin immediate cooperation." MacDonald's bill would force them to modernize—in effect, to develop the expertise they would need to partner with the Office of Public Roads.

  The Oakland meeting thus ended with AASHO's position reversed. Three months later, the membership ratified the new bill and passed it along to the U.S. Senate, where it was approved with a smattering of amendments. President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916 into law that July.