You're cruising down the Interstate, speed control on 75, air conditioning blowing, CD blasting. You're thinking ahead to the deluxe motel where you have reservations for the night. Life on wheels is beautiful. But it didn't "yoostabee" that way.
The 50th anniversary of President Dwight D. Eisenhower signing the enabling legislation - awkwardly labeled the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 - for the Interstate System is June 29. Today we enjoy its fruits, but the journey to a safe, fast, self-financed, rational highway system was laborious.
Our aboriginal ancestors - regardless from which continent - started out following animal paths, graduated to trading over man-made routes to nearby villages and then with those at greater distances. Thus roads were "invented" before recorded history. It's believed the wheel, basically a wooden disc, was devised in the Bronze Age, and the spoked wheel around 1800 B.C. The silk trade "road" across continents from China to Europe and Africa began about 550 B.C.
To communicate with and defend their empire, the Romans began constructing their famous road network in 312 B.C., with the first route taking 292 years to complete. A survey taken about 150 A.D. counted some 53,000 miles of Roman roads and the best of them, the 320-mile Appian Way, compared favorably with today's superhighways. Built on a four-foot base with flagstone surface, it stretched 32 feet wide, featuring two outboard 8-foot lanes for horse and chariot traffic with the center 16 feet for foot soldiers.
Moreover, Roman roads were durably designed; bits and pieces still are used in the 21st century. Road engineering was an art, however, that was lost in the Dark Ages, rediscovered only by the needs of colonial settlement in the Americas .
In Spanish America dating from that age, we have El Camino Reals (Royal Roads) in New Mexico and California and even Louisiana that tied remote missions together. Yet the conquistadores also found excellent roads built at least a century before their arrival by the Inca Empire in Peru .
It was a different story in British America where decidedly unmilitary colonists faced seemingly impenetrable forests, countless rivers, and eventually formidable mountains as they pushed their way inland. The path of least resistance was simply to follow existing Indian trails - and many of our modern highways still cover the same routes. Before the American Revolution, Scots-Irish, Welsh, and German pioneers trekked over The Great Wagon Road, which started westward near Philadelphia, crossed the Susquehanna River, then turned south across the Potomac into the Shenandoah Valley all the way down through a mountain gap into western North Carolina. The means were foot, horseback, or wagons drawn by horses, mules, or oxen, and the "roadway" was just a bridgeless, muddy trail. Today the route is largely a segment of Interstate 81.
Road-building binges
But this was almost the exception. The real early roadways in North America were the seaways and waterways of the East Coast for the English and the St. Lawrence, Great Lakes, and Mississippi for the French. In England's coastal colonies, the Boston Post Road crossed Connecticut between Boston and New York City, beginning in 1673 to inaugurate a monthly mail service. By 1729, the postal road extended to Philadelphia. Today, it's mostly covered by US 1 or I-95.
The colony of Maryland enacted its first Road Act in 1666 "marking highways & making heads of rivers, creeks, branches, and swamp passable for horse & foot." A 1704 Act set the width of roads at 20 feet with provision for marking roadside trees with notches or branding irons. By the late 1700s throughout the new United States, stagecoach lines ran along the numerous post roads, inns sprang up along the ways, and privately operated turnpikes collected tolls. Then the federal government got into road building when Congress enacted the National Road Act of 1796, providing for a road to be built west from Baltimore to Williamsport where it intersected at the Potomac River with the aforementioned Great Wagon Road. In 1806, a commission was named for extending this highway - called the National Road, now US-40 - on to the Ohio River, along the colonial military route carved out during the French and Indian War of 1754-63, crossing numerous AlleghenyMountain ridges. The National Road later was extended to Illinois.
Concurrently in Great Britain, the Industrial Revolution sparked a great road-building binge that resulted in the Macadam concept of road construction design, patterned after the ancient Roman roads - graded, drained, and composed of three crushed rock layers but with a base only a few inches deep. Initially macadam roads had no surface coating. When tar or asphalt was added as a topping, they became "tarmacs." In Eastern America where forests prevailed, plank roads became common into the 20th century. These consisted of logs or planks laid crossways to prevent wagon wheels from sinking into the mire; while "quick and dirty" to build, their shortcomings were high maintenance and low durability, as the wood quickly rotted.
By mid-19th century, though, road building had fallen into another "Dark Age" of design and federal interest, due to the development of steamboats and railroads for rapid movement and canals for carrying bulk or whatever cheaply. Wagon roads, or course, far preceded the iron rails to move settlers and goods westward over such routes as the Oregon and Santa Fe Trails. Meanwhile, a new concept for financing local roads had arisen: citizens were compelled to either maintain the roads abutting their property, or pay taxes to hire someone else to do so. In Detroit in the 1840s, each block elected a Road Commissioner empowered to maintain roads one way or the other, either by his neighbors' labor or their taxes (which also went for the new public school systems). Generally, road construction and maintenance was considered a local matter for communities and counties, including franchises granted for private toll roads.
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