In 1837 this method of road-building was introduced into the United States, Syracuse, New York, possessing the first plank road this side the Canadian border. In fifteen years there were two thousand one hundred and six miles of these roads in New York State alone, and the system had spread widely through the more prosperous and energetic states. Usually these roads were single-track, the track being built on the left hand side of the roadway; the latter became known as the “turn-out.” The planks, measuring eight inches by three, were laid on stringers, these, in turn, resting on a more or less elaborately made bed. The average cost of plank roads in New York was a trifle less than two thousand dollars per mile. It will be remembered that the Cumberland Road cost on the average over ten thousand dollars per mile in Maryland and Pennsylvania, and three thousand four hundred dollars per mile west of the Ohio River. Its estimated cost per mile, without bridging, was six thousand dollars. It was natural, therefore, that plank roads should become popular—for the country was still a “wooden country,” as the pioneers said. It was argued that the cost was “infinitely less—that it [plank road] is easier for the horse to draw upon—and that such a road costs less for repairs and is more durable than a Macadam road.... On the Salina and Central road, a few weeks back, for a wager, a team [two horses] brought in, without any extraordinary strain, six tons of iron from Brewerton, a distance of twelve miles, to Syracuse [New York].... Indeed, the farmer does not seem to make any calculations of the weight taken. He loads his wagon as best he can, and the only care is not to exceed the quantity which it will carry; whether the team can draw the load, is not a consideration....” Such arguments prevailed in the day when timber was considered almost a nuisance, and plank roads spread far and wide.
Few who were acquainted with primitive conditions have left us anything vivid in the way of descriptions of roads and road-making. “The pioneers of our State,” wrote Calvin Fletcher, in an exceedingly interesting paper read before the Indiana Centennial Association, July 4, 1900, “found Indian trails, which, with widening, proved easy lines of travel. Many of these afterward became fixtures through use, improvement, and legislation.... Next to the hearty handshake and ready lift at the handspike, where neighbors swapped work at log-rollings, was the greeting when, at fixed periods, all able-bodied men met to open up or work upon the roads. My child-feet pattered along many of the well-constructed thoroughfares of today when they were only indistinct tracings—long lines of deadened trees, deep-worn horse paths, and serpentine tracks of wabbling wagon wheels. The ever-recurring road-working days and their cheerful observance, with time’s work in rotting and fire’s work in removing dead tree and stump, at last let in long lines of sunshine to dry up the mud, to burn up the miasma, and to bless the wayfarer to other parts, as well as to disclose what these pioneer road-makers had done for themselves by opening up fields in the forests.... To perfect easily and naturally these industries requires three generations. The forests must be felled, logs rolled and burned, families reared, and in most cases the land to be paid for. When this is accomplished a faithful picture would reveal not only the changes that had been wrought, but a host of prematurely broken down men and women, besides an undue proportion resting peacefully in country graveyards. A second generation straightens out the fields at odd corners, pulls the stumps, drains the wet spots, and casting aside the sickle of their father, swings the cradle over broader fields; and even trenches upon the plans of the third generation by pushing the claim of the reaper, the mower and the thresher.... The labor of the three generations in road-making I class as follows: To the first generation belonged locating the roads and the clearing the timber from them. The wet places would become miry and were repaired by the use of logs.... The roots and stumps caused many holes, called chuck holes, which were repaired by using brush and dirt—with the uniform result that at each end of the corduroy or brush repairs, a new mud or chuck hole would be formed in time; and thus until timber and brush became exhausted did the pioneer pave the way for the public and himself to market, to court, and to elections. The second generation discovered a value in the inexhaustible beds of gravel in the rivers and creeks, as well as beneath the soil. Roadbeds were thrown up, and the side ditches thus formed contributed to sound wheeling. Legislation tempted capital to invest and tollgates sprang up until the third generation removed them and assumed the burden of large expenditures from public funds for public benefit.
“And thus have passed away the nightmare of the farmer, the traveller, the mover and the mail-carrier—a nightmare that prevailed nine months of the year.... An experience of a trip from Indianapolis to Chicago in March, 1848, by mail stage is pertinent. It took the first twenty-four hours to reach Kirklin, in Boone County; the next twenty-four to Logansport, the next thirty-six to reach South Bend. A rest then of twenty-four hours on account of high water ahead; then thirty-six hours to Chicago—five days of hard travel in mud or on corduroy, or sand.... In the summer passenger coaches went through, but when wet weather came the mud wagon was used to carry passengers and mail, and when the mud became too deep the mail was piled into crates, canvas-covered, and hauled through. This was done also on the National [Cumberland], the Madison, the Cincinnati, the Lafayette and the Bloomington Roads.”
The corvée, or required work on the roads of France, has been given as one of the minor causes of the social unrest which reached its climax in the French Revolution. American peasants had no such hardship according to an anonymous rhymester:
Oh, our life was tough and tearful, and its toil was often fearful,
And often we grew faint beneath the load.
But there came a glad vacation and a sweet alleviation,
When we used to work our tax out on the road.
When we used to work our tax out, then we felt the joys of leisure,
And we felt no more the prick of labor’s goad;
Then we shared the golden treasure of sweet rest in fullest measure,
When we used to work our tax out on the road.
The macadam and plank roads saw the Indian trail at its widest and best. The railway has had a tendency to undo even such advances over pioneer roads as came in the heyday of macadam and plank roads. We have been going backward since 1840 rather than forward. The writer has had long acquaintance with what was, in 1830, the first turnpike in Ohio—the Warren and Ashtabula Road; it was probably a far better route in 1830 than in 1900. By worrying the horse you can not make more than four miles an hour over many parts of it. One ought to go into training preparatory to a carriage drive over either the Cumberland or the Pennsylvania road across the Alleghenies. As the trail was widened it grew better, but once at its maximum width it was eclipsed as an avenue by the railway and, exceptions aside, has since 1850 deteriorated. Every foot added in width, however, has contained a lesson in American history; every road, as we have said, indicates a need; and the wider the road, it may be added, the greater the need. An expanding nation, in a moment’s time, burst westward through these narrow trails, and left them standing as open roadways. Few material objects today suggest to our eyes this marvelous movement. These old routes with their many winding tracks, the ponderous bridges and sagging mile-posts,[19] are relics of those momentous days.