In 1903, Horatio Nelson Jackson drove his car from San Francisco to New York. He was the first person to travel by car across the country, and he did it at a time when highways, as we know them today, did not exist. When he was lucky, Jackson bumped along dirt roads, but sometimes, especially in the west, he had to follow railroad tracks, bicycle paths, or just plain old foot paths.
It made sense that Jackson found few roads suitable for his car in 1903, since the first gasoline-powered American vehicles had been made by Charles Duryea in 1893, only ten years before. Duryea was also a maker of bicycles, and while the combination may surprise us today, bicycles and cars are closely linked in the matter of roads.
BICYCLES AND THE GOOD ROADS MOVEMENT
Duryea manufactured “safety bicycles” — mass-produced bicycles with air-inflated tires, two wheels of the same size, and pedals attached to a chain mechanism. That is, he made bicycles similar to today’s. They were called safety bicycles because they were easier to ride and therefore safer than previous bicycles, which were called “penny-farthings” after British coins. The front wheel (the penny) was larger than the rear wheel (the farthing).
Even on penny-farthing bicycles, individuals could cover considerable distances on routes of their own choosing, and outside cities there weren’t many roads appropriate for such travel. To improve this situation, bicycle enthusiasts organized the “good roads movement” in the 1870s. They touted the economic benefits of improved transportation for those living in rural areas, and in May 1880 in Newport, Rhode Island, they founded The League of American Wheelmen, a bicycle advocacy organization. Soon there were public demonstrations for improved roads.
Farmers and others from rural communities joined the agitators, and the good roads movement went national. In 1891, a 73-page pamphlet called The Gospel of Good Roads — A Letter to the American Farmer encouraged advocates. In 1892, Good Roads, a monthly illustrated magazine, began publication, and it soon had one million readers. You can find out what sparked such readership, if you wish, because issues dated from 1892 to 1921 are online.
Political candidates began making campaign promises supporting improved roads, but it took until 1916 for the federal government to get fully involved. That’s when Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Aid Road Act. American business got on board that year, too, as the Buffalo-Springfield Company began selling a key tool for building paved roadways: the steam roller.
By that time, interest in personal transportation had moved from bicycles to cars, and people driving outside towns needed direction on how to get where they wanted to go. Starting in the 1910s, that direction was supplied by “auto trails.”
AUTO TRAILS
Auto trails, defined routes intended to guide travelers in cars, were sponsored by localities looking for business from increased traffic, as well as organizations such as auto parts suppliers. Trails were easy to create — they were often marked by as little as colored paint on telephone poles — and they weren’t always reliable. Sometimes, unscrupulous promoters collected money from towns along a proposed trail, put up a few markers, and vanished down the road.
Many auto trail organizations, though, worked with states and localities to improve the roads along their routes, and there were auto trails in all parts of the country. Two well-known trails were the coast-to-coast Lincoln Highway, begun in 1913, and the Dixie Highway (1915) from Canada to Miami, Florida. Among the other 86 trails known to have existed were the Ben Hur Highway (St. Louis to Fort Dodge, Iowa); the Cornhusker Highway (Sioux City, Iowa, to Oklahoma City); the Egyptian Trail (Chicago to Cairo, Illinois); the Glacier to Gulf Motorway (Calgary, Canada, to Tampico, Mexico); and the Lackawanna Trail (Binghamton, New York, to New Jersey and Delaware).
The highway routes we know today were influenced by the auto trails. There are still Lincoln Highway signs on roads across the country, and U.S. Highway 50 follows part of one of the first transcontinental trails, the Midland Trail, which was marked from Washington, D.C. to both Los Angeles and San Francisco. Midland Trail towns along today’s Highway 50 route include St. Louis and Kansas City, as well as Vincennes, Indiana, Sedalia, Missouri, and Salem, Illinois.
THE U.S. HIGHWAY SYSTEM
Today, of course, our highways are identified by number, not name. Could such a change have happened without a committee? Never!
In 1924, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) developed a plan to mark numbered highways throughout the U.S., and formed a committee to implement the plan. Despite being an organization of states, and not a federal government authority, AASHTO designated 81,000 miles of roads as “U.S. Highways.” The proposed new system was both criticized and praised by auto trail associations and local newspapers. Support, or lack of it, generally depended on whether a proposed highway passed through a town or skipped by it.
The individual states approved the plan. That was necessary, because under the plan, the states were responsible for construction and maintenance of the numbered roads, just as they are today.
Today’s network of roads, officially called the United States Numbered Highway System, still generally follows the plan defined in the 1920s. East-west highways have even numbers, with the lowest numbers on the northern routes. Odd numbers identify north-south highways, with the lowest assigned to routes in the east. Three-digit numbers have generally been reserved for routes branching off principal highways, though Highway 101 in California is an exception to this.
U.S. HIGHWAY 50
The plan specified much of the current route of U.S. Highway 50, marking it from Annapolis, Maryland to Wadsworth, Nevada. It was soon extended to Sacramento, California, but in Utah that new part of the route diverged from today’s Route 50. It went north to Salt Lake City, likely to avoid the construction challenges posed by the San Rafael Reef.
Route 50 later crossed the Chesapeake Bay from Annapolis by ferry, thus reaching Ocean City, Maryland, and the Atlantic Ocean. In the west, it was extended to San Francisco in the 1930s and then retracted back to Sacramento in the 1960s. Such changes reflect the control individual states exercise over the routing of U.S. Highways within their borders. Even so, today’s Route 50 still passes through many of the same towns and cities marked on the highway plan developed almost 100 years ago.
In the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration proposed a new road system, called Interstate Highways. Planners wanted to avoid numbering confusion with the established U.S. Highways, so they placed the lowest east-west Interstate numbers in the south, far from the lowest existing U.S. Highway numbers in the north. Of course, that strategy didn’t work for east-west highways in the middle of the country, which is why there is no Interstate Highway 50.
HIGHWAY SIGNS
The signs we see today along Route 50 and other U.S. Highways display the shield design approved back in the 1920s, chosen to echo the shield on the Great Seal of the United States.
Such signs provide direction at intersections, of course, but they are also displayed at intervals along highways. Those particular signs are called “reassurance markers,” intended to tell travelers they have not gone astray.
BACK TO THE FUTURE
The committee that defined Route 50 almost 100 years ago is still active, and its members are engaged in a surprising return to the late 1800s, when bicycling led the way to today’s highways. They are defining a national cycling network called the United States Bicycle Route (USBR) system. It includes roads, off-road paths, and bicycle lanes.
There is a USBR 50. A segment of it starts next to Lake Tahoe in Stateline, Nevada, at the California-Nevada border . It continues over 400 miles through Nevada to the Utah border, and most of that route follows U.S. Highway 50.
The image of the penny-farthing bicycle came from Pixabay and is not copyrighted.