Making Michigan Move/Chapter 1

by Bill Kulsea and Tom Shawver

I

GETTING MICHIGAN OUT OF THE MUD

Two men dedicated to a cause, each in his own way. . . Horatio S. "Good Roads" Earle and Frank F. Rogers. As state highway commissioners in the first three decades of this century, they pushed Michigan from mud to mobility. There were others, true, for it takes many people, not just cement, asphalt and machinery, to build roads over swamps, rock, rivers and forests. Yet this diverse pair will always stand tall in the pantheon of early road builders. They built the foundation for the Michigan Depart­ment of Transportation and its forerunner, the Michigan State Highway Department.

Earle was Michigan's first highway commissioner, serving from 1905 to 1909. He was outgoing, flamboyant, caustic, with crossed eyes which he said gave him the power "to look at things other people don't see." He had been drawn into the good-roads movement before 1900, as a bicycle enthusiast. He and other members of the League of American Wheelmen fought for better roads and streets and the rights of bicyclists to use them without interference from horsedrawn vehicles. The league played a major role in persuading the State Legislature to establish a State Highway Commission in 1892 to make recommendations on road improvements and to pass a bill in 1893 to give voters of any county the right to establish a county road system.

Earle's zeal brought him national prominence and focused the atten­tion of the Michigan citizenry on the growing good-roads movement. As chief consul of the Michigan Division of the League of American Wheel­men, he brought the first International Road Congress to Port Huron in 1900, an event that drew hundreds of good-roads advocates from throughout the country. For the main event, Earle hitched together the first good-roads train ever assem-
"Good Roads Train" of construction equipment touring the Michigan Thumb in 1908. These helped promote public support for good roads. bled—a traction engine, road roller, sprinkler, dump wagons and farm wagons. They carried the delegates to a newly laid, one-mile stretch of macadam road built of layers of crushed stone. It was built as an "object lesson" to show what ought to be done nationwide. Two years later, Earle became national president of the league.

It wasn't until the opening years of the 1900's that he became concerned about good roads for "automobilists," as they were then called. In those days, automobilists had a choice: bad roads or worse. They were a rare breed caught between the horse-drawn wagon and buggy and the bicyclists. Even in the larger towns the roads were in miserable condition. In rural areas, except where there was a lakeport or a railroad depot, roads were mud tracks in wet weather, dust bins in dry. Railroads and burgeoning systems of electrified rail cars known as "interurbans" carried passengers from town to town. Streetcars furnished public transportation in the cities.

The Detroit Bicycle Club convinced Earle that the way to get things done was to become a member of the State Legislature, where laws were made and money appropriated. In 1900, running as a Republican from De­troit, he was elected to the State Senate, campaigning almost exclu­sively as a good-roads promoter. He became known as "Good Roads" Earle. As a lawmaker, he contrived to mention the need for better roads in nearly all his speeches and was named chairman of a committee to study the need for road improvements and offer a plan to bring them about. The committee's main recommendation: set up a reward system to provide state financial aid for improvement of local roads.

The proposal gathered dust for two years. Farmers feared that more roads would increase their property taxes, chiefly for the benefit of despised automobilists. They thought existing roads of sand and clay should be kept intact for movement of their products to market, not for joyriders by the owners of noisy motorcars which frightened their livestock and dis­rupted the serenity of their rural countryside.

Earle's next move was to bring together the growing number of unorganized professional road build­ers and engineers as a force in the good-roads movement. Realizing that the Wheelmen's influence was wan­ing as the bicycle craze declined, he became the main founder of the American Road Makers Association. Only 25 men attended the organiza­tional meeting in New York City in 1902 but the next year several hundred showed up at the first annual convention in Detroit. It was the parent of the American Road Builders Association and a fore­runner of today's thriving Michigan Road Builders Association and simi­lar groups in states across the coun­try.

The 1903 State Legislature, after a bitter fight, passed a bill setting up a state reward system for highways and creating a state highway department and office of highway commissioner. Earle got the job by appointment from Gov. Aaron Bliss. A few days later, the attorney general ruled the act unconstitutional, saying the state's basic document did not permit state aid for internal improvements, including public highways.

Earle stayed on the job at no pay. He called himself the "unconstitutional highway commissioner" and began a statewide campaign to amend the constitution. Opponents resisted him at every turn, heckling him from the audiences, occasionally hiring drunks to disrupt meetings and on at least one occasion paying people a dollar apiece to stay home on the night Earle came to town.

A macadam road, consisting of several layers of crushed stone, was the ultimate in rural highway construction in the early years of the century. The good-roads forces prevailed. In the spring election of 1905, voters in all 83 counties approved an amend­ment authorizing state spending for roads. Gov. Fred Warner named Earle state highway commissioner and on July 1, 1905, Michigan became the 18th state to establish a state agency to supervise road improvements. In that year, there
The nation's first mile of concrete road was this section of Woodward Avenue between Six Mile and Seven Mile roads in Detroit. The conversion from mud track to concrete roadway was completed July 4,1909, at a cost of $13,354.

were 2,958 automobiles registered in Michigan, each owner paying a 50-cent fee to the state.

The best available records indicate there were 68,000 miles of roads in the state. Fewer than 8,000 miles were improved, 7,700 with gravel and 245 with macadam. Only 18 counties had adopted the county road system.

The new highway department set up business in the office of the Speaker of the House in the State Capitol. Its operating budget of 310,000 a year paid for a staff of five, including Earle and his deputy, Frank F. Rogers, an engineer from Port Huron who had worked diligently at his side in the campaign to legalize a state reward law.

The new legislation allocated $20,000 for the first year and $50,000 for the second year as "rewards" to counties and townships which built roads in accordance with minimum specifications. State pay­ments of S25O to $1,000 a mile typically paid about one fourth of the total cost.

Earle's ideas were a mirror of future road progress. He advocated use of trained civil engineers to plan and supervise construction of roads and used his state office and the state reward system to encourage local officials to do the job professionally and well. In 1907, he persuaded the Legislature to abolish the ancient and highly inefficient statute labor system for road improvements. It allowed a farmer and a team of horses to work out in a day or two his share of local road taxes. In its place, the Legisla­ture enacted a much more productive cash tax system. The ceiling was set at 50 cents per $100 of assessed property value, and the revenue could be used only for permanent road improvements, not mainte­nance.

Earle predicted counties and cities and the state, even the federal government, eventually would coop­erate to build good highways and connecting roads. He was the first to urge a statewide system of roads, not just farm-to-market, hit-and-miss roads that ignored cross-country traf­fic. He also played a key role in construction of the nation’s first full mile of rural concrete highway. It was built on Woodward Avenue in De­troit between Six Mile Road and Seven Mile Road, a 17-foot, eight­ inch-wide marvel that drew observers from all over the world. The three-year-old Wayne County Road Com­mission started work on April 20, 1909, and finished on July 4. The cost was $13,354.

Earle had encouraged the project and approved a $1,000 state reward to the county nine days before his term expired. His successor, by appoint­ment of Governor Warner, was Townsend Ely, a retired farmer and former state senator from Alma. Earle had crossed swords with Warner several times during his four years as highway commissioner and had even run against him for gover­nor in the Republican primary elec­tion of 1908.

Warner decided to replace the strong-willed commissioner with a less aggressive man of more conser­vative bent. Ely had worked with Earle on early road legislation, includ­ing the cash tax system for road financing. He was an honest, sincere, kindly man with a strong sympathy for the farmer and for local govern­ments. Even his personal conversa­tion and speeches were sprinkled with references to "wagon roads," not farm-to-market roads. There was a reason: many farmers still believed the auto would meet the fate of the buffalo and the support of the rural population was important to the success of state programs in the rural-dominated Legislature.

Horses pulling a primitive grader was a standard maintenance technique for Michigan roads in the "Age of Mud."

Ely ably used the department to promote more and better roads. From the outset of his four-year term he developed a communications clearing-house for local roadbuilders, using his staff, with Frank Rogers as the deputy and chief engineer, and the massive collection of information compiled in the Earle administration. He was keenly interested in research­ing road problems, prompting the department to issue semi-technical bulletins on such subjects as "Care of Earth Roads" and "The County Road System." In 1912, the University of Michigan established the nation's first state highway testing laboratory, where materials used in road work were tested for quality. The university also hired its first instructor in highway engineering.

Michigan was then well launched on its love affair with the automobile. Henry Ford had built his first one in Detroit in 1896 and R. E. Olds erected the nation's first automobile factory in 1899, also in Detroit. Then came Buick Motor Co. in 1901, followed by Ford Motor Co. in 1903 and Hudson Motor Car, Inc., in 1909, all in Detroit. Other lesser-known, often short-lived manufacturers entered the competition. In 1908, Ford introduced the model T, a car he said "every man earning a good salary can afford." The same year William C. Durant's Buick Company produced nearly 8,500 cars at the world's largest automobile factory at Flint. The price was not yet within the reach of the ordinary working­ man, but the number of owners was growing rapidly and all of them became backers of good roads for their vehicles to travel on.

Motorists also organized themselves into automobile clubs, starting with the Automobile Club of Detroit, founded in 1902. In less than 10 years, more than a dozen others were going in cities throughout the Lower Peninsula. Some used goodly por­tions of their dues revenues for road improvements. About that time, citi­zen promoters undertook what were called "pike tours" to demonstrate that the auto was capable of hazard­ous travel and deserved better road­ ways. One of the first tour groups spent a week in 1912 driving from Benton Harbor to Harbor Springs, proving that auto travel along Lake Michigan's western shoreline was entirely feasible.

Auto travel on Michigan's roads in springtime during the "Age of Mud" was anything but smooth and speedy.

The Michigan State Good Roads Association was formed in 1906 by a variety of interests to help lead the way and be a spokesman on all manner of road issues. Auto man­ufacturers joined the movement, knowing that better roads would spur sales of their products. More and more farm organizations followed suit as members learned the advan­tages of good roads on land values and movement of their products to markets.

In 1913, the state's chief highway engineer became the chief admini­strator. Frank Rogers, who had served eight years under Earle and Ely, became highway commissioner by choice of the people, who voted their choice for the first time after the Legislature in 1909 had stripped the governor of power to make the appointment. Rogers, a Republican, won out in a field of five. Earle, the candidate of the fledgling Progressive (Bull Moose) Party headed by Theo­dore Roosevelt, ran third. Ely had retired to his farm.

When Rogers took over, there were 60,438 motor vehicles registered in Michigan, more than 20 times the number registered when the highway department opened for business eight years earlier. A total of 1,754 miles of roads had been built under the state reward system. The average cost of building a mile of concrete road was $15,000. Macadam was $4,500 and gravel $1,500.

The demand for more than purely local roads crystallized that year when the Legislature passed the State Trunkline Act. It provided for laying out some 3,000 miles of main state highways extending to all corners of the state and connecting cities and larger towns. Double reward pay­ments were to be paid for newly improved roads in the system and extra compensation paid for roads on which state rewards had previously been paid.

The act inspired some energetic and rather astounding efforts. The Huron Shore Road Association scheduled Michigan's first Road Bee Day for June 9, 1913. It was a day of work and festivity by an estimated 5,000 men and 2,000 women, aided by 3,000 teams of horses and 750 automobiles. A historian of the day reported that 200 miles of road were improved during the bee. Gov. Woodbridge Ferris was so impressed that he issued proclamations officially setting aside statewide road bee days for the next several years.

A Michigan "first"—an elevated station for a traffic policeman, on Detroit's Woodward Avenue. It was commonly known as a "crow's nest." Rogers, who had built a statewide reputation for integrity and effi­ciency, shaped the state highway department into a professional unit. He hired skilled engineers and de­manded detailed specifications for roads and bridges built by townships and counties. He encouraged the formation of more county road or­ganizations, knowing from experi­ence that growth of road systems depended upon the willingness of counties to do the work. By 1916, there were 61 of them.

Draftsmen and design engineers of the State Highway Department at Lansing headquarters in 1916. Four rooms accommodated the entire staff. Rogers also promoted profes­sionalism at every level of the industry. He successfully encouraged formation of regional organizations of highway engineers and road-building experts and initiated annual institutes bringing engineers together for lec­tures on the latest developments in the field. He also strengthened a weak road maintenance system and encouraged counties to be more efficient by acquiring road machinery such as cement mixers and dump cars.

Some of the most important advances in road improvements, and some of the most important legislation, took place during Rogers' first few years in office. They included:

• The Covert Law, championed by Philip Colgrove of the Michigan Good Roads Association, authorizing the formation of special assessment districts in the counties for road improvements, with property owners, the counties and the townships shar­ing the costs of the various projects. It triggered a new spurt in road­-building.
• The Automobile Tax Law effective in 1916 was Michigan’s first weight tax for automobiles, taxing passenger cars at 25 cents per horsepower and 25 cents per 100 pounds of weight. The levy on motortrucks was 15 cents, with half of all proceeds going to the state highway department and half to the counties, all to be used for highway purposes.
• A law promoted by a beauty­-conscious Rogers authorizing the highway department to plant trees along all state reward roads.
• Legislation authorizing the com­missioner to name all unnamed state roads and post signboards on public highways with the name of the road and the distance to the nearest settlement. These coincided with efforts of the automobile clubs to guide motorists by such means as painting bands of different colors on roadside telephone poles along the main routes between cities.
• Laws and efforts by the depart­ment, the auto clubs and others to sign thousands of railroad grade crossings.
• The Bryant Bill of 1917, which for the first time imposed regulations on the axles, tires and speed of vehicles and set 15 tons as the maximum weight for vehicles traveling state roads.

A "Rube Goldberg" type of contraption was used for laying down centerline markings on state highways in the 1920's. The years before America's entry into World War I also produced the first federal highway aid law, ap­proved by Congress in 1916, allocat­ing $75 million to the states. Michi­gan was ready to match its share dollar for dollar, collecting nearly S2.2 million of the total.

Hand-painted arrow supplemented centerline dividing traffic lanes on dangerous curve of a northern Michigan highway. The nation's first centerline on a rural state highway was laid in 1917 on the Marquette-Negaunee Road (State Trunkline 15) in Marquette County.

Other developments important to the future of highways and highway travel were taking place in rapid-fire order. Edward N. Hines of the Wayne County Road Commission invented the center line in 1911 to separate traffic moving in opposite directions. It has been called the most important traffic safety device ever conceived. Michigan won credit in 1917 for painting the first center line on a state highway—the Marquette-to-Negaunee Road. The first stop sign went up in Detroit in the same year and the nation's first "crow's nest" traffic signal tower was built on Woodward Avenue in De­troit, giving police officers a high vantage point for traffic control. The red-yellow-green traffic light was conceived by Detroit police officer William Potts.

World War I brought a new type of maintenance service—snow re­moval. It resulted from the need for all-weather roads to bring materials to the war plants and ship the finished products to railroads and embarkation points. Michigan, in the winter of 1918, kept roadways clear on 590 miles of strategic highways.

Clearing the roads in Wayne County in the winter of 1921. Highway Depart­ment's winter maintenance program started in World War I. In the same year, road officials of the counties banded together to form the Michigan Association of Road Com­missioners and Engineers, later to become the County Road Association of Michigan. The roads under their jurisdiction formed the great bulk of the total mileage in Michigan.

With the end of the war, the greatest roadbuilding effort in history began in Michigan and across the country. Demobilization brought a surge in the demand for autos, led by veterans returning from Europe with a desire to see more of the country and the world about them. Registrations rose from 262,000 in 1918 to 325,000 the following year. Truck traffic grew apace and roadbuilding was seen as a panacea for unemployment problems stemming from the closing of war plants and the glut of discharged servicemen.

Michigan's state reward system had paid for improvements on 4,800 miles of roads, including 2,115 on the state highway system, but huge gaps remained in the state system. Motorists traveled through one county on a concrete road, traversed the next on macadam or asphalt and ended up in the third on gravel.

Rogers and good-roads advocates went to the people for help in raising needed funds. In the spring of 1919, voters approved a constitutional amendment to issue S50 million in road bonds, a tremendous sum at the time. Rogers promised 3,600 miles of trunklines that would benefit both the farmer and the city dweller, and Michigan industry. He led in de­veloping a five-year construction program spending S10 million a year, plus S30 million in county funds. At the same time, U.S. Senator Charles E. Townsend of Jackson was busy in Washington with a bill calling for federal expenditures of S434 million over a five-year period, all for construction of highways built under federal specifications. Passed in 1921 after a two-year fight, it became known as the "Townsend Bill." It replaced the "bits and snatches" of local highway development by laying the groundwork for the federal-aid system of cross-state and interstate highways now in place nationwide.

In 1923, the highway department linked the Upper and Lower penin­sulas with state-owned ferry service at the Straits of Mackinac. Prior to that, passengers and auto owners were at the mercy of operators of railroad ferries, who cared little whether they got the business or not. For terminals, a dock was purchased at St. Ignace and railroad facilities were rented at Mackinaw City. The service began July 31, 1923, first with a passenger ferry with capacity of 20 autos and later with two war surplus vessels that had been con­verted to ferries. Other ferries joined the fleet over the next three decades; and when they were put out of business in 1957 with the opening of the Mackinac Bridge, they had car­ried some 12 million vehicles and more than 30 million passengers.

Cost of road materials and labor raised construction prices in 1923 at a time when the state was running out of road bond funds. Road revenues could not meet new de­mands. A special commission suggested the state levy a one-cent tax on each gallon of gasoline sold. Rural communities generally favored the proposal, but it brought a storm of protest from the cities, where motorists preferred to stick with the existing levies on auto weight and horsepower.

The department eyed the controversy from a balcony seat. The argument raged until March of 1923 when state lawmakers adopted a two-cent-a-gallon gasoline tax. Gov. Alex J. Groesbeck, generally a strong good­ roads advocate, vetoed it as "an excessive burden on the automobile owner." Two years later, the Legisla­ture readopted the tax and Groes­beck signed it into law, effective in 1926. It added $5 million a year in new revenue. Rogers was given complete authority for planning, building and maintaining trunklines, a responsibility previously shared with the counties. Tighter control over routes removed that part of road­ building from politics and relieved counties of property taxes for roads.

The burden eased further in 1927 with adoption of a three-cent levy on a gallon of gasoline. From then on, state trunklines were built with con­crete or asphalt; no more macadam, sand, clay or gravel. The department went into force-account work on highways, bidding on road projects in competition with private contractors. If its bid was low, it got the job. It used convict labor to pound stakes and place cement and purchased a plant in Chelsea for cement supply—in reprisal against the cement trust, which had jumped prices to the department on force-account pro­jects. Counties were obligated to buy cement from the state until the plant was sold in 1929.

Michigan in the 1920's drew national recognition for its highway programs. It built nearly 2,000 miles of hardsurface roads, the most in the nation, and improved about 6,500 miles of trunklines. The highway department completed the first concrete trunk­ line across the state—M-16, later changed to US-16—linking Detroit and Grand Haven. The date the last segment was opened, roadbuilders proudly noted the new highway was 20 feet wide and between seven and nine inches thick. That compared with the previous standard of 16 feet six inches and six inches of concrete.

Other important developments those years included:

• Construction of the nation's first "super-highway," an eight-lane di­vided thoroughfare running 18 miles between Detroit and Pontiac along

State officials camped on the site when they made an inspection tour of state trunkline construction in Lenawee County prior to World War I. Woodward Avenue. It led to con­struction of a network of multi-lane highways developed under a master plan for the Detroit metropolitan area.
In 1925, the Michigan Highway Department became the first in the country to utilize aerial surveys for route location and engineering. Talbert "Ted" Abrams began the service, still in operation today.

• Michigan’s was the first state high­way department to correlate soils characteristics with highway design and construction, starting in 1925. The same year it became the first to use aerial surveys for highway design when Abrams Aerial Survey Co. of Lansing took photos of a planned route between Benzonia and Beulah.
• At the instigation of Gov. Fred W. Green, a former Ionia County road commissioner, Michigan developed the yellow line to indicate no-passing zones on sight-restricted hills and curves.
• Allen Williams, Ionia County Road Commission engineer-manager, de­signed and placed the nation’s first roadside picnic tables on US-16, an effort that helped promote Michigan's status as a leading tourist state. It followed by 10 years the opening of the nation’s first roadside park, developed along US-2 by Herbert Larson, engineer-manager of the Iron County Road Commission.
• Twenty-six road contractors formed the Michigan Road Builders Association in 1928, joining forces to develop standard specifications and contract procedures and raise the level of professionalism in their industry.
• Systems of uniform sign and traffic lights were put in place to smooth traffic flow and improve driving safety for the 1.2 million autos and 176,000 commercial vehicles registered in 1929. The total had in­creased nearly 500 percent in just 10 years.

Between 1905 and 1930, Michigan built a serviceable network of high­ways on what once were Indian paths, military roads, wagon roads, plank roads and farm-to-market roads. The age of mud was over; the age of concrete was moving in.

During the Depression in the 1930's, federal aid money for highways was split between the Highway Department and the Welfare Department. Thousands of "reliefers" were put to work on highways as a means of putting unemployed men back to work.

Horses were still important to roadbuilding well into the 1930's. This is a grading and drainage project on M-95 in the western Upper Peninsula in 1935.

As more and more cars took to the highways in the 1930's, Michigan became a national leader in developing techniques to improve highway safety. Here, safety engineers tested the effectiveness of a guardrail.