The first post road to be completed was opened to traffic in 1914. It was a dirt road, extending 14½ miles west from Florence, Alabama, to Waterloo. The program, with congressional extensions, dragged on for four more years, until the last post road, in Dubuque County, Iowa, was opened in 1918. From the start, this program was a very considerable burden on the Office of Public Roads, yet in carrying it out, the OPR learned valuable lessons which Director Page was able to pass on a few years later to the framers of the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916. The most important of these recommendations was that Federal aid should be dispensed only through the 48 States, avoiding the complexities of dealing with the Nation’s more than 3,000 counties.
It is worth noting that the post road program of 1912 to 1918 was the Office of Public Roads’ first involvement with the Federal policy of inducing social change in the States by means of the public works programs. Later legislation conditioned Federal grants for roads on State compliance with the 8-hour law, the prohibition of convict labor, the use of hand labor methods, the payment of minimum wages, and numerous other requirements that were primarily social.
Although the date is not known, it can be assumed that Director Page made up this model of a State highway department about the time that he made his recommendation on the 1916 Federal Aid Road Act.
The Lincoln Highway
The Glidden Tours and the exploits of the Pioneer Freighter inspired a growing interest in motorable long-distance roads among the rapidly increasing class of automobile owners. In 1912 Carl G. Fisher, builder of the Indianapolis Speedway, conceived the idea of a “coast-to-coast rock highway” as a way to dramatize the need for interstate roads. He was able to get support for this idea from some of the foremost leaders of the automotive and allied industries, and in July 1913, Fisher and his supporters formed the Lincoln Highway Association to carry out the scheme and collect public subscriptions to pay for it. The Association then selected what they considered the most direct route across the mid-United States beginning at New York and proceeding by way of Philadelphia, Chicago, Omaha, Cheyenne, and Salt Lake City to San Francisco, a total distance of about 3,150 miles.[1]
The Association recruited members in all of the towns along the route, and, with thoroughgoing efficiency, appointed able and influential local citizens as “consuls” to promote the improvement of the various sections of the route. The result was a rich harvest of local and national publicity and sizable cash contributions as well.
The Lincoln Highway Association collected millions of dollars from the public, but its officers had no illusions that they would ever be able to get enough to build the highway from this source. Their primary purpose was to educate the public to the need for better roads and build political support for national aid to good roads. As a vehicle for this educational campaign, they adopted Roy Stone’s tried and tested technique of object lesson roads. The funds donated to the Association were used to finance “seedling miles” distributed throughout the length of the route. The first of these, begun October 1914, near the village of Malta, Illinois, was a cement concrete pavement, and many of the others were of similar high types suitable for heavy traffic.
The Lincoln Highway inspired a tremendous amount of argument both for and against long-distance roads. The rural interests generally were against them, claiming that the Nation would be drained of funds to build a few “peacock alleys” for the enjoyment of wealthy tourists. Urban spokesmen said the country had been too long in bondage to the medieval English concept that roads were the responsibility of the smallest and weakest units of government, namely, the road districts, townships, and counties, and that the Federal Government should assume responsibility for “national routes.”
Among the most active of the national roads advocates was the National Highways Association, an organization its enemies claimed was dominated by the road machinery, road materials, and portland cement interests. This Association published a map showing a recommended 50,000-mile system of national roads extending from coast to coast and from Canada to the Gulf, which it claimed should be the responsibility of the Federal Government to build and maintain.[N 1][2] Such a system, proponents claimed,
- ↑ This idea was 30 years ahead of its time and was not realized until the Interstate System was authorized in 1944.
