Roads, more than rail lines or the airways, are at the heart of travel. I am going to devote a few posts to historic roads, what we can learn from them and why we should save them. This is the sixth post in an eight-part series.
With this post we narrow our focus and spotlight America’s first transcontinental highway, an idea that was clearly visionary in 1912 when the thought first began to form in the mind of an extraordinary Hoosier, Carl Fisher.
Try to understand what life was like in 1912. We were still two years away from the first of two great wars that would reshape life as the world knew it.
The automobile was certainly not a fixture of American life yet—far from it. And roads? Well, they were a story unto themselves. Even the term “road” seemed too formal for the muddy routes that smeared the landscape.
Even though by 1912 there were about 2.5 million miles of “roads” throughout the United States, most of them didn’t live up to their name. They were bumpy trails bone dry in good weather and a sea of mud when it rained. And in winter? Well, use your imagination.
Only those around larger cities were in decent condition. Some were even paved. But less than ten percent of rural roads had earned the dubious rank of “improved,” which meant their surfaces were covered with brick, gravel, shells or oil.
Roads were an on-again, off-again diversion of local cities and towns that had no real plan. Most roads didn’t go much of anywhere. They merely webbed out from the epicenter of populated areas, often dribbling away into nothing, short of any real destination.
If you really wanted to get somewhere in 1912, you depended on the trains. Besides, many dismissed roads as a fancy add-on for the benefit of rich folks and their showy automobiles. They probably didn’t command a dominant share of time or attention from Mr. and Mrs. Everyday America.
Life was far different then. From our perspective 97 years down the road, so to speak, it’s hard to imagine being stuck in axle-deep mud or streets bumpy enough to send flying anything that wasn’t lashed down. But bad roads weren’t the only mark of a scarcely imaginable lifestyle when Woodrow Wilson was president.
Staples like coffee sold for six cents a pound. Milk was one cent a quart. A barrel of potatoes would set you back $1.75, and eggs were 10 cents a dozen.
You could buy sugar for about a cent a pound and rounding out your menu with tomatoes, corn, cheese and onions came to about three cents a can or pound, whichever was relevant.
Ordinary citizens in 1912 probably spent most of their time on the stuff of everyday life just as we do today. Among the popular songs were “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee,” “When the Midnight Choo Choo Leaves for Alabam,” “That Old Gal of Mine” and “The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.”
Or they thought about the news of the day—a horror like the sinking of the Titanic in the middle of April and the loss of 1,513 lives, for example. Or there was Jim Thorpe’s domination of the Olympic Games in Stockholm or the opening of Tiger Stadium.
While it wasn’t big news, in Indiana a young pioneer with notoriously bad eyesight began to dream about a highway stretching from coast to coast. More about the man and his dream in our next post.
Previous: Drive through history one road at a time
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