Getting Out of the Mud: The Alabama Good Roads Movement and Highway Administration, 1898-1928

by Martin T. Olliff, David O. Whitten (Foreword by)

Overview

Recounts the history of the Good Roads Movement that arose in progressive-era Alabama, how it used the power of the state to achieve its objectives of improving market roads for farmers and highways for automobiles

Getting Out of the Mud: The Alabama Good Roads Movement and Highway Administration, 1898–1928 explores the history of the Good Roads Movement and investigates the nature of early twentieth-century progressivism in the state. Martin T. Olliff reveals how middle-class reformers secured political, economic, and social power not only by fighting against corporate domination and labor recalcitrance but also by proposing alternative projects like road improvement and identifying the interests of the rising middle class as being the most important to public interest.
 
With the development of national markets in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans began to regard the nation as a whole, rather than their state or region, as the most important political entity. Many Alabamians wished to travel beyond their local communities in all seasons without getting stuck in the mud of rudimentary rutted dirt roads. The onset of the automobile age bolstered the need for roadmaking, alerting both automobilists and good roads advocates to the possibility of a new transportation infrastructure. The Good Roads Movement began promoting farm-to-market roads, then highways that linked cities, then those that connected states. Federal matching funds for road construction after 1916 led state and federal governments to supplant the Good Roads Movement, building and administering the highway system that emerged by the late 1920s.
 
Olliff’s study of how Alabamians dealt with strained resources and overcame serious political obstacles in order to construct a road system that would accommodate economic growth in the twentieth century may offer clues to the resurrection of a similar strategy in our modern era. Many problems are unchanged over the hundred years between crises: Alabamians demand good roads and a government that has the capacity to build and maintain such an infrastructure while, at the same time, citizens are voting into office men and women who promise lower taxes and smaller government.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780817391386
Publisher:	University of Alabama Press
Publication date:	07/18/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	232
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Martin T. Olliff is a professor of history and the director of the Wiregrass Archives at Troy University Dothan Campus. He is also the editor of The Great War in the Heart of Dixie: Alabama in World War I and an editorial board member of both The Alabama Review: A Quarterly Journal of Alabama History and Provenance: Journal of the Society of Georgia Archivists.

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CHAPTER 1

When Roads Were Bad

Some scholars who study the impact automobiles had on twentieth century road making engage in a "chicken-or-egg" argument that focuses on the technologies of road and car rather than on the social, political, and economic systems that made car culture possible and desirable. Automobiles and road making reinforced each other and alerted both automobilists and good roads advocates to the possibility of a new transportation infrastructure. Reasons other than the emergence of automobiles converged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to encourage Americans to travel beyond their local precincts year-round without getting stuck in the mud. While Americans came to consider the nation rather than the state or region to be the most important political entity, a belief anchored in the late-nineteenth-century development of national markets, the railroads that allowed Americans to travel throughout the nation became problematic. Populists railed against what they thought of as predatory practices, J. P. Morgan bought many railroads in the 1890s to save the industry from chaos, and "respectable" people were disgruntled at having to bend to the railroads' schedule and mix with (to them) distasteful company.

When Gilded Age and Progressive Era Alabamians looked at their local market roads and searched vainly for highways, they saw almost a century of neglect, a quarter-century of parsimony, and the pernicious effects of the localism that had been a political mainstay since statehood. Alabama's roads in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries bound neither communities, nor states, nor the nation together. "System" and "networking" were foreign concepts. Alabama was not alone in this; until the 1890s no state funded or demanded statewide networks of roads and highways. In nineteenth-century Alabama, long-distance travel and freight haulage required river transport until the Civil War, then railroads afterward. Alabama experienced a few years of private attempts to build long-distance roads, but those failed as the rail system improved. Private roads were expensive to build and maintain, and recouping investments by running toll gates was so ineffective that almost all investors left the field. Early in its history, Alabama had made building and maintaining public roads the responsibility of county governments, which were neither interested in nor able to construct long-distance highways across county lines. Because county-built roads existed almost exclusively to allow farmers to take their crops to market towns, river ports, or railheads, they became known as "farm-to-market roads" or simply "market roads."

Except for a brief flurry of support for railroads, Alabama's government played almost no role in coordinating long- and short-distance transportation. The federal government, however, built long-distance military and postal highways that the public could use, dredged harbors and removed river hazards to promote riverboat and shipping operations, and provided lucrative land grants in support of railroads.

Such support enabled railroads to become the leading edge of transportation throughout the United States in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, they were so capital intensive that investors needed state financial support as well as private money and federal land grants to build and operate them. This was a problem in antebellum Alabama, where citizens were ambivalent about providing public funds to private transportation projects. This uncertainty was in part ideological — many believed their taxes should not go to private enterprises — and in part driven by the state banking system's collapse in the 1840s. Ideology and hard experience led Alabamians to prohibit state investment in either private enterprises or infrastructural improvements in all but one of their constitutions after 1819, which prevented state action on roadbuilding. Not that there was much popular outcry for state intervention in roadbuilding. Most Alabamians were farmers who were less concerned with transportation infrastructure than with preventing concentrations of wealth and power. In fact, most farmers thought the rudimentary road system worked just fine. They had little reason to use riverboats or railroads to haul crops, for they usually sold their crops to local merchants who took charge of transporting them to larger markets. Farmers rarely used local roads except after harvest, and since their principal crop was nonperishable cotton, they cared little that poor roads cost them extra time to haul multiple small loads to market towns.

Consequently, Alabama's roads, like those in most other states, were bad. Really bad. They followed the natural contours of the land and easements granted by local landowners, so grades often were excessive and routes meandered. County residents paid their road taxes through physical labor on their neighborhood lanes, a practice called "statute labor." They pulled stumps from the roadbed and allowed wagons to pack the earth. Even on better roads, rural residents maintained them by lowering the high spots and raising the low spots once per year. Such practices left rural roads prone to deep ruts and erosion. Without adequate cantilevering and drainage, low spots became bogs of "gumbo" in the wet season. Sandy spots mired wagons to their axles and sunbaked dirt surfaces became clouds of choking dust in the dry season.

Roadways, even abysmal ones, were part of the slow, awkward, difficult, dangerous, and haphazard transportation system that had made little progress before the railroad. Alabama was fortunate in the era of river travel, for most of its economically attractive areas had long navigable stretches that emptied into Mobile Bay, Apalachicola Bay, or the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Even steamboat travel was slow, for rivers meandered. Travel where rivers did not go was even more difficult. Roads began as Native American trails, horse paths, or wagon tracks and for the most part were unimproved. Some mail- and passenger-coach entrepreneurs devised their own routes, and early white settlers beat down wagon roads into the newly opened lands of the Old Southwest of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. But these were inadequate for the federal government, which used its superior financial and engineering resources to build post roads and military roads to establish suzerainty and foster American settlement. The most important of these in Alabama was the so-called Federal Road, begun as a post road in 1806 that connected Milledgeville, Georgia, with Fort Stoddert north of Mobile, Alabama, a distance of more than three hundred miles. It traversed the low-lying area south of the fall line, over too many streams and rivers crossed by too many "Indian bridges" of fallen trees that were often too rotten to sustain traffic. The road passed over sandy loam that wagon wheels destroyed and rains eroded into dangerous gullies. At one spot in present-day Russell County, Alabama, the Federal Road was so worn after a few years that traffic traveled six feet or more below the original grade.

Accounts by travelers along this road inspired the authors Of The Federal Road through Georgia, The Creek Nation, and Alabama to title one of their chapters "Almost Impassible." Another author, Jeffrey Benton, entitled his compendium of travelers' accounts of the Federal Road in Alabama The Very Worst Road. In one of Benton's stories, Bernard, Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, recounted his January 1826 carriage ride west from Georgia to Montgomery. "In a narrow place we upset," he recalled. "The carriage fell slowly toward my side, I took the right moment, sprung from the box on which I sat, and fell upon my feet. This was the eighth time I have been overturned, and never did I escape so cheap as on this occasion." Almost a decade later, the coach mates of Englishwoman and member of Parliament Harriet Martineau had to shift from side to side in their coach to keep it from tumbling over. George William Featherstonhaugh planned to catch the mail coach from Montgomery to Columbus, but because the winter rains delayed mail coach service until the spring, he hired a private coach at exorbitant cost. He found the roads "so frightfully cut up as to render it impossible to sit in the vehicle" and walked whenever he could find dry road. The driver begged Featherstonhaugh to ride, but he obviously was too annoyed or frightened to do so.

It was the finicky Englishman Captain Thomas Hamilton whose experience in 1831 gave Benton's book its title. "I pronounce that along which our roads lay on the present occasion, to be positively, comparatively, and superlatively, the very worst I have ever travelled," Hamilton complained. The conditions warranted his ire, "The ruts were axle-deep, and huge crevices occasionally occurred, in which, but for great strategy on the part of the coachman, the vehicle must have been engulfed. ... Stumps of trees often ... brought the whole machine to a standstill; trees which had been blown over by the wind sometimes lay directly across the road, and it was with difficulty that the united exertions of the passengers succeeded in removing them."

It is easy to understand why the Federal Road was poorly maintained. It was far from the center of commerce and government and had been built to move soldiers and the mail westward between the Alabama and Georgia Rivers that flowed southward. The government allowed commercial and personal traffic to use the road but had not accounted for that in designing or financing the road, and such traffic wore it down. Federal policy was to ignore the road until frontier threats forced improvements to facilitate troop movement. If the federal government, with its superior fiscal and engineering resources, could not produce and maintain a passable roadway, what hope was there for states and counties to do better?

They could not, and throughout the nineteenth century they did not. Accounts from twentieth-century travelers bear witness that Alabama roads were almost as bad as they had been a century earlier. May Jordan's 1912–1913 diary testifies to the problems of rural roads just north of Mobile in Washington County, which in those years was a wilderness of fewer than fourteen people per square mile. At age twenty-three, Jordan accompanied her father on wagon trips to buy furs from hunters. Writing with relentless joy and humor, she described encounters with wild animals — including a fight with a mountain lion on a "night ... as dark as a stack of black cats" — the people they met, her daily activities, and the pitiful roads. On February 27, 1913, she and her father traveled on a good road except for a single bog, but she notes on March 2 that they "nearly tore our wagon up on this trip. We traveled 40 miles out of the way to get around creeks and mud." The detour failed to prevent trouble, as they "had to jump in the creek and pry our wagon off of the stumps." A week later, their one-mule wagon could not make it over a hill because of the steep grade and muddy road condition. Later the wagon sank into a bog so badly that they "fixed a place so our faithful mule could hold herself from sinking and then she pulled us out" as May and Papa Jordan pried the wagon loose. She also reported that the wagon wheels sank so deeply that the axel dragged the road center and their mule broke its reins multiple times.

Bad roads were not limited to just the highly rural counties of western Alabama. Even in the more populous center of the state, good roads advocates described similar conditions in those same years. The Birmingham Ledger and the Alabama Good Roads Association sponsored multiple long-distance automobile tours in 1911 and 1912 to popularize the idea of linking county roads into intrastate highways. Jefferson County enjoyed many miles of well-made, hard-surface roads, but neighboring counties lagged. On the August 1911 tour, one of the Ledger's cars rolled twenty feet when the freshly worked mountain road crumbled beneath it. A week later, a four-man pathfinding team from the Pensacola Journal passed through Alabama on its way to Chicago. Journal editor Frank Mayes reported the roads across the mountain between Pelham and Acton as the second worst of the 1,100-mile trip. He wrote of their nighttime traverse,

It was a long, slow, and to a man the first time over it, a perilous pull. Only half was pull, however, for the other half was down hill, and it was down some, too. ... A part of the time the searchlights, shining from the machine at an angle of 45 degrees, played up among the tree tops. ... Another minute and the same lights at the same degree would cast their rays down into gulches and chasms that looked like Dante's depths as we coasted and slid down the mountain side with the power cut off and both brakes on. At other times, the turns in the road were so abrupt and acute that the lights, shining straight ahead of the machine, left the roadway itself in darkness and the turns had to be felt out at the slowest possible speed.

The worst roads were those near Blount Springs, the same stretch that the Ledger scouts had tumbled down just a week earlier. Mayes wrote,

The pike out of Birmingham was good, but after leaving that the roads were of all kinds — sandy in some places, rough in others, soft, slippery, and steep in others, and extremely dangerous at some points. In getting over Sand Mountain and down to Blount Springs we encountered the worst running of the trip. The mountain road to Warrior was very good although the climb was a hard one. But from Warrior until you get to Blount Springs, words fail me. They failed the doctor [driver Mallory Kennedy, MD]. Ordinarily when driving he talks a great deal — sometimes with his tongue, but when the noise gets too great he makes signs with his hands. On this trip, he did no talking with his hands and he neglected us absolutely. All the talking he did was to the road. ... We rounded the side of the mountain on a narrow ledge that afforded less than 12 inches between the outer track and a 50-foot precipice below. If it had rained at this time, a skid would have been practically inevitable, but the Lord was good to us that day and the road had almost dried when we reached it.

Alabama was not alone in the retrograde quality of its roads. Another 1911 pathfinding party traveling from Pensacola through Memphis to Los Angeles fared miserably. The frustrated tour leader wrote of the almost impassable Mississippi roads, "in Iuka ... [we] ran into a mud hole right in the center of the town and had to jack up and cordaroy [sic] out of it. By this you can imagine the condition of the cow trails that answer for roads in the country. One day in Mississippi only twenty-nine miles were made and The [Pensacola] News party was forced to bridge mud hole after mud hole." Tennessee offered little relief, though the report noted that citizens there had drained enough of the swamps to make the roads into Memphis "probably passable." Problems did not abate, and these pathfinders diverted away from Little Rock toward St. Louis and Kansas City.

To the east, Georgia faced the same plague. In 1908 an Emory College professor described roads that "in winter dissolved into a sea of mud and slush ... or [were] baked by the sun in summer." With little foundation and only occasional surface treatment, roads "retain[ed] every rut or hole cut by heavy wheels," but worse, and more common in the hot South, "these same roadways [were] reduced to powder ... the whole atmosphere beclouded ... the foliage ... on either side of the trackway so covered with dust as to have lost appearance of life." What of the travelers? They breathed "with great discomfort the dust which they themselves have made, and from which — no matter what their pace — there can be no escape."

Floridians suffered, too. On their first day's trek into Alabama, Frank Mayes's 1911 Pensacola Journal scouts put chains on their tires to navigate rain-muddied roads. An unchained escort car slid into a ditch and had to be pulled to safety. Seven years later, Ed Leigh McMillan, his wife, Iva Lee, and their toddler son, Thomas, drove in an open automobile from Brewton, Alabama, to Blountstown, Florida, over roads that were "very sandy or boggy and sometimes almost impassible." Mrs. McMillan noted another problem: the lack of clear signage or directions. "We had to use an AAA [American Automobile Association] Road Book as a guide, setting our speedometer at certain land marks, such as town sites, fence corners, etc.; traveling so many miles to a certain point then setting our speedometer again." She and her husband took turns driving and reading the guide to navigate.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Contents Foreword Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction 1. When Roads Were Bad 2. Alabamians Become Wide-Awake to Good Roads 3. State Highways Take the Lead 4. Peering beyond the State’s Boundaries: Named Trails and Interstate Highways 5. Laying the Foundation for a Modern Highway System 6. Alabama Administers Its Highway Program Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

Editorial Reviews

In this deeply researched and engagingly written book, Troy University-Dothan historian Martin T. Olliff examines the myriad obstacles encountered by good roads advocates as they sought, in his words, to pull Alabamians out of the mud.”
—Alabama Review

“Olliff weaves a unique combination of history, sociology, political science, and economics to create a three-dimensional fabric.”
—David O. Whitten, author of Andrew Durnford: A Black Sugar Planter in the Antebellum South and coauthor of The Birth of Big Business in the United States, 1860-1914: Commercial, Extractive, and Industrial Enterprise


“ . . . Getting Out of the Mud is an important case study that enhances our understanding of progressive reform in the South.”
—American Historical Review

“Getting Out of the Mud is an interesting and insightful study of the path Alabamians took to modern highway construction and management.”
—Matthew Downs, author of Transforming the South: Federal Development in the Tennessee Valley, 1915-1960

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