THE OHIO ROAD EXPERIMENT 1913-1916
by WAYNE E. FULLER
In December 1914, the Signal, a Zanesville, Ohio, newspaper, carried a story captioned, "Jacob Johnson of the West Pike Died Thursday." The story was interesting, not because Jacob Johnson was renowned, but be- cause he was, at the time of his death, eighty-seven years old and had lived his entire life west of Zanesville near the famous highway which the Ameri- can people knew as the old National Road, but which the people of Zanes- ville called the West Pike. Born in 1827, more than a year before Andrew Jackson became president, Johnson had lived to see the traffic along the old road west of Zanesville pass from flood stage to a trickle. More than that, his life had spanned a complete cycle in the relationship of the road to the national government.1 What the people of Zanesville called the West Pike was a fifty-two mile link in the National Road, which ran from Cumberland, Maryland, to Illi- nois. Constructed by the national government between 1829 and 1835,
NOTES ARE ON PAGES 70-71 |
14 OHIO HISTORY
the West Pike passed through Muskingum,
Licking, and Franklin counties,
and reached from Zanesville to Columbus;
and if it was not built as elab-
orately as a Roman road, still it was
like the rest of the National Road, the
best built road in the nation.
Altogether it was eighty feet wide, with a
central thirty foot macadamized section
which had been graded and filled
to a depth of almost one foot with three
strata of crushed stone, or "pre-
pared metal," as it was called.
Furthermore, the low places along the way
and the rivers and streams that crossed
the road had been either provided
with culverts or bridged with sturdy
stone bridges that were models
of masonry in their day.2
Once, in the days of Presidents Jackson
and Martin Van Buren, the
West Pike had been a part of the
nation's principal artery connecting
East and West. In those days a great
chain of humanity moved along its
graveled surface, tarried overnight at
the inns and wagon-stations along
the way, and eventually made its way
beyond Zanesville and Columbus as
it moved on to the ever-beckoning West.
Congressmen, senators, even
presidents, mingled with the westering
pioneers as they made their way
to and from the nation's capital. And
over this road, too, in overburdened
stagecoaches, passed the United States
mail, bringing the news of the day
to a great many isolated Americans for
whom it was the only means of
communication with the world east of the
Appalachian Mountains.3
The West Pike had been built by the
national government, it was true,
but the government did not long maintain
it. Indeed, as early as 1831, be-
fore the road was completely built, the
state government of Ohio agreed
to maintain the entire National Road
through Ohio and established a toll
system for that purpose. Eventually,
however, this system too broke down,
and in the years after the Civil War,
the upkeep of the road was left to
the counties, each to care for that
portion of the road within its boundaries.4
By this time, the heyday of the National
Road had passed. Better
methods of transportation west had been
found than the old road with all
its slowness and discomforts could provide.
Even before the Civil War,
men had become interested in other forms
of transportation, first in canals,
and then in railroads; and after the
Civil War, the building of railroads
throughout the Midwest so diminished the
traffic on the road that by 1900
it was scarcely more than another of the
country's poor farm-to-market
country roads.
But even then a new era was opening for
the National Road, and more
particularly for the West Pike. For a
good-roads campaign was under way
in the early 1900's, and congressmen and
their constituents had begun to
talk grandly about securing help from
the national government to build
and maintain their roads.
The idea was net new. In fact,
congressmen and presidents had dis-
cussed it thoroughly at the time the old
National Road was being built,
only to come at last to the conclusion
that for the national government to
build and maintain roads in the states
was unconstitutional. This belief had
somehow become deeply implanted in the
public mind and was not the least
of the reasons for the government's turning over to the states the upkeep of the one road it had built. But times had changed. With the manufacture of each new automobile and the development of rural free delivery of mail --a system which could not operate efficiently without decent country roads--good roads became an absolute necessity. Besides, the coming of rural free delivery neatly dispatched the old argument that national aid for roads was unconstitutional. For every road over which the rural mail- man carried the mail was obviously a post road, and congress, so it was argued, assuredly had the right to help in the building and maintenance of post roads.5 And so, with the constitutional argument gone and farmers and auto- mobile enthusiasts writing letters to their friends in Washington, congress- men began introducing good-roads bills in congress, and in the first decade of the new century there seemed to be almost as many road-building schemes as there were congressmen. Finally, in 1912, in order to stall for time, congress appropriated $500,000 to be used in helping states and counties build experimental roads, stipulating two conditions: first, that the national government supervise the road construction, and second, that each state or county participating in the experiment contribute two dollars for every one given by the national government. So began the novel dollar- matching scheme that has played so great a role in the nation's develop- ment in this century.6 At first, during the remainder of President Taft's administration, plans were made to distribute $10,000 of the $500,000 appropriation to each state interested in the experiment. Before this plan could materialize, however, Woodrow Wilson became president, and his administration devised a |
16 OHIO HISTORY
scheme to build a limited number of
roads located in areas of the nation
where climatic and topographic
conditions varied extensively from one
another. In this way, sums larger than
$10,000 of government money might
be spent on each experimental road and a
variety of road materials might
be tested under different kinds of
weather and soil conditions.7
Among the sites chosen for the
experiment was the West Pike. Perhaps
the old road was chosen partly for
sentimental reasons; in any case, it
seemed particularly fitting that here,
where once the government had built
a road, it should undertake to rebuild
it some eighty years later. Accord-
ingly, a contract was drawn in which it
was agreed that the national
government would contribute $120,000 to
the rebuilding of the West Pike
from Zanesville to the South Fork of the
Licking River near the town of
Hebron, a distance of almost twenty-four
miles. This sum was to be matched
by $100,000 from Muskingum County and
$140,000 from Licking County.
In addition, the state of Ohio agreed to
give $80,000 toward the work and
also to continue, at its own expense, the
building of the road through
the remaining part of Licking County to
the east line of Franklin County,
where it would connect with a portion of
the old road that had already been
rebuilt by the people of Franklin
County.8
By the spring of 1914, Muskingum and
Licking counties had bonded
themselves to raise the needed money and
were ready to sign the final con-
tract with the secretary of agriculture,
when opposition to the project
arose from the brick manufacturers in
Zanesville.9
The trouble began when it was discovered
that the national government
had specified that the West Pike was to
be rebuilt with cement instead of
brick. As it happened, over a thousand
men were employed in the Zanes-
ville brick factories, and the
revelation of the government's decision to use
cement on the road threw the Zanesville
Chamber of Commerce into a
tizzy. General R. B. Brown, secretary of
the chamber of commerce, de-
clared that "the decision was an
outrage to Zanesville and particularly
Zanesville business interests," and
urged the townspeople to fight the great
injustice. "If there is an ounce of
red blood in our bodies," said he, "we
will protest against this to the bitter
end."10
The reason for the decision to use
cement was, of course, a matter of
dollars and cents. The government was
prepared to support the rebuilding
of the West Pike at a cost up to, but
not exceeding, $16,000 per mile. Cement
could be used for that figure; brick
could not. But this explanation was not
satisfactory to the Zanesville business
interests. R. C. Burton, secretary
and treasurer of the Townshend Brick and
Contracting Company, was
certain the proposal to use cement
instead of brick was a conspiracy be-
tween the government and cement
manufacturers. Claiming that "the
specifications requiring the adoption of
concrete were prepared months
ago at the instigation of the concrete
manufacturers," and "that the brick
manufacturers 'got it in the
neck,'" he prophesied that a delegation of
brick builders from all over the country
would go to Washington to make
an investigation. Moreover, if worse
came to worst, he said, and "there is
THE OHIO ROAD EXPERIMENT 17
to be used concrete or nothing, it will
be nothing, as the brick manufac-
turers will enjoin the work if concrete
is to be used."11
For a time, it appeared the brick
builders would make good their
threat to stop the work. They filed a
strong protest with Governor James
M. Cox and State Highway Commissioner
James R. Marker, and these two
in turn, with the support of the
district's congressman, George White, tried
to get the post office department, one
of the government agencies in charge
of the experiment, to agree to the
demands for brick. But all in vain. In-
deed, it seemed for a moment that the
post office department might cancel
the project entirely and move the Ohio
appropriation elsewhere. Rumors
of this helped induce those who most
wanted the road to raise some nine
petitions urging that the road be build
with concrete if it could not be
built with brick. After this the
opposition to the building of the new road
began to melt, although as late as April
a delegation from the Zanesville
Chamber of Commerce was in Washington
protesting against the use of
cement on the road.12
In the meantime, on March 23, 1914,
while the controversy was still
raging, the final agreement between the
national government, the state of
Ohio, and Muskingum and Licking counties
was reached regarding the im-
provement of the West Pike. The next
month the contract for building the
road was let to the H. E. Culbertson
Company of Cleveland for $436,017.00,
and finally, on May 11, the Signal noted
that the headquarters of the Cul-
bertson Company were being established
near the Talley icehouse and that
some fifty road workers had been brought
to the city and moved to a camp
on the West Pike. Work on the road was
expected to begin within the
week.13
The government's road engineers,
surveyors, and economic statisticians
who swept into Zanesville to plan the
rebuilding of the road and collect
statistical data on the area, found the
West Pike considerably changed from
the way it was in the pre-Civil War days
when the great wagon trains and
stagecoaches had rolled across its macadam
back. The countryside along
the way, with its fields of corn and
wheat and pastures dotted with grazing
sheep and cattle were much the same as
they had been, of course, as were
the rolling hills that ranged from an
elevation of 725 to 1125 feet. Even the
little villages through which the road
passed were not much different in
point of population from what they had
been in the earlier days. Mt.
Sterling, Gratiot, Brownsville, and
Jacksontown each had something more
than two hundred inhabitants in 1913,
while Linnville and Coaltown
claimed seventy-five apiece and
Amsterdam one hundred.14
It was in the road itself, showing all
the ravages of time and neglect,
that the changes were most marked. Here
and there the original surfacing
on the West Pike had virtually
disappeared. Chuck-holes and ruts marred
its appearance, water stood in puddles
in its low places, and in one spot
at least, a small stream had washed away
a part of the road. Indicative
of the general status of road maintenance
of the period was a sign
marking the place where a neglected
county road joined the West Pike.
ANY PERSONS TRAVELING 'THIS ROAD, it read, DO SO AT THEIR OWN RISK.15 Nor was the old road eighty feet wide as it once had been. In the course of years, farmers along the way had moved their fences and even their barns onto the right-of-way, narrowing the road in some cases to the very edge of the macadam. Moreover, the marks of the twentieth century were all about. Segments of six different rural mail routes, over which the mail was carried every day except Sunday directly to the farmers, covered all of the twenty-four mile strip to be rebuilt, and some 160 rural mailboxes, unheard of in the old days, stood at farm gates along the road. Remarkable, too, was the fact that when the West Pike had been built, Alexander Gra- ham Bell's famous invention was still more than forty years in the future. Now telephone poles and wires lined both sides of the road.16 Changed as the West Pike was in 1914, the old stage-driver of the 1840's, revisiting the scenes of his triumphs in that year, could still have seen many of the old landmarks. Stone bridges, like the one just outside the Zanesville city limits, over which his stagecoach would have passed many a time, were still standing firm as the day they were built. Familiar too would have been the limestone milestones at the edge of the road. In front of the Townshend school, for example, was one such stone, somewhat askew, to be sure, but still legible, which read: ZANESVILLE 3 MILES, COLUMBUS 50 1/2 MILES, WHEELING 77 MILES, CUMBERLAND 207 MILES. True, the old stage-driver would have had to go to the old records to discover that C. Niswanger, James Hampson, and D. Scott, were the names written on the north wall of the old bridge located nearly six miles west of Zanesville. But the date of the marker, 1830, and the inscription, THE POLICY OF THE NATION, RECIPROCITY AT HOME AND ABROAD, were still plain enough for him to have made out without his glasses.l7 |
THE OHIO ROAD EXPERIMENT 19
And surely most familiar of all to the
old stage-driver had he visited the
West Pike in 1914, would have been the
five-mile tavern some three miles
west of Zanesville. Here was one of the
finest taverns to be found along
the entire length of the National Road.
Made for the most part of dressed
limestone, the larger portion of it had
been built in 1832 and the smaller
in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War.
The accumulation of years, a small
picket fence, the telephone lines
running past the door, and the growth of
trees around it, had somewhat changed
its outward appearance, but any
stagecoach driver who had stayed there
over night would have been un-
likely to mistake this old tavern for
another. Its huge chimneys and mas-
sive, rugged appearance were features
not easily forgotten.18
Neither the government's engineers nor
those of the Culbertson Com-
pany, however, had much time to
contemplate the old landmarks along the
road. Unlike the contract "for
clearing and grubbing" given the contractors
who built the road in the 1830's, the
Culbertson contract called for grading,
paving, and building drainage structures,
and this was a gigantic under-
taking, especially since the making of
cement roads was still in the experi-
mental stage. Indeed, until the work
began on the West Pike, there was only
a handful of cement roads in the nation.
In 1912, a demonstration on the
building of cement roads, which the
Culbertson engineers may have ob-
served, was given in Wayne County,
Michigan, but even here paving had
apparently not reached the proportions
contemplated on the West Pike.19
The first thing that had to be done on
the West Pike was to order the
farmers and telephone companies who had
encroached on the road's right-
of-way, to move their telephone lines,
fences, and even barns back from the
road to give the contractor the needed
clearance. The second problem was
to find some way to move sand and cement
and other materials to places
along the road where they were needed.
The Culbertson Company solved
this by building a narrow-gauge railroad
along the road's right-of-way to
haul the needed materials. The railroad
would have been expensive under
any circumstances, but it was the more
so in this case because the steep
grade between Linnville and Gratiot
necessitated the use of special steam
engines.20
In spite of these difficulties, grading
from both the Hebron and Zanes-
ville ends of the road and construction
of the Culbertson narrow-gauge rail-
road began on May 14, 1914. On June 9,
the building and repair of bridges
and culverts, many of them still in
wonderful condition after eighty some
years, was started. Finally, on June 17,
concreting began with mixer one
at the Zanesville station. One week
later, mixer two at the National Road
station near Hebron went into operation,
and on July 22, mixer three, sta-
tioned some distance east of mixer two,
was set to move west with the ex-
pectation of meeting mixer two in
time.21
Of all the work done on the West Pike,
the most experimental, important,
and demanding was the concreting. The
huge Austin mixers that could lay
down two miles of concrete in a month,
ate up a gargantuan amount of sand
and Portland cement, all of which, of
course, had to be hauled to the paving
20 OHIO HISTORY
site over the Culbertson railroad.
Moreover, great care had to be taken
not only to screen the gravel carefully
but also to get the correct mixture
of sand and cement, and at least once
during the project the bureau of
public roads had to warn the government
people on the job that the cement
samples sent from the Ohio road did not
measure up to the bureau's stand-
ards. Water, too, was a problem and at
one point had to be pumped from
Timber Run near the Talley ice plant to
the job five miles away. But this
was not entirely satisfactory. Because
of a dry summer, Timber Run began
to go dry in August, and new sources of
water had to be found farther out
on the road.22
Nevertheless, once the paving began it
proceeded smoothly and efficiently.
Work was conducted from numbered
stations, beginning at station 0-00 at
Zanesville and station 683-70 near the
National Road station, and the ce-
ment was laid in sections sixteen feet
wide and varying in some instances
as much as thirty to ninety feet in
length. After the cement was poured and
smoothed, it was covered with a canvas,
which was kept wet for about four
days. Then the canvas was removed and
loose dirt thrown over the cement.
Like the canvas, the dirt was kept wet
for as long as two weeks; finally, it
too was removed, to leave, as a reporter
from the Signal wrote, "one of the
smoothest pieces of roadway in
Ohio."23
So well was the work progressing, in
spite of shortages and dry weather,
that on Wednesday, August 26, 1914, some
640 feet of concrete were laid,
and predictions were made that the
entire road of nearly twenty-four miles
would be paved by the middle of November.
As it turned out, this prediction
was overly optimistic. The work had been
somewhat slowed by the dry
weather, it was true, but the scarcity
of gravel proved to be the principal
problem. Partly for experimental
purposes the Culbertson Company was
using ordinary gravel and crushed stone
on the project. Both of these were
apparently somewhat costly to obtain in
the immediate vicinity, and in
August, Culbertson Company officials
began to suggest the impossibility of
securing enough gravel and crushed stone
to complete the job in November.
There was some indication that the
company had not really tried very hard
to obtain the necessary materials in the
nearby area, and intended to delay
the project until the next year in order
to use the winter months to bring
cheaper gravel in from Dresden, some
twenty miles away.24
Whatever the reason, the Culbertson
Company did stop construction in
November 1914. Mixer three had completed
its assignment by October 27,
but mixers one and two shut down
November 14, still far short of their
goals. The work on the drainage
structures, also uncompleted, came to a
halt in Licking County November 13, and
in Muskingum County Novem-
ber 16. Only the grading in Licking
County continued until January 28,
1915.25
Although the concreting had been rigidly
inspected by government in-
spectors, a fact which had caused the
Culbertson Company much concern,
certain flaws which were to appear in
all cement roads began to show up in
the West Pike in the fall and winter of
1914-15. About a month after the
THE OHIO ROAD EXPERIMENT 21
first sections had been scraped free of
dirt, Charles H. Moorefield, the gov-
ernment's engineer in charge of the
work, noticed that the pavement had
begun to spall, or flake off, at the
joints between the sections. Then during
the winter months, probably because of
the contraction of the cement, long-
itudinal cracks appeared.26
It was then generally believed that some
bituminous product could be
used to prevent spalling and to fill in
the cracks, but the building of cement
roads was so new, no one preparation to
correct these problems had been
decided upon. Upon Moorefield's request
for a recommendation, the bureau
of public roads replied that he might
use a light mixture of water, gasoline,
and tar, which had been used on the
government's road experiment at
Chevy Chase, Maryland; or he might
experiment with other preparations,
Tarvia A, Standard Macadam Binder A, or
Trinidad Liquid Asphalt, all of
which, the bureau reminded him, would
have to be heated before using.
Apparently, however, Moorefield came to
the conclusion that no such exotic
preparations were needed, for in the
spring of the year, upon discovering
the longitudinal cracks, he wrote the
bureau recommending that plain tar
be used to correct the damage.27
In spite of the cracks, however, and
overlooking the dismay of the
engineer from the Ohio State Highway
Commission concerning them, the
government inspectors believed that, in
general, the road had weathered
well, and as spring returned, they and
the Culbertson Company prepared
to recommence construction on the West
Pike. Work was delayed in Mus-
kingum County, but grading began in
Licking County on March 15, 1915,
and by the middle of April the company's
stone crushing apparatus there
was turning out eighty yards of crushed
stone a day. On May 5, concreting
began with mixer two, and on May 17,
work began again on the drainage
structures in the county.28
Just as the work on the road was being
renewed, however, a new crisis
threatened to disrupt the project once
more. In November 1914 state elec-
tions had been held, and Governor James
M. Cox had been defeated by Re-
publican Frank B. Willis. Soon after entering
office, the Republican at-
torney general had made a ruling that
the state government could pursue
no road project for which it did not
have the funds in hand, and word leaked
out that because there was no money left
in the treasury for the purpose,
the state government was not going to
complete the West Pike construction
from the South Fork of the Licking River
to the east line of Franklin
County as it had promised to do in the
contract made with the postmaster
general and the secretary of agriculture.29
The prospect of such a possibility
greatly excited and angered the board
of commissioners of Licking County. The
county had, the commissioners
said, incurred an indebtedness of
$140,000 on the assumption that the state
government would complete the road
through the county, and they threat-
ened to withhold the rest of the money
owing the national government
project unless the state government
agreed to fulfill its obligations. More-
over, they wrote Congressman William A.
Ashbrook, a native of Licking
County, asking him to do what he could to force the state government to complete the road, and Ashbrook in turn took the matter up with David F. Houston, the secretary of agriculture. "I wish you would wire the State Highway Department," he wrote, "that it must comply with this agree- ment with the Government and with the Commissioners of Licking County as well. I also urge you under no conditions to enter into any agreement changing the terms and stipulations of the contract which you entered into in this matter."30 Houston turned the matter over to L. W. Page, director of the bureau of public roads, and with the whole project in jeopardy because of Licking County's threat to withhold its funds, Page wrote Clinton Cowen, the new Ohio State Highway Commissioner, demanding to know the situation. In a series of letters, Cowen eventually made the state government's posi- tion clear. First, he admitted that the state was having trouble finding money for finishing the road, but it did intend to stand by its agreement. Would the government, he wondered, be willing to accept the completion of the road to the Franklin County border with some material cheaper than cement--asphalt macadam, perhaps, or tar-bound macadam?31 Upon Page's assurances that the government would accept the state's offer to complete the road with some other material of a bituminous type, one more crisis in the construction of the West Pike passed.32 In the meantime, work on the road in Muskingum County was still being delayed, perhaps because construction was farther advanced in this county than it was in Licking County. The grading in Muskingum County had been completed to the county line the previous year, and the pave- ment had been laid from Zanesville through Mt. Sterling, almost seven |
THE OHIO ROAD EXPERIMENT 23
miles away. Even the Mt. Sterling hill
with its famous S curve, often
thought of as the most dangerous place
in the entire road, had been paved.33
In the spring of 1915, this strip of
smooth pavement from Zanesville
to Mt. Sterling was simply irresistible
to the autoists, as they were called,
and as the weather grew warmer, more and
more people had apparently
taken to joy-riding along the West Pike,
particularly at night. On June
14, in the middle of the night, the L.
L. Hazlitt family, living just west of
Mt. Sterling and about three hundred
yards beyond the end of the paving,
was awakened by the sound of an
automobile turning around in front of
their home. The car pulled away and
headed for the village, where it
aroused Emery Pange, who rushed from his
bed to the window just in
time to see a large touring car roaring
through the town, headed for
Zanesville. "The cut-out was
'wide-open,'" he told a reporter next day,
"and the machine was going about as
fast as I ever saw one go."34
How fast the car was going when it began
the steep descent of the Mt.
Sterling hill was uncertain, but
probably too fast. It was raining and the
road was slippery, and at the S turn,
Henry A. Buerhaus, the driver of
the car and a former county auditor, who
had been involved in the first
negotiations with the government concerning
the rebuilding of the road,
lost control of his machine. The
automobile left the road, rolled over a steep
embankment, and was prevented from
falling fifty feet to the stone bridge
at the floor of the valley only by the
timely intervention of a telephone pole.
Buerhaus, and his companion on the trip,
Guy Longley, a former hackdriver
and active Republican in Zanesville,
were pinned beneath the car, and it
was not until about 4:30 in the morning
that the overturned automobile was
discovered. By that time, Buerhaus had
managed to crawl from under it
and was stretched out along the
Culbertson Company's railroad, while Guy
Longley lay dead underneath the wreck.35
Zanesville was startled by the accident.
In a land just emerging from the
horse and buggy era, before slaughter on
the highways had been accepted
as the normal course of events, an
automobile accident of such proportions
was a major catastrophe. With the
exception of some boys who had gone
off the road on a bobsled near the same
place during the winter, this was
the first major accident to occur along
the new West Pike, and, according
to the Signal, "hundreds of
automobiles containing sightseers made the trip
out the pike to the scene of the
accident," in spite of the rain and the slip-
pery road.36
All that day and the next and for a week
or more, people talked about the
tragedy and the terrible S curve and
wondered what to do about it. "The
Mt. Sterling hill, where the tragedy
occurred," ran an editorial in the
Signal, "is a treacherous descent under normal conditions and
normal speed
and all drivers should not attempt the
descent unless sure that their ma-
chine is under full control." But
for many in the town, the Signal's advice
was insufficient. They demanded that
something be done to prevent cars
from slipping off the road at that
point. A cement wall, three feet high, or
a fence painted white, they said, should
be erected around the curve in the
road where the Buerhaus car
overturned.37
24 OHIO HISTORY
But it would take time and money to
build a fence, and a number of
prominent Zanesville citizens did not
want to wait. The result was that
a group of autoists, apparently led by
Chester A. Baird, a local druggist,
got permission from the county
commissioners to erect a large sign at the
top of the hill warning drivers of the
curve ahead. And in a short time
a sign that could be seen for a half
mile was built and erected some three
hundred feet from the place where the
tragic accident had occurred. It
was six feet high and five feet wide,
with huge letters spelling out the
words DANCER, DOUBLE CURVE--DRIVE SLOW, SOUND
KLAXON.38
The accident, however, apparently never
diminished the appeal the
smooth, new pavement had for the
autoists of Zanesville. Scarcely a month
following the Buerhaus accident, two
young men from the city borrowed,
without permission, a Ford touring car
from the H. J. Baker grocery com-
pany, and accompanied by two of the
town's young women, went for a ride
on the pike. Leaving Zanesville about
eleven at night they had apparently
driven until about midnight, when for an
unexplained reason, their car
struck the ties of the Culbertson
Company's railroad and upset. Strangely,
the two men were found lying near the
car unconscious, according to the
Signal's account, but their women companions had disappeared.
The men
were not seriously injured, but they
were brought to the city and placed
in the Good Samaritan Hospital for
treatment.39
This second automobile accident on the
West Pike occurred July 13, just
one day after the Culbertson Company had
resumed concreting in Mus-
kingum County and one day before work on
the drainage structures there
had begun, and with the resumption of
construction it was predicted that
the concreting of the National Road
would be completed in two months.
Yet hardly had construction started and
the prediction been made, than
trouble once more struck the project
causing more delays and threatening
to upset time schedules.40
In the 1830's it had been the wet
weather and the cholera that had de-
layed construction on the West Pike, and
an exasperated superintendent of
construction had had to write back to
his superior in Washington that
"cholera made its appearance on a
portion of this district of the road, which
rendered it necessary to suspend
operations for about two weeks, at a time
most favorable for the advancement of
the work." But in the summer of
1915 it was weather and accidents that
upset time tables. Only the day
after work had recommenced on the
drainage structures in Muskingum
County, five supply cars were being
towed up the Mt. Sterling hill on the
Culbertson railroad when the coupling
between the engine and the first
car broke, releasing all five. The
unleashed cars sped down the hill and
over the embankment at the S curve, and
came to rest beside the remains
of the Buerhaus automobile, which had
crashed at that very spot.41
The supply cars were demolished, and so,
too, was the big danger sign
so recently placed there. Smashed by the
runaway cars, it was so utterly
destroyed that no piece of it larger
than eighteen inches square could be
THE OHIO ROAD EXPERIMENT 25
found. "A sight which would make
the strongest hearted shudder met the
gaze of those going to the scene Friday
morning," wrote the Signal reporter
of the accident. "Side by side lay
the five wrecked cars of the Culbertson
company and the body of the Buerhaus
machine which went over at this
danger point. Both are monuments to the
most dangerous curve on the
pike and one which should undoubtedly be
safeguarded and will some day
unquestionably." Fortunately, no
one was on the road at the time of the
accident; however, only a few minutes
before the cars broke loose, an auto-
mobile and a farmer with a wagon load of
hay had both passed by.42
As if this were not enough trouble, that
evening, July 15, Zanesville
was deluged with a one-inch rain. The
Muskingum and Licking rivers were
booming the next morning, and out at the
Culbertson Company's gravel
plant just west of Gant Park, the rain
had fallen on a filled gravel bin,
making it so heavy it collapsed and fell
upon a nearby crane. Damage to
bin and crane was estimated at $300, in
addition to the time taken to
build a new gravel bin.43
In spite of breakdowns and poor weather
that continued to hamper
progress, work on the road continued. By
August, the cement mixers in
both counties were going full blast, and
on September 1, mixer one crossed
the line from Muskingum into Licking
County. Two months later the
paving was all but completed. "With
good weather Saturday," the Signal
announced on November 12, "150 feet
of concrete which remains to be
poured to complete the paving of the
West Pike from Zanesville to Hebron,
Licking county, will be poured and the
longest stretch of road work and
the biggest road contract ever completed
in Ohio will be practically ready
to turn over to the state highway
department." And at last one of the
Signal's prophecies did come true. The next day, mixers one and
two met
at station 152-40, and the pavement was
completed.44
To celebrate the completion of the road
construction, the Zanesville
Chamber of Commerce announced on
November 22 that a trade excursion
would be made over the West Pike to
Jacksontown and then north to the
city of Newark thirty-five miles away.
All autoists were asked to make
the trip and form their own parties. The
cars, it was said, would leave
the courthouse at 1 P.M., November 26.45
At 12:30 on the appointed day, a fleet
of machines, gaily decorated
with bunting and streamers flying
expressions of friendship for Newark,
had assembled on Fourth, Fifth, Sixth,
and Seventh streets, and, though
somewhat late in starting, the
procession was soon under way with
Charles Baird, enthusiastic autoist, in
the pathfinder car. Following
closely behind the pathfinder car was a
truck, borrowed from the Wedge
garage, to which a trailer carrying the
United Commercial Travelers'
Boosters Band was attached.46
The trip was made almost without
incident. The pike was wonderfully
smooth, and to avoid trouble no one was
allowed to pass Baird's pathfinder
car, which maintained a steady speed of
fifteen to twenty miles per hour
throughout the trip. And because there
was always some uncertainty about
the performance of a machine, an auxiliary car containing "repair men," as the newspaper called them, was put in line, and all those who experi- enced mechanical troubles simply pulled to the side of the road and had their car repaired.47 At Newark, Zanesville's eleven hundred enthusiasts were welcomed effusively, and the Newark Advocate was loud in its praise of the expedi- tion. "The trip by automobile over the old National Road," ran the paper's editorial, "is indeed delightful and will be enjoyed by residents of both Muskingum and Licking counties to the fullest extent. One may now jump into a machine and drive to Zanesville as quickly as he could go from Newark to Granville [about seven miles] with a horse and buggy."48 Indeed, so enthusiastic were the citizens of Newark about the linking of the two cities and the motorcar expedition from Zanesville that the following spring they organized their own excursion of some fifteen hun- dred people and five hundred autos and motored to Zanesville. Wearing badges made of white paper showing clasped hands and in blue lettering the words "Zanesville and Newark," the Newark autoists arrived in Zanesville promptly on schedule, to the delight and awe of the Signal. From the city limits a Zanesville delegation escorted them into town, and here they were entertained with sight-seeing tours, dancing, refreshments, vocal music at Gold Hall, and with visits to open houses held by many of the clubs throughout the city.49 Years before, when Newark lay on the old route between Zanesville and Columbus, it had attempted to have the National Road built through its boundaries; but because it was too far north for the straight line the government surveyors wanted to follow, the road had gone over the route they laid out, and since that time, the two cities had been rivals. |
THE OHIO ROAD EXPERIMENT 27
But the improvement of the West Pike had
helped wipe out the old dif-
ferences. "There was a time,"
editorialized the Signal, "happily buried in
the distant past, when Zanesville and
Newark were 'hated rivals.' . . .
However, the rivalry of today is a
friendly one and ties of an enduring
friendship have been cemented. Within
the past year the two cities have
been linked together by an improved highway
and the occasion of Zanes-
ville's first visit to Newark was in
celebration of the opening of the new
road. That visit was returned by Newark
Thursday, and now that 'the ice
has been broken' it is sincerely hoped
that there will be many other inter-
city celebrations of a similar
nature."50
But what did the road experiment prove
beyond the bettering of
relations between two old enemies? And
what did the government have
to show to congress for all the money
expended and time spent?
Government experts made two studies of
the economic life along the
West Pike, one before the road was paved
and one afterwards, and the
differences the new road made were
impressive even when allowance is
made for the desire of the statisticians
to cast the experiment in as favor-
able a light as possible. Because of the
easier pull along the paved road,
for example, the average horse-drawn
load increased from 2,324 to 3,290
pounds, and the annual traffic volume
from 21,347 tons to 24,245. The
speed of travel also increased some 25
percent, and most significantly, the
cost of hauling was reduced from 28 to
19 cents per ton mile. Moreover,
it was estimated, possibly with some
exaggeration, that the value of the
land along the road had increased as
much as $7.50 an acre because of the
new road.51
Even more dramatic than these
statistics, however, were those col-
lected on the use of motorcars on the
new road. In 1915, there were 1,557
automobiles in Muskingum County, 900 of
them in Zanesville, and on
almost any Sunday afternoon after the
pavement was finished, nearly all
of them seemed to be on the pike.
Recording the Sunday drive, a phenom-
enon no longer of special importance in
America, the second economic
study revealed that "Sunday traffic
on a clear summer day is a steady run
of automobiles in each direction."
On one Sunday afternoon, for example,
May 21, 1916, eighty-eight machines
passed the village of Amsterdam in
one hour, and this was considered one of
the most lightly traveled sections
of the entire road! On such days
"old Dobbin," averaging less than five
percent of the traffic, was virtually
driven off the road.52
The full meaning of this report,
however, can be but dimly appreci-
ated by generations of Americans to whom
the automobile has become the
second self. The sheer joy of speeding
along a smooth highway at twenty-
five, or possibly thirty, miles an hour,
the feel of the wind rushing by and
through the open car, the swift passing
of a horse and buggy, and the
trip of perhaps as much as thirty or
forty miles from home in one after-
noon can be fully understood only by
those Americans who can remember
their first automobile ride and the time
when they had never been more
than ten miles away from home before.
28 OHIO HISTORY
But the motor-powered vehicles were
being put to important economic
as well as aesthetic uses. Before the
West Pike was paved, the villages of
Gratiot and Brownsville were virtually
isolated. Gratiot was ten and
Brownsville twelve miles from the
Zanesville trade center, a six to
seven hour round trip for the two-horse
hack that had been making the
trip three times a week for thirteen
years. This was more time than many
farmers could spend away from home and
still get back in time to milk
the cows; besides it cost fifty cents
each way.53
With the paving of the West Pike,
however, an auto truck replaced
the hack. It made two round trips every
day, required only one hour each
way, and reduced the price of the trip
to forty cents one way and sixty-
five cents round trip. Moreover, a large
motor bus was put on the road to
run from Hebron to Zanesville, 26.1
miles, and one could go the entire
distance for seventy-five cents; it made
one round a day between Hebron
and Brownsville, and two a day between
Zanesville and Brownsville. So
instead of three hack trips a week,
Brownsville was connected with Zanes-
ville by four motor trips a day, besides
being connected by bus with
Newark.54
The experiment proved one thing more.
From it the postmaster gen-
eral and the secretary of agriculture
learned that if the federal govern-
ment was to make large contributions for
road building within the states,
it must deal only with some state
agency, such as a state highway com-
mission. The conflict between Licking
County and the state government,
and similar more difficult problems
experienced by the government on
other projects, had convinced them that
local governments were uncertain
agencies to do business with. "From
correspondence and from the atti-
tude of local officials in many
places," read a joint report of the post-
master general and the secretary of
agriculture, "it appears that there
is a disposition frequently to avoid the
obvious requirement of the present
act . . . . The allotments have been
looked upon . . . in the light of a
gratuity, and the question has been
frequently raised . . . as to why the
government would not give the money to
the counties and let them spend
it."55
And so, when the famous federal highway
act of 1916 was enacted,
providing money for road building within
the states on a dollar matching
basis, it specified that the secretary of
agriculture was authorized "to
cooperate with the States, through their
respective State highway depart-
ments, in the construction of rural post
roads."56
THE AUTHOR: Wayne E. Fuller is a
professor of history at Texas Western
College of the University of Texas, and
the author of the recently published
book
RFD: The Changing Face of Rural
America.
THE OHIO ROAD EXPERIMENT 1913-1916
by WAYNE E. FULLER
In December 1914, the Signal, a Zanesville, Ohio, newspaper, carried a story captioned, "Jacob Johnson of the West Pike Died Thursday." The story was interesting, not because Jacob Johnson was renowned, but be- cause he was, at the time of his death, eighty-seven years old and had lived his entire life west of Zanesville near the famous highway which the Ameri- can people knew as the old National Road, but which the people of Zanes- ville called the West Pike. Born in 1827, more than a year before Andrew Jackson became president, Johnson had lived to see the traffic along the old road west of Zanesville pass from flood stage to a trickle. More than that, his life had spanned a complete cycle in the relationship of the road to the national government.1 What the people of Zanesville called the West Pike was a fifty-two mile link in the National Road, which ran from Cumberland, Maryland, to Illi- nois. Constructed by the national government between 1829 and 1835,
NOTES ARE ON PAGES 70-71 |