On the other hand, have you ever wondered whom to thank for the new highways that save you two hours when you drive from Wilmington to Asheville?
A brand-new book by the North Carolina Transportation Museum’s historian gives the answers to these and hundreds of other questions about how we got the roads we use every day. Walter Turner’s “Paving Tobacco Road: A Century of Progress by the North Carolina Department of Transportation” is a history of our state’s road building program.
Turner tells his readers how North Carolina developed a passionate attachment to its roads — how it became known as the “Good Roads” state. The development of these good roads helps explain why North Carolina changed from the “Rip Van Winkle” state of 1900 to today’s “leader of the New South.”
The book is more than economic history. It is also a political history of the state’s Department of Transportation and its predecessors. Inside politicians know that “DOT” is the most powerful department in North Carolina government. Its multi-billion dollar budget is independent of the state’s general fund — and its leaders have more discretion in spending those dollars than other state agencies.
Even more important, DOT has the power to make people wealthy through its power to locate major roads and intersections and make opportunities for the businesses that build and repair our roads.
Anyone who wants to understand North Carolina politics must understand the politics of transportation.
In 1915, when Turner’s story of North Carolina’s modern road building program begins, the state’s roads system was a mess. County governments had almost total control over roads and total responsibility for their financing. As a result, there was very little statewide planning to link the county roads into a state system. Most roads were unpaved and often impassable. Some important roads came to a dead end at the county line.
The growing availability of automobile and truck transportation encouraged the rapid change and progress Turner describes. In 1910, there were about 3,200 cars in the state. By 1920, there were 127,000, and by 1925, there were 341,000. Some important North Carolinians recognized quickly that an effective statewide roads system could have a tremendous positive impact on North Carolina’s economy.
Turner cites a number of heroes in this movement. For instance, Harriet Morehead Berry took over the direction of the North Carolina Good Roads Association in 1917 and promoted a comprehensive system of hard-surface, all-weather highways to connect all the state’s county seats.
In 1919, with encouragement of the Good Roads Association, the legislature adopted a set of special fees and taxes. It provided for a special highway fund that was separate from the state’s general fund. The moneys from this fund were to be used to encourage counties to take advantage of newly available federal matching road funds.
This small beginning paved the way for the radically progressive steps made by the next governor, Cameron Morrison, who made good roads his first priority. He persuaded the General Assembly to issue millions of dollars in bonds and to fund their repayment by adopting a gas tax and then quickly increasing it. In the early 1920’s North Carolina began to rush of road construction. Small construction companies like Blythe Brothers in Charlotte and Nello Teer in Durham became giants in just a few years as a result of their work on the expanding roads.
During the Depression, Gov. O. Max Gardner of Shelby led the state to take over all the county-maintained roads.
John Sanders, in his forward to Paving Tobacco Road, helps explain the lasting importance of this decision: “North Carolina’s present state transportation system, like its public education system at every level, is the product of a major policy commitment made during the first third of the 20th century. That commitment holds that the people of North Carolina should finance government services of comparable quality to everyone, regardless of place of residence, by taxing the resources of the entire state and spending resulting revenue to serve the needs of all the people.”
The immediate result of the state’s takeover of county roads was that North Carolina had more miles of state-financed roads than any other state in the country. It maintained that position for almost 60 years. Today we are second only to Texas.
North Carolina’s attention to its local roads may explain why it failed to grab its share of funding for the federal interstate highway system. During the 1940’s, when the federal government asked North Carolina to prepare a plan for its Interstate highways, the state responded with a very conservative and unimaginative proposal. It did not want to divert its resources away from its responsibility to build and maintain local roads.
As a result, under the original 1947 plan, North Carolina received only 708 miles of interstate highways, just two more miles than South Carolina. Other nearby states Virginia (with 911 miles), Tennessee (1,052 miles) and Georgia (1,141 miles) were far ahead of us.
Turner acknowledges that more highways are not the only answer to the state’s transportation needs. He urges more funding for alternatives like mass transit and passenger rail connections to more North Carolina cities.
Ironically, in 1915, the year that Turner’s story begins, North Carolina had a transit system that would sound like a dream come true for today’s planners of transportation alternatives. In that year, the state’s passenger rail system served 1,500 different communities, each with its own rail station.
Maybe the 1915 state-wide passenger rail system sounds idyllic. But no one can read Turner’s book without understanding how critical its road transportation system has been to North Carolina’s transformation from the poverty of 1915 to the prosperity of today.
D.G. Martin hosts UNC-TV’s North Carolina Bookwatch, which airs Sundays at 5 p.m.
