National Old Trails Road – Legends of America (original) (raw)
National Old Trails Road, Keyser’s Ridge, Maryland.
The National Old Trails Road, also known as the Ocean-to-Ocean Highway, was established in 1912 and became part of the National Auto Trail System. It was 3,096 miles long and stretched from Baltimore, Maryland, to Los Angeles, California, with branches to New York City and San Francisco. The road’s name signified that it followed several of the Nation’s historic trails, including the National Road and the Santa Fe Trail. In 1926, much of the road from Colorado East became U.S. 40 and U.S. Route 66.
National Old Trails Road.
The idea of a transcontinental highway has been around since the 1890s. General Roy Stone, head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of Road Inquiry, suggested combining existing roads into a network and recommended that “… the most effective lines that could be adopted for this purpose would be an Atlantic and a Pacific Coastline, joined by a continental highway from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco.”
The League of American Wheelmen Bulletin and Good Roads magazine quoted General Stone as referring to the idea as “The Great Road of America.”
“The whole scheme would carry something that would inspire the entire Nation. It is not a new scheme; it is not a new idea. It was the idea of Jefferson, Madison, Gallatin, and many other great men who helped start the National Road, which led through Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana and reached the Mississippi River.”
General Stone’s successor, Martin Dodge, endorsed a transcontinental highway shortly after taking office in 1899.
Early advocates of good and long-distance roads soon adopted the idea of naming highways and forming associations to support the route. In early 1902, the Jefferson Memorial Road Association began promoting the construction of a memorial road from Thomas Jefferson’s home at Monticello to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, the university he founded.
On March 4, 1902, nine auto clubs met in Chicago, Illinois, to combine forces in a new organization called the American Automobile Association. The new Board of Directors was instructed to consider a transcontinental road from New York to California immediately. The board chose a more northern routing than General Stone had proposed. The American Automobile Association proposal was for a macadamized road north out of New York City along the Hudson River and the shores of the Great Lakes, passing through Albany and Buffalo, New York; Erie, Pennsylvania; Cleveland and Toledo, Ohio; Chicago, Illinois; Omaha, Nebraska; Denver, Colorado; Salt Lake City, Utah, and Sacramento, California.
The New York-Chicago Road Association was formed on June 17, 1902, to advocate an improved public road between the two cities.
American Automobile Association.
On June 23, 1905, James W. Abbott, Special Agent of the Mountain and Pacific Coast Division of the U.S. Office of Public Road Inquiries, told the Fifth Annual National Good Roads Convention in Portland, Oregon, “We ought to have established one or more good through wagon roads from the Atlantic to San Francisco and to the Northwest.”
In August 1906, Good Roads magazine published an article about a proposal to build an “American Appian Way.” This “latest proposition in this land of big schemes” was routed from ” Washington, on Atlantic tidewater, following the trail of the historic National Pike through the passes of the Appalachian Mountains and across the Ohio River, through the great middle west to St. Louis, Missouri and then into two great boulevards on to the Pacific, one of which will cross Montana to Puget Sound and the other through Denver and Salt Lake over the Rockies and Sierras to San Francisco.”
Macadam Road.
In the summer of 1907, Governor Joseph W. Folk of Missouri expressed an interest in a cross-state macadam highway. The Highway Department of the State Board of Agriculture identified three feasible routes. The northern route passed through St. Charles, Louisiana, Bowling Green, Mexico, Moberly, and Liberty. The central route passed through Columbia, crossing the Missouri River at Arrow Rock on the way to Kansas City. It incorporated Boon’s Lick Road and part of the Santa Fe Trail. The southern route approximates modern U.S. 50.
The State Board and Governor Folk met on August 5, 1907, to designate the cross-state highway. Instead of choosing one, though, they designated all three routes. While this decision encouraged local initiative by keeping competition alive, it did not result in constructing a cross-state highway. Instead, the idea was shelved for several years.
By the 1910s, local organizations, chambers of commerce, towns, and good roads advocates throughout the country began to select old roads for improvement and to give them names as a rallying point. One of the earliest was the National Old Trails Road, an outgrowth of two movements in Missouri. The first was the drive for a cross-state highway from St. Louis to Kansas City. The second was an effort by the State chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution to mark the historic Santa Fe Trail, the old trader’s route to New Mexico.
In 1911, various newspapers gave space to help keep the movement alive in Missouri. The Kansas City Star and Kansas City Post were consistent “boosters” for a cross-state highway.
History lovers joined in the fight to ensure that roads over which Daniel Boone and pioneers of the West blazed their way were practical routes for a state highway. This brought the Santa Fe Trail and Boone’s Lick Road Association, the Kansas City Historical Society, the Missouri Historical Society, and the Daughters of the American Revolution into the fight.
The idea of a transcontinental highway was receiving increasing attention. Meeting in Chicago, the Fourth International Good Roads Congress endorsed a transcontinental route from New York City through Chicago to Kansas City, then over the historic Santa Fe Trail to Santa Fe, New Mexico, Phoenix, Arizona, and Los Angeles, California.
I want good roads!
Among the more ambitious bills was one introduced in August 1911 to create a National Interstate Highways and Good Roads Commission to build seven named national highways radiating from Washington, D.C. The plan included a road from Washington, D.C. to Seattle, Washington (Lincoln National Interstate Highway) and two roads to California (Jefferson National Interstate Highway to northern California and the Grant National Interstate Highway to southern California) as well as shorter routes to Portland, Maine; Niagara Falls, New York; Austin, Texas; and Miami, Florida.
With interest growing, several States decided to take it upon themselves to identify the best route within their borders for a transcontinental highway. These State efforts grew out of the belief that such a road would someday be built. They thought that designating the route in advance would give the state control over the location.
The day after the Old Trails Association of Missouri was formed, the Tri-State Road Convention was held in Phoenix, Arizona, on December 20-21, 1911. The organization was based in Arizona, California, and New Mexico, with the Governors of each State appointing the delegates. As in Missouri, officials in the Southwest wanted to influence what they anticipated would be Federal decisions on transcontinental highway routings.
The new organization had to address efforts by San Diego boosters who had been fighting for years regarding highway routing between Phoenix and Los Angeles. Early automobile traffic between the two cities went via San Diego and Yuma across the rugged roads of the Imperial Valley. San Diego interests, fearing their city would become a backwater if transcontinental traffic went directly from Yuma to Los Angeles, had identified a routing that would become U.S. 80 when designated in the 1920s (I-8 roughly follows the route today). Los Angeles had adopted a route following in part the tracks of the Southern Pacific Railroad from Yuma to San Bernardino by way of the Salton Sea. Nevertheless, San Diego advocates claimed their route was faster to Los Angeles, partly because it cut off 100 miles of desert travel.
Good Roads Magazine.
An article in the January 13, 1912, issue of Good Roads magazine described the western division of the route:
It begins at Raton, New Mexico, and runs from there to Las Vegas, through Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Carthage, San Antonio, Socorro, and Magdalena, New Mexico; Solomonville, Globe, Roosevelt, Phoenix, and Yuma, Arizona; and Mammoth, California, west to Mecca, via Beaumont, through Redlands Junction and Colton to Los Angeles.
The National Old Trails Road Association was formed in April 1912 in Kansas City, Missouri, to promote the improvement of a transcontinental trail from Baltimore to Los Angeles.
On April 17 and 18, 1912, Professor Williams presided over the first National Old Trails Road Convention in the Commercial Club Rooms in Kansas City. The Committee on Credentials certified delegates from Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and California did not send delegates.
At the convention, Mrs. Hunter M. Merriwether, the Missouri State Vice Regent for the Daughters of the American Revolution and a Missouri Good Roads Committee member, addressed one of the convention’s main problems, namely routing. No one questioned the eastern portion of the new trail. It would follow the Cumberland Road to its terminus in Vandalia, Illinois, and continue to St. Louis and Kansas City via the Missouri Cross-State Highway. West of Kansas City, however, the best location for the trail was in dispute.
She emphasized the importance of designating the route along the historic trails instead of the alternatives under consideration. A good road that was not also historic would spoil the name’s significance.
“Hold to your name and build that National Old Trail’s Road. We, Daughters of the American Revolution, do not come before you to plead for it because the section through which it passes is a great commercial one but because it was the pathway of our forefathers, who took civilization from the tidewaters of the Atlantic to the golden sands of the Pacific.
When we gather our children about our knees, we do not tell them of the great captains of industry, of the leaders of finance. We tell them of Washington and Lee; of Daniel Boone, who led the pioneers along the Wilderness Road across the Mississippi River; of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark; Whiteman and Spaulding, of the Oregon Trail; of Colonel Alexander Doniphan, General Stephen Kearny; of john Fremont and Thomas H. Benton.”
Daughters of the American Revolution Emblem.
The convention adopted a route along the Cumberland Road, the Cross-State Highway through Missouri, the “Old Santa Fe Trail” to Santa Fe, and “from Santa Fe west on the most historic and scenic route to the Pacific Coast.”
Just as technology caused the National Road to decline, it also led to its revival with the invention of the automobile in the early 20th century. As “motor touring” became popular, the need for improved roads grew. Many early wagon and coach roads, such as the National Road, were revived into smoothly paved automobile roads.
In 1914, the Automobile Club of Southern California placed signs along its route from Los Angeles to Kansas City and produced maps promoting road use. However, the routing remained under much discussion until 1917. In particular, the western alignment was debated, with an early proposed routing going through Phoenix, Arizona, and San Diego, California, up to San Francisco, California. Eventually, however, the alignment was agreed upon, which followed earlier Indian trails, preexisting railroad tracks, and, in some cases, new construction.
The Federal Highway Act of 1921 established a program of federal aid to encourage the states to build “an adequate and connected system of highways, interstate in character.” By the mid-1920s, the grid system of numbering highways was in place, thus creating U.S. Route 40 out of the ashes of the National Road.
Good Roads Movement
Due to the increased automobile traffic on U.S. Route 40, a whole new network of businesses grew to aid the 20th-century traveler. Hotels, motels, restaurants, and diners replaced the stage taverns and wagon stands. The service station replaced the livery stables and blacksmith shops. Some National Road-era buildings regained their new life as restaurants, tourist homes, antique shops, and museums.
In 1926, future President Harry S. Truman was named president of the National Old Trails Road Association. As the association’s new president, Truman periodically drove the National Old Trails Road from coast to coast and met with association members in each state to discuss improving their segments.
One of Truman’s accomplishments as president of the National Old Trails Road Association was his work with the Daughters of the American Revolution to place Madonna of the Trail statues in the 12 states along the National Old Trails Road. Designed by Arlene Nichols Moss, the statues are dedicated to the pioneer mothers of covered wagon days. Each statue is 18 feet high and consists of a 10-foot-high pioneer mother mounted on a base.
“The `Madonna of the Trail’ is a pioneer clad in homespun, clasping her babe to her breast, with her young son clinging to her skirts. The face of the mother, strong in character, beauty, and gentleness, is the face of a mother who realizes her responsibilities and trusts in God.”
— Daughters of the American Revolution
Madonna of the Trail in Council Grove, Kansas, by Kathy Alexander.
Though the road was upgraded and realigned to improve the route, by 1926, significant portions of the West remained challenging to drive on, and much remained unpaved. That year, the section West of Las Vegas, New Mexico, to Los Angeles, California, was certified as U.S. Highway 66, as was Manchester Road in St. Louis, Missouri.
Only 800 miles of roads were paved in 1927. By the late 1920s, most roads traversing the California desert were widened and paved or oiled.
The federal government passed legislation in 1956 to construct a limited-access, high-speed, multiple-lane interstate highway system.
Construction on Interstate 40 began in the late 1960s and was completed through the desert in 1973. The new design was more efficient and did not parallel Route 66 for much of its length in the Mojave Desert.
After Route 66 was decommissioned in eastern California in 1985, portions of the road were renamed with the old name. Most of the modern-day “National Trails Highway” follows old Route 66. The section between Barstow and Victorville follows almost the exact routing of the 1925 realignment.
Cities along the route, from east to West, included:
Baltimore, Maryland
Washington, D.C.
Frederick, Maryland
Hagerstown, Maryland
Cumberland, Maryland
Uniontown, Pennsylvania
Washington, Pennsylvania
Wheeling, West Virginia
Zanesville, Ohio
Columbus, Ohio
Springfield, Ohio
Dayton, Ohio
Eaton, Ohio
Richmond, Indiana
Indianapolis, Indiana
Terre Haute, Indiana
Marshall, Illinois
Effingham, Illinois
Vandalia, Illinois
St. Louis, Missouri
St. Charles, Missouri
Columbia, Missouri
Kansas City, Missouri
Olathe, Kansas
Osage City, Kansas
Council Grove, Kansas
Marion, Kansas
McPherson, Kansas
Great Bend, Kansas
Dodge City, Kansas
Garden City, Kansas
Trinidad, Colorado
Raton, New Mexico
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Los Lunas, New Mexico
Gallup, New Mexico
Holbrook, Arizona
Winslow, Arizona
Flagstaff, Arizona
Needles, California
Barstow, California
San Bernardino, California
Los Angeles, California
National Old Trails Road Map.
©Kathy Alexander/Legends of America, July 2024.
National Old Trails Road Traffic Sign.
Also See:
Sources:
Digital Desert
Federal Highway Administration
National Park Service
Wikipedia