National Road, American Treasure

Carol and I just got back from a fascinating drive along an interstate highway, parts of which are barely wider than a pickup truck!

It’s a highway, all right, just not a new one. And it was an interstate – in fact, the very first federal highway, begun in 1811, about 140 years before land was cleared for what we now know as America’s Interstate Highway System.

George Washington, the nation’s first president and a surveyor by trade, had fought French and Indian forces in western Pennsylvania, where the woods are as thick as bulrushes. Firsthand, he saw the difficulty of moving armies into the frontier, and he pressed for better roads than the old animal and Indian trails along which travelers struggled to move at the time.

Travel on America’s early roads was, as the innkeeper Thenardier said in "Les Misérables," “a curse”

Several short, earthen toll roads, or turnpikes, which were mired in mud each winter and spring and choked with dust much of the rest of the year, were cut between the port city of Baltimore on the Chesapeake Bay and Cumberland, Maryland, in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains. But far beyond those dense mountains beckoned the new “Northwest Territory” that began in Ohio. So in 1806, Congress authorized construction of what it foresaw as a sort of portage road between the Potomac River near Cumberland in the east, and the Ohio River at Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia), far to the west.

Westward, Ho!

George Washington commanded, if not slept, here, and this cabin in Cumberland is ground zero of The National Road.

Beginning in a triangular park in downtown Cumberland at a little log cabin that had once been Washington’s headquarters, workers blazed westward along the old Nemacolin or Braddock Trail. Nemacolin was a Delaware Indian chief; Edward Braddock, a British general who had tramped that way, hoping to capture French forts.

But the “National Road,” as everyone soon called this remarkable pathway west, kept right on going, past Wheeling onto Zane’s Trace, a barely improved wilderness footpath to Zanesville in eastern Ohio. The target terminus, far to the west, was the mightiest river of all: the distant Mississippi. The National Road almost made it, stretching about 1,000 kilometers to Vandalia in central Illinois in the 1840s before funding ran out and enthusiasm waned. That’s because speedy, capacious new railroads stole the road’s thunder as well as most of its people and freight.

Here’s Doug, ready with a story about rudimentary early travel on The National Road

Carol and I learned a lot of this from Doug Smith, our enthusiastic guide and traveling companion on an exploration of remnants of The National Road in Ohio. Unlike the many train freaks and vintage-car enthusiasts, Doug, who’s a real-estate broker, Licking County commissioner, and auctioneer – you should hear him speed-talk through an auctioneer’s call! – just loves old roads. Until he and Glenn Harper, a founding member of the Ohio National Road Association, came along, most of the romantic stories of America’s historic byways had been lavished upon U.S. Route 66, which was created in the “roaring” 1920s from a string of state roads out west. Connecting Chicago to the Pacific Ocean via quirky crossroads and scenic desert byways, 66 has come to be known as “the Mother Road.”

If that’s so, The National Road, begun 110 years earlier, is wiry old Great Grandma.

The National Road doesn’t yet have as many trinkets, slogans, or fan clubs as U.S. 66 out West. But folks in Ohio are working on it

“John Steinbeck and [the Great Depression novel] The Grapes of Wrath didn’t hurt the nostalgic craze over Route 66,” Doug Smith reminded me. Doug and Glenn Harper aren’t (yet) in Steinbeck’s league, but they have produced an exceptional little travelers’ guide that is a treasure trove of stories, vintage photos, and maps that help visitors locate, then enjoy, the many, though often hidden, delights to be found on The National Road in Ohio.

Doug and Glenn’s travel guide spans many generations of "The Road That Helped Build America"

Carol and I wore out our copies, even as Doug told us stories and pointed out spots that we’d have never found on our own. And we ended up in one of the most curious, intellectually nutritious museums in America. Curious, as you’ll see, because of the odd combination of themes presented there.

All Aboard for Time Travel

I hope you like history as much as I do – and the wind in your hair as you drive with the top down! We’re gassed up and ready for a trip down The National Road. A smidgen of it, at least.

As I mentioned, The National Road winds from the ancient mountains of western Maryland to the pancake-flat plains of Illinois. Doug Smith’s neck of the woods in eastern Ohio is just a microcosm of an old road that teems with stories dating as far back as the opening of the American frontier.

Signs old and new adjoin each other along the venerable road in eastern Ohio

Much of the way as you whiz past red, white, and blue signs for The National Road, you’re driving U.S. 40, a two- or sometimes four-lane federal highway that was given its number during the same era that Route 66 was strung together out West.

But those colorful signs reflect fiction as well as truth. U.S. 40 does follow the general path of the old National Road, but many of the most compelling remnants of the original, historic highway are little more than offshoots – driveway-size, even – running off that road into the woods or right up to somebody’s farm. If you didn’t have Doug Smith in the car with you, you wouldn’t know the real National Road was there. The original, narrow road twisted and

This is a piece of the original National Road, as first paved with concrete about 1916. Driving along U.S. 40, you’d never see it

turned, loped straight up gentle hills, and curled around steep ones. Come U.S. 40, the highway engineers of the 1920s were determined to proceed as straight as possible from Cumberland west, and they proceeded to widen, cut, fill, and pave over the old road to do it – chewing up, disguising, and discarding much of The National Road as they went.

Allow me to present nuggets from Doug and Glenn’s travelers’ guide, Doug’s genial tour, and my own peeks at roadside markers and overlooks.

Connections

The Wheeling Suspension Bridge, over which The National Road still runs, looks its age, for sure

Doug likes to tell about the Wheeling Suspension Bridge, across which The National Road finally spanned the Ohio River in 1849. Originally the world’s longest suspension bridge (at 308 meters), it twisted and torqued and finally collapsed into the river one day five years later, during a frightful storm. Everything but the structural engineer’s reputation survived. When it came time to rebuild, John Roebling, renowned for his Brooklyn Bridge across the East River in New York City, got the job. But the new Wheeling bridge got built only after city burghers upriver in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, stopped bellowing. They were worried that the workhorse steamboats of the period would not be able to pass under Roebling’s creation and deliver goods to Pittsburgh. Clever inventors averted the problem by figuring a way to tilt steamboat stacks backward on hinges, even at full steam, low enough to glide safely under Roebling’s bridge.

The National Road had first reached Ohio via smaller bridges, igniting a human flood so profound that, by the 1840 census, “frontier” Ohio had become the nation’s third-most-populous state.

Going in Cycles

Safety bikes were all the rage, even among the nation’s “new women,” in 1895, when this poster was produced

And The National Road became its most popular thoroughfare. In their guide, Glenn Harper and Doug Smith include this note about the “safety bicycle” – the low-riding kind with wheels of equal size that we know today – that replaced scary, bone-shaking (and occasionally -breaking), 1.5-meter-high models that had been in vogue. The safety bike, the authors report, “brought new life to the old Road. To prove their physical prowess, young men would sometimes ride one hundred miles or more. Sherman Granger established a record in 1897 by riding his bicycle from Zanesville to Cumberland [337 kilometers] in four and one-half days. Such enthusiasts organized the League of American Wheelmen and in their quest for appropriate places to ride helped champion the ‘Good Roads Movement.’ Advocates for the movement increased dramatically with the invention and increased use of the automobile. In just ten years from 1900 to 1910, the number of automobiles increased from 8,000 to 468,000.”

That’s more than 58 times as many “horseless carriages” in a decade. And an awful lot of them rolled along The National Road.

Site Manager Mary Ellen Weingartner near the end of the National Road/Zane Grey Museum’s meticulously accurate diorama

I mentioned a most unusual museum. Called The National Road/Zane Grey Museum, it’s tucked up on a hill in little Norwich, Ohio. That’s enunciated as “Nor-wick,” not “witch,” in these parts, for reasons known only to denizens of the town. The museum, supported by the state historical society, displays three almost completely unrelated sorts of artifacts. One set, pertinent to our visit, explains The National Road. It includes a superb 41-meter-long diorama, displaying hundreds of tiny, hand-carved natural features, human figures, animals, wagons, tools, and road-building equipment – each individually crafted – plus other treasures and photographs related to the first federal road. The Zane Grey portion tells the story of America’s best-known Old West adventure novelist; he grew up nearby and was a great-grandson of Ebenezer Zane, whose “trace” we mentioned earlier. And there’s a wing devoted strictly to art pottery, which was once a thriving business in eastern Ohio.

Site manager Mary Ellen Weingartner pointed out three artifacts, in particular, that caught my fancy:

One was a “Gunter’s chain,” named after a 17th-Century British mathematician. Its 100 links, precisely, stretch exactly 66 feet (just over 20 meters). The men who blazed The National Road used Gunter’s chains to hew a uniform right-of-way as they went. The traveling portion was usually far narrower, as shallow drainage ditches and space for markers ate up part of the width.

The second notable artifact was an actual Conestoga wagon, which Mary Ellen described as the “semi truck of its day.” This was the pioneer freight wagon that you see in film “westerns” – the sort with billowing white canvas affixed to its high, arching

That’s an ordinary shoe, all right, between the pieces of wood in the braking device of an old Conestoga wagon

ribs. Conestoga wagons, named after the Pennsylvania valley in which they first appeared, carried no drivers or passengers. They were pulled by 6 to 12 horses or oxen, but the drovers rode or walked alongside. The only seat was a short, hard, retractable “lazy board,” sticking out from the wagon’s side, on which an exhausted person could catch what must have been a short, incredibly uncomfortable ride. When these heavily laden “prairie schooners” headed downhill, a lever engaged a brake shoe to prevent the wagon from rolling over the dray animals that were pulling it.

I note this because a Conestoga wagon’s brake shoes were, in fact, real shoes! No doubt hand-me-downs that already had holes in their soles.

Look Out Below

Downhill travel on The National Road was indeed an adventure. Approaching a steep decline, a drover would sometimes stop, cut down a large tree, and tie it to the back of his wagon to slow the heavy, rolling loads. There’s even a slightly macabre marker along the Ohio portion of the road that pinpoints the spot where Christopher Baldwin became Ohio’s first known traffic fatality. On August 20, 1835, Baldwin, a Massachusetts antiquarian en route to central Ohio to study prehistoric Indian mounds, was riding “up top” with his stagecoach driver when they passed a pack of grunting hogs. The horses reared, the coach tipped over, and poor Baldwin broke his neck.

In 1912, Congress ordered several “Madonna of the Trail” statues, including this one on the National Road in Ohio, erected along historic roads to salute westward-bound pioneers

That third item of note at the National Museum/Zane Grey Museum is a series of rings that Mary Ellen Weingarten uses for school-group demonstrations. The rings fit around stones of various sizes, gathered in the area during an early upgrade of The National Road. It employed a mélange called “macadam,” developed in Scotland by John McAdam about 1820. A frame was laid ahead across the terrain, into which layers of carefully sorted stones, large ones underneath up to pebbles at road level, were spread, then compacted by a heavy, horse-drawn roller. No adhesives or fillers held these millions of stones together, Mary Ellen told me. The road was no longer a muddy path. It was all rocks, smooshed by that roller, then further compressed by passing wagon wheels and the feet of travelers and livestock.

That’ll Be 27 Cents

This was one of the first toll booths travelers would have encountered on The National Road, near La Vale, west of Cumberland

Both Mary Ellen and Doug pointed out The National Road became a toll turnpike once the federal government turned over jurisdiction to the states in 1835. Tollhouses popped up along the “turnpike.” (The word derives from the days when real pikes, or sharpened rods, across the road kept non-paying travelers from passing.) Travelers “coming down the pike” with those Conestoga wagons paid no toll at all, because the freight wagons’ wide wheels helped tamp down the road. Sheepherders were assessed 3 cents a score (20 head) for their herd; cattle – though nice and heavy – had sharp hooves that tore up the road, so their toll was 7 cents a score. Drovers took respite, and enjoyed a drink or two or ten, in roadside inns or in “pike towns” that sprang up along the road. Animal pens and barns corralled their animals.

Here’s a short stretch of the Old National Road that had been paved in brick. Note how narrow it was!

In the 19-teens, engineers introduced still more new paving materials to The National Road. In places where brickyards abounded, row after row (after row after row after row!) of brick were laid. In fact, prison convicts completed an 80-kilometer stretch of brick from Zanesville eastward to Wheeling. Elsewhere, crews tried out various early forms of concrete. On some of those original road offshoots that you find off in the brush next to U.S. 40, you can walk on

You can see the narrow-gauge railroad engine at work alongside highway workers as The National Road was repaved in the 19-teens

95-year-old concrete and break off a stone or two where the surface has crumbled. To lay all that concrete, Doug Smith explained, narrow-gauge railways were created just for that job. They hauled sand and gravel and stones alongside the pavers, and as work moved on down the road, the rails were pulled.

Rest Only if You Must

Doug noted that there were rest areas along The National Road, just as you’ll find on today’s Interstate Highway System. There were certainly no information kiosks or giveaway maps, vending machines or men’s and ladies’ rooms, however. These turnouts offered only shade, a water well and pump, maybe a hard bench or two, and pit toilets.

This is part of the inscribed rock at “The Eagle’s Nest” along the National Road

Sometimes various layers of history converge along The National Road. Near the little town of Brownsville, for instance, a granite boulder at a place called the “Eagle’s Nest” was engraved in 1914 with the outline of a covered wagon and an early roadster automobile, as well as a written notation about the repaving of the highway. But attention is also drawn to the valley below, where the world’s first demonstration of contour farming was taking place at the same time.

And this is a look at another old marker on site

Congress stipulated that markers be placed once in every mile along the road. Crews used their Gunter’s chain for that task as well; stretch one out exactly 80 times, and you had a mile. The sandstone mile markers, buried deep in the ground, carry a surprising amount of information, starting with the distance to Cumberland and including the names of, and distances to, the nearest towns. When these markers were broken by wayward vehicles or malicious vandals, concrete ones replaced them.

Here’s what’s left of one of those old strip motels that sprouted along The National Road in the 1940s

Other less formal sentinels of the old road are harder to find. Most period gas stations have been razed, turned into junk shops and the like, or modernized. Most, but not all, of the dreary little tourist courts, such as the “Nighty-Night Motel,” with their rows of identical rooms facing right onto the highway, are gone or empty relics. The clever Burma Shave shaving-cream ads that unfolded in four-line couplets plus a tag line on crude wooden signs . . .

Don’t stick your arm
Out too far
It might go home
In another car
Burma Shave

An old, but photogenic, rustic barn along The National Road

. . . are nowhere to be seen. But Carol was thrilled when Doug led us to a couple of classic, extant “Mail Pouch” barns, on which the chewing tobacco company’s distinctive logo had been carefully hand-painted.. In fact, Doug and Glenn Harper note in their travelers’ guide, a fellow named Harley Warrick from nearby Belmont, Ohio, painted hundreds of those signs on barns throughout the Midwest for half a century.

S as in Bridge

Here’s an early postcard view of an S-bridge in eastern Ohio

It’s hard to drag a “favorite favorite” National Road site out of Doug Smith. He loves every sign and pebble. But he’s awfully partial to the “S-bridges” that you can still see in a few places off U.S. 40. The bridge structures themselves are not S-shaped; that would be engineering folly. Like every bridge I’ve ever seen, save for one that I’ll tell you about in a moment, they shoot straight across the water at a neat 90-degree angle to the shorelines. But remember all those twists and turns of the original roadway? They brought The National Road up to many rivers at odd angles. So the early engineers had to maneuver the connections

And here’s the approach to one of the S-bridges as it looks today

from the road to the bridge this way or that in order to line them up for a perfectly straight shot across. Taken together, the wiggly approaches and the ruler-straight bridge have the look of a big, snaky S. (You can see what I mean in the adjacent photos.)

My favorite stop was a pretty park, high above Zanesville. Below sat not just the town, in postcard splendor, but particularly a bridge over the intersecting Licking and Muskingum rivers.

Zanesville’s world-famous Y-bridge

That’s right: one bridge over the confluence of two rivers! It’s Y-shaped, the only one in the world, by Doug’s reckoning. For sure, it’s the only place we know of where you can go to the middle of a bridge and turn right! Early versions of Zanesville’s Y-bridge were even covered, like the quaint, though conventionally straight, covered bridges you see in Vermont or Indiana.

Here's the Ohio capitol, past which U.S. 40, successor to the National Road, still runs. No, they didn't run out of money to finish the dome. The roof is flat, but there's a rounded dome inside it!

The National Road runs through two state capitals: Columbus, Ohio; and Indianapolis, Indiana, though you have to work to find it in both of those cities. Carol and I were both places on this trip but didn’t try very hard.

One of the treats of our ride along the old National Road occurred at a few spots where it was possible to stand on a fragment of the original pike, look across a field or up a hillside, and see two more generations of the road: U.S. 40 and today’s ultramodern, ultrafast Interstate 70. Not surprisingly, I-70 was the only busy one of the bunch.

I was standing on part of the old National Road when I took this shot of U.S. 40 in the distance. My eye could also see I-70 farther away, but it doesn’t show up very well here

In 2002, The National Road added a name when Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta designated it as “The National Historic Road.” That was rather a waste of effort. The “historic” part, as I hope Doug and I have demonstrated, goes without saying.

[Glenn Harper and Doug Smith’s The Historic National Road in Ohio: The Road That Helped Build America was published in 2005 by the Ohio Historical Society.]

TODAY'S WILD WORDS

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I'll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of "Ted's Wild Words" in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there's another word in today's blog that you'd like me to explain, just ask!)

Capacious. Large in capacity.

Denizen. Strictly, this means any inhabitant of a place. But the word also gives special status to animals and those of mystical powers, as in “denizens of the deep” or “denizens of the fields.”

Smidgen. A little bit. Sometimes shortened to “smidge.”

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Old 11

Eighteen years ago during a short stint in management here at the Voice of America, I sent a superb reporter named Bill Torrey on a journey that I longed to make myself. As it turns out, my photographer-wife Carol M. Highsmith and I would later retrace a good deal of his route, to our deep delight.

Accompanied by two young geographers, Bill traveled the length of one of America’s great U.S. highways. These are not the high-speed, multi-lane, numbingly monotonous Interstate superhighways on which we scoot across the country today. They are aging, mostly two-lane national roads that tied the country together soon after Americans got the itch to go exploring in our horseless driving machines.

A New Beaten Path

One of the early “named” highways, begun in 1932, was the “Going-to-the-Sun Road” (later part of U.S. 2), which cut through spectacular Glacier National Park in Montana

Beginning in 1925, numbered U.S. highways replaced a web of “auto trails” carrying names like “Dixie Highway” and “Mohawk Trail” chosen by civic boosters and driving enthusiasts. The Old Oregon Trail auto route, for instance, ran from Independence, Missouri, to Portland, Oregon, along roughly the original Oregon Trail on which pioneers had walked and driven oxen teams westward almost a century before. But sticking to these auto trails was no easy task for motorists. Signs and colored bands on telephone poles that were supposed to show the way were there one day, stolen or knocked over the next. If they weren’t careful, travelers would find themselves 50 kilometers down the wrong road.

So the nation switched to numbered routes that were better marked and crossed state lines. The U.S. government helped build them, tacked up thousands of shield-shaped signs with the highways’ numbers, and instituted modest standards of safety. At last you wouldn’t need 20 different maps to get from Ocean City, Maryland, to Sacramento, California. Maybe just one newfangled “road map” put out by Pure or Esso or Gulf Oil. Or no map at all: you just got onto U.S. Route 50 and headed west.

Even-numbered national highways ran east-west – and of course, west to east as well! Odd-numbered ones cut north and south, just as Interstate highway numbers work today.

The ‘Highway That’s the Best’

It’s a dark day, in more ways than one, at the Siesta Motel on U.S. Route 66 in Kingman, Arizona. America’s most famous national highway still has passionate devotees, however

You may have heard of our most-acclaimed national road: historic U.S. Route 66, which started in Chicago, zigged and zagged southwestward to Oklahoma, then slithered across the dusty West before ending abruptly at the Santa Monica, California, pier on the Pacific Ocean. Crusty tales, evocative photographs, and snappy songs like “Get Your Kicks on Route 66” still celebrate Route 66, which its devotees call “The Mother Road.”

Backers of famous named roads like the Lincoln Highway, which wended from Atlantic City, New Jersey, to Astoria, Oregon, 4,900 kilometers away, grudgingly gave in to the numbering system. You still see commemorative Lincoln Highway signs in Pennsylvania, especially, but the road officially became and remains “U.S. 30” on maps and markers.

Border to Border (Almost)

One of the benefits of the new national highway system was the establishment of uniform signage from coast to coast. Or in the case of U.S. 11, almost from northern to southern borders

Bill Torrey and his companions did not follow any of the roads I have mentioned. They ventured down a more obscure and meandering national road: U.S. 11, which begins in upper New York State at the edge of Lake Champlain, just below Montreal, Canada, wiggles southward 1,700 kilometers down the spine of the Appalachian Mountains, and cuts through Deep South bottomlands to an ignominious ending at a merge point with another U.S. Highway, U.S. 90, in eastern New Orleans, Louisiana. Ignominious? You’d expect a haughty national highway to conclude triumphantly at the door of New Orleans’ fabulous French Quarter. Instead, Old 11 dead ends at a merge point with another national road, U.S. 90, outside of town.

Metaphorically, though, Route 11 does connect French Canada with French Louisiana, even though not much of New Orleans except its rich, saucy cooking is French any more. French Quarter architecture is Spanish.

Swell for Scenery, Not Speed

Still on U.S. 11, you still see a few vestiges of the kind of roadside stands that used to beckon to weary travelers. And who wouldn’t want to see the world’s largest snake?

The national highways were narrow, winding, and often punctuated by treacherous cross traffic from lesser roads. And as I told you recently in this space when discussing the state of Iowa, at least one national highway – old U.S. 6 – actually had curbs along the way, supposedly to guide slipping cars back into line during fierce Midwest snowstorms. All the national roads led drivers right through cities and towns, past radar “speed traps” in which sneaky constables hid on their motorcycles behind billboards.

Business leaders wouldn’t hear of diverting traffic around town. Roadside attractions – many of them “tourist traps” like snake farms, pseudo-scientific fossil collections, and spooky caverns – lured tourists off the national roads out in the country. Motor courts, “greasy spoon” restaurants, souvenir stands, and independent repair shops beckoned in every little town. So did elaborate neon-gas advertising signs, which had been introduced in the United States at a Packard automobile dealership in Los Angeles in 1923.

Places to Stretch Your Legs a Spell

In the early days, motor courts and tourist cabins lacked today’s frills. The word “motel” was coined in California in 1926 but not used much Holiday Inns came along in 1952

The early lures of the national roads bore little resemblance to today’s outlet shopping malls, fast-food chains, gargantuan theme parks, and capacious motels with pools, workout rooms, and mints under your pillow. Some of the little tourist cabins were barely wider, and no more comfortable, than your car.

Every stop along the old roads could bring adventure. Carol remembers annual trips from her home in Minnesota to her granny’s North Carolina farm. Every year, it seemed, the old family car would break down on U.S. 52, deep in the West Virginia hills. Carol, her mom, and her sister Sara would be stuck for several days and nights in a dingy rented room above the repair shop, waiting for the right part to be trucked in.

Folks along old U.S. 30 in Pennsylvania have outdone themselves with creative artwork

Because it missed all of America’s really big metro centers, U.S. 11 never got the attention that routes 30 or 50 or 66 attracted. Besides New Orleans, 11’s only cities of note are Birmingham, Alabama; Chattanooga and Knoxville, Tennessee; Roanoke, Virginia; Harrisburg and Scranton, Pennsylvania; and Syracuse in New York State. Route 11 was no Mother Road – not even a Little Brother or Sister road. It was a workaday Canada-to-Gulf of Mexico route, often choked with trucks, that drivers took for granted, then pretty much deserted once Interstates 81, 75, and 59 opened along its path.

Y’all Come – Right Through Town

This rusted steam shovel is one of the remnants of the old ironworks along U.S. 11 in Birmingham. Everything else, including huge ovens and conveyors, is rust-red, too

I remember crawling along Route 11 through Birmingham. Before the Interstate super roads were completed, our family often traveled between Washington, D.C., and New Orleans. Each time through Birmingham, the shimmering Alabama heat and dripping humidity overwhelmed our VW Beetle’s pitiful air conditioning. But we weren’t eager to roll down the windows. Route 11 may have been bird-chirpy bucolic in the countryside, but no tourist brochure would ever tout the tough, shabby neighborhoods through which the highway ran in town.

A couple of years ago, Carol and I drove along 1st Ave. North, which carries U.S. 11 through the heart of Birmingham. We were off to photograph the defunct, eerily silent Sloss Furnaces. This was once a bustling iron-mill complex whose web of pipes and blast furnaces turned out more than 400 tons of pig iron each day. You see, Birmingham was no sleepy southern town of magnolia trees, fireflies, and old coots whiling away their days on a bench in the town square. It was the vibrant “Pittsburgh of the South” – a gritty city of steel and bright-red iron forged from ore pulled from the Red Mountain Ridge near town. Today the rusted, vivid-red ironworks are a national landmark and a City of Birmingham museum.

In the Interstate’s Shadow

In the countryside, monster interstates have obliterated much of Old 11, plowing it under and paving it over. In Virginia, for instance, you tool along on Route 11 through dots of towns like Rural Retreat and Glenvar and Chilhowie, only to be shunted up onto I-81. Then the very next Interstate exit will drop you back down onto 11 again. The old road wraps around the superhighway like a snake on a beanpole.

One of the most engaging attractions along U.S. 11 is “Steamtown” in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Chock full of old steam-train exhibits, it’s a train lover’s delight

After businesses, developers, and most drivers deserted the tired old roads, the action shifted to Interstate highway interchanges. These days on the national roads, sad remnants of better days appear around every turn: sagging barns, long-shuttered restaurants, busted-up gas stations, chunks of old drive-in theaters, faded historical markers of little-known battles and people, and obscure museums where there’s not likely to be a wait to get in. On Old 11, you’ll find museums dedicated to handweaving, American presidents, steam trains, even the legendary magician and escape artist Harry Houdini.

You don’t have to drive and drive and drive some more to an exit if you want to take a photograph on Route 11. Just pull off the road the moment you feel like it. Later, you can file your shots under “authentic Americana.”

U.S. 11 crosses the Erie Canal, which, in its heyday, was thought to be the transportation corridor of the future

Lots to See, If You’re Into Old

On their U.S. 11 excursion, Bill Torrey and his companions found deserted forts and military gravesites dating to the French and Indian War of the middle 1700s; sturdy covered bridges; homesteads of obscure luminaries like Joseph Priestly, who discovered oxygen; the Erie Canal, which tied the mighty Great Lakes to New York’s Hudson River; a 63-meter-tall stone arch called the “Natural Bridge” in Virginia; a crossing of the Appalachian Trail, the world’s longest footpath.

The Natural Bridge in southwest Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, was once owned by future U.S. President Thomas Jefferson. It’s higher than Niagara Falls

You'll also find what’s left of burley tobacco barns; roadside stands still selling fireworks; clusters of house trailers that we call “mobile homes”; tables of trinkets at “flea markets” (“One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s Treasure”); twirling, tinkly carousels; rows of factories in “America’s Sock Capital” of Fort Payne, Alabama; and that final, forlorn end point on the edge of New Orleans.

Their journey took twelve days.

Roads of Wood Not So Good

Years later, Carol and I enjoyed a stop on a stretch of Old 11 in central New York State, just above Syracuse. It had been the nation’s first plank road, made of squared wooden logs laid side to side. The folks who built it in 1846 figured anything was better than rutted mud. Wagons could rumble so expeditiously on the plank road that its investors set up tollbooths to charge teamsters for the privilege. But travelers soon found that rain rotted the timbers, steel horseshoes and laden wagons beat the wood to splinters, and spillage from one of the prime local cargoes – salt, mined in swamps outside Syracuse – didn’t do the wood much good, either.

The town of North Syracuse, New York, has preserved and displayed some of the artifacts of the old Plank Road what became the U.S. 11 route. This is an old tollhouse

So boom turned to bust on the plank road. Today, there’s a dandy little outdoor museum of artifacts, including a tollhouse, in the village of North Syracuse that recalls the road’s brief heyday.

“It is a melancholy route,” Bill Torrey wrote of Route 11 in 1990. “For long stretches, it connects one abandoned, derelict, deserted, forsaken, shabby, commercially comatose downtown to another, and in between are fields gone to weed.” And years later, when Bill worked in the college town of Ithaca, N.Y. – one of the few economically healthy communities on the northern part of Route 11 – he found that nothing much had changed from the days of his adventure on the old road.

Seen Better Days

A lot of business buildings and barns along U.S. 11 were simply abandoned and left to the elements and vandals when high-speed, limited-access interstate highways came along

In Appalachia and much of the South, too, Old 11 has pretty much gone to “rack and ruin.” Technology passed it by. Farms played out. Once-viable businesses were abandoned to the vandals and graffiti artists. Like stretches of other national highways, Route 11 slid out of our daily lives.

Still, just as there’s poignant dignity to be found in a rouged gray lady, there are fragile and decaying reminders of unhurried times to be savored on Old U.S. 11. Its accents are French-ified up top, Yankee-clipped in the rest of New York and Pennsylvania, twangy-hard along the mountain ridges, and drawly-slow down South.

Along interstate highways, there's no chance of pulling over for apples, cider, or "sider and appels." But plenty of such stands remain on U.S. 11

Smells range from crabapple to road apple – the latter being a term you should research. Sights turn from soot to rot to rust, sounds from crickets to the clatter of a broken barn door banging in the wind. Some folks along the old road still wear suspenders and ruffled dresses for square dancing. Sure, over those 1,700 kilometers of Route 11 you’ll get your fill of used-car dealers, railroad slag piles, overgrown corn cribs, dark and beery taverns, and shuffling old-timers. But for some of us, there’s nostalgic charm to it all, a fast-unraveling thread to our past, and a feast for the eye and lens and pen.

TODAY'S WILD WORDS

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I'll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of "Ted's Wild Words" in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there's another word in today's blog that you'd like me to explain, just ask!)

Burley. A light-colored, relatively mild tobacco, lower in nicotine than darker varieties. Burley tobacco is grown extensively in the mid-South state of Kentucky. Not to be confused with burly, which is an adjective describing men, primarily, who are brawny and strong. Burly lumberjacks often smoke burley cigs.

Grudgingly. Extremely reluctantly. Doing something, going along with what’s asked of you, but with zero enthusiasm.

Ignominious. Shameful, disgraceful. Ignominy comes from the Latin, meaning “without a name.” Ignominious behavior brings one great discredit. Ignominious places are lowly, ruder or humbler than what might be expected.

Luminaries. Prominent people or stars. Big shots. The bright lights, or luminescence, shine on these famous people.

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