Plank Road Boom
In turn, the concept is thought to have been brought to North America from Russia by the then Governor General Lord Sydenham.
They are the three great inscriptions graven on the earth by the hand of modern science...They also published an editorial saying "every section of the country should be lined with these roads.”[10] Other written items included Observations on Plank Roads (1850) by George Geddes,[11] History, Structure and Statistics of Plank Roads in the United States and Canada (1851) by William Kingsford,[12] and A Manual of the Principles and Practice of Road-Making (1871) by William M.
[17] The roads traveled over the New Jersey Meadowlands (at the time known as the "Hackensack Meadows"),[18] connecting the cities for which they were named to the Hudson River waterfront.
[19] In 1912, the New York Telephone Company was granted permission to lay wire under the Paterson plank road.
[24] The oil industry in that area in the late 1800s fueled the development of the plank road through Pleasantville NJ.
[25] In 1901, the New Jersey legislature enacted a law to claim any plank road owned by a charter which has or will be expiring.
[6] After the initial craze in New York, in late 1844 and early 1845, many regional newspapers in Fort Wayne and Chicago, and throughout the Midwest called for plank roads.
[28] In Indiana, and throughout much of the Midwest, social reformer Robert Dale Owen was a prominent supporter of plank roads.
After returning, he wrote a number of newspaper articles and a hugely popular pamphlet titled "A Brief Practical Treatise on the Construction and Management of Plank Roads" in 1850.
That company was the Detroit, Plymouth and Ann Arbor Turnpike Company, chartered by Michigan state legislature on March 22, 1837 to build a "timber road made of good, well-hewn timber" from Detroit, in Wayne county to the village of Ann Arbor in the county of Washtenaw.
[31] Later on, in 1844, the state authorized the building of plank roads from Detroit to Port Huron and from near Sylvania, Ohio to Blissfield, Michigan.
[33] Eventually, the interest in building plank roads became so high that in 1848, a general incorporation law was passed.
[34] The law was subsequently amended in 1851 (shortening charters to sixty years, and making the greatest allowable grade one foot every twenty feet, as well as requiring the companies to make a report to the auditor general before the first Tuesday in January), 1855 (allowing the substitution of gravel covering nine feet wide, and ten inches thick for plank), 1859 (restoring the acceptable grade to one foot in ten) and 1867 (changing the gravel specification to nine feet wide, and seven inches thick.
[36] By 1869, plank road companies in the Bay, Clinton, Gratiot and Saginaw counties were allowed to double their tolls.
[34] The man who signed the law was one of the major supporters of plank roads in Michigan, governor Epaphroditus Ransom.
Properly maintained plank roads were known to cut four to six day trips to as short as ten to fifteen hours.
[34] In 1854, the Farmer's Companion and Horticultural Gazette reported that " A farm adjacent to a plank road increases in value from 10-15 percent...and commands a sale from the fact that the produce never lacks a market, and has a more regular and higher net value.
