Plank road

Plank roads have been built since antiquity, and were commonly found in the Canadian province of Ontario as well as the Northeast and Midwest of the United States in the first half of the 19th century.

[2][3] This type of plank road is known to have been used as early as 4,000 BC with, for example, the Post Track found in the Somerset levels near Glastonbury, England.

[6] The plank road boom, like many other early technologies, promised to transform the way people lived and worked and led to permissive changes in legislation seeking to spur development, speculative investment by private individuals, etc.

Plank roads are used exclusively in the Canadian fishing outport of Harrington Harbour, Quebec because the town is built directly over a hilly, rocky shore.

In Perth, Western Australia, plank roads were important in the early growth of the agricultural and outer urban areas because of the distances imposed by swamps and the relatively-infertile soil.

[7] However, increased traffic and suburban development rendered the routes unsatisfactory over time, and by the 1950s, they had been replaced with bitumen surfaced roads.