100 Years Ago: The Free Bridge, the Dollarway, and Arkansas
Roads, Part II
By David Trulock
John Gould
Fletcher’s book of Arkansas history and personal observation, published in 1947
and titled simply Arkansas, contains
a story that can be said to herald the arrival of the automobile age in our
formerly natural state. The final chapter
of the book is “The Sweet Home Pike Rolls On.” It opens with this paragraph:
On the twenty-fifth of March, 1910, the modern
age—which was to rule Arkansas for the next thirty-five years and
longer—proclaimed itself unmistakably when four automobiles, containing
residents of Pine Bluff, made the run into Little Rock in four hours. The distance, by the present-day motor
highway, is exactly 43 miles; and it could not have been more than a mile or
two longer at that time. So these
strange vehicles, which in those days frightened all horses, though the animals
were still by far numerically the stronger on the streets, had averaged little
more than a moderately good horse and buggy and had made the trip in scarcely
over ten miles an hour.
The Sweet Home Pike, five miles long and completed
in 1888, was the road on which the cars from Pine Bluff ended their journey
into Little Rock. Fletcher says that, as
far as he could determine, the Sweet Home Pike was “the first hard-surfaced
highway in rural Arkansas.” It was
constructed by the Telford method, using large, flat stones that were squeezed
into place with a steamroller and covered with gravel and clay. Then steamrollers were used again to compress
the gravel-clay mixture, giving a relatively smooth and durable surface.
During its earliest days, the Sweet Home Pike was a
toll road. “Had the automobiles passed
that way only a year before,” Fletcher says, “they [likely] would have been
forced to pay a toll in order to enter Little Rock at all.” If so, they would also have had to pay on
their way back, so maybe the Pine Bluffians planned their trip for just after
the road had become toll-free.
Tolls were charged for horseback riders (2½ cents),
horse-drawn buggies, carriages, and wagons (from 5 to 15 cents, depending on
the number of horses pulling them), and livestock (a penny a head). Pedestrians were not charged. “Probably a provision for bicycles was added
about the nineties, but whether there was ever any toll on automobiles I do not
know,” says Fletcher. “They were possibly
charged according to the horsepower of their engines; or perhaps they were charged
nothing, for the wonder was whether they could run at all along the
then-existing mud-tracks.”
One thing is certain, and John Gould Fletcher’s story
provides a good illustration of it. In
general, people in Pine Bluff have more interest in travelling to Little Rock
than Little Rock residents have in driving to Pine Bluff. For a brief period starting in mid-1914, however,
automobile owners in Little Rock had a reason to want to travel here—and many
did travel here, as did other automobilists from even farther away. The reason was Jefferson County’s “Dollarway,”
the first paved concrete road in Arkansas and the longest in the nation when it
was completed in late October 1914.[i]
The Dollarway was on the Pine Bluff end, and the Sweet
Home Pike was on the Little Rock end, of the mostly unimproved road between the
two cities. The Dollarway was longer
than the Sweet Home Pike, however, stretching almost 23 miles from West Pullen
Street near Bellwood cemetery—presumably where Pine Bluff’s city limits were at
the time—to the conjunction point of Grant, Pulaski, and Jefferson counties
just north of Redfield.
The Dollarway’s five-inch-thick concrete base,
covered with a bitumen sealcoat (a mixture of tar and sand), made for a
virtually permanent roadway that gave an exceptionally smooth ride for
automobile travelers. Many people drove
or had their cars shipped by rail to Pine Bluff in order to experience this
lengthy, bump-free, futuristic surface.
In Arkansas, and in and most of the nation, other improved rural roads
at the time were either gravel, water-based or tar-based macadam, or made of
some local material, such as crushed sea shells in the case of the coastal
states. The vast majority of rural roads
in Arkansas in 1914, however, were unimproved dirt roads not at all suitable
for the coming of the automobile age.
The Dollarway was financed by Jefferson County’s
Road Improvement District #4, created by a special act (Act 164) of the 1913
session of the Arkansas legislature. A
1907 law passed by the legislature had authorized the creation of Road
Improvement Districts, but not many had been formed.
In her article “The Dollarway Road and Road
Improvement Districts in Arkansas, 1913-1921,” Christie H. McLaren notes that
under the 1907 law, “counties were authorized to establish road improvement
districts at the request of a majority of landowners along a local route,” but the
landowners themselves were expected to pay for the road.[ii]
(The Arkansas Constitution provided authority for
general land or infrastructure improvements—levees and drainage systems, for
example—to be accomplished in the same way. The Road Improvement District legislation
was needed to provide uniformity of road construction practices throughout the
state.[iii] Jefferson County’s Bridge District, created
in 1911 to finance the construction of the Free Bridge, will be discussed in
the next issue of the Quarterly.)
McLaren’s description of rural road financing in
the years after the Dollarway was built provides some insight into the highway
robbery that would soon be inflicted on Arkansas residents:
Taxes were assessed against property lying adjacent
to the road to fund construction.
Various legal questions remained obstacles, however, meaning few road
improvement districts were created under this [1907] law. Notably Pulaski County, home of the state
capital, and Jefferson County, of Dollarway Road fame, were the locations of
several of the first few districts created.
When the Arkansas Highway Commission was founded in 1913, the
shortcomings of road improvement district system were already apparent.
These shortcomings turned into scandals on both the
state and county level that went on for ten years. McLaren quotes a New York Times article titled “Arkansas Totters Under Road Taxes
and Czar-like Rule,” published on March 26, 1921, that reports “land owners in numerous
instances being taxed amounts that equal or even exceed the total gross incomes
of their property.” By 1923, things were
bad enough that federal highway funds and technical personnel were withdrawn
from Arkansas. “In response,” writes
McLaren,
Governor McRae called a special session of the
general assembly in September 1923 and demanded that it pass the necessary legislation
to bring about an end to the crisis. The
result was the Harrelson Road Law, which eased the burden of property owners
somewhat by increasing user taxes and granted supervisory status to the
reconstituted State Highway Commission. … Property owners, however, would have
to wait until the Martineau Road Law of 1927 to be relieved of the
responsibility for funding road construction.
Happily, the cost and the tax burden of the
Dollarway when it was proposed were kept low enough that initial resistance
from local landowners was overcome—well, the resistance of the largest
landowner, the Iron Mountain railroad (forerunner of the Missouri Pacific) was
not assuaged so much as it was just ignored.
“The railroad objected to being included,” Jim Leslie wrote in 1970, “as
it would pay the highest tax, but the objection was to no avail.”[iv]
The initial objection of the individual landowners
along the route was that the county’s contract with road builders Shelby &
Bateman of Little Rock called for the use of concrete rather than macadam. Concrete, the landowners assumed, would be
more expensive. Their objection was shown
to be without merit, however, due to the fact that the terrain in and around
Jefferson County was practically stone-free, and the rocks to be crushed and
pulverized for a macadam road would have to be shipped in, making it more
expensive than a concrete one.
The landowner’s tax burden was also eased by
Jefferson County’s assumption of the expense for constructing bridges and
culverts for the Dollarway Road, amounting to about $50,000 of the
approximately $165,000 final cost of the road.
The originally anticipated one-dollar-per-linear foot ended up being closer
to $1.36 per linear foot of roadway, or about $7180 per mile.
Although the “dollarway method” was indeed cheaper—and
longer lasting—than macadam for road construction in Jefferson County, its
expense was nevertheless considerably more than the $5,300-per-mile average for
the 93 miles of “permanent roads” constructed in Arkansas under supervision of
the Highway Commission in the 1913-1914 time period.[v] Interestingly, this average amounts to $1.00
per linear foot of roadway (divide 5300 per mile by 5280 feet per mile).
Speaking of road construction material and its cost: John Gould Fletcher’s chapter on the Sweet
Home Pike tells how bauxite was discovered near Granite Mountain as a result of
the road’s contractor running out of gravel while “completing the last mile of
this highway close to the Confederate Home.”
Some of the “crumbly soft gray rock” in the area was put in the crusher,
and was found to make “an excellent road surface.” Later, when the state geologist determined
the material to be bauxite, he told the contractor “the road you surfaced is
now finished with the most valuable road-building material ever used on a
highway.”
[i] A
concrete roadway in Maryland may have been a mile longer. See “Public road mileage and revenues in Southern
states, 1914,” U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bureau of Public Roads, 1917,
Appendix, p. 56. (Accessible through USDA website.) Maryland is reported to
have had 189.34 miles of concrete roadway at the end of 1914, of which 24 miles
were in Baltimore County. The report doesn’t say whether it was a continuous 24-mile
roadway with a bitumen coating, or when it was completed.
[ii] Looking Beyond the Highway: Dixie Roads and
Culture, Claudette Stager and Martha Carver, eds; University of Tennessee
Press, Knoxville, 2006.
[iii]
“The Automobile Age in Arkansas, Part II,” John Hume, in Arkansas Highways, V.
23, No. 3, Summer 1977.
[iv]
“The Old Dollarway: It Was Narrow And Winding—But It Got You to Pine Bluff,” Arkansas Gazette, January 4, 1970, p.
6E.
[v] Historical Review Volume II: Arkansas State
Highway Commission and Arkansas State Highway and Transportation Department,
1913- 2003, published by the Arkansas State Highway and Transportation
Department, Little Rock, 2003, p. 21.
Published in the Jefferson County Historical Quarterly, Winter 2014.
