100 Years Ago: The Free Bridge, the Dollarway, and Arkansas
Roads, Part I
By David Trulock
One hundred years ago, a “free bridge” across the
Arkansas River was nearing completion six miles upriver from Pine Bluff. It was
designed to be both a railroad bridge and a bridge for wagons, pedestrians,
and—though they were not yet plentiful—autos and trucks. Thus it had two sets one set
of train tracks down the middle, and separate, one-way “driveways” along each
side. But in the fall of 1914, neither
railroad tracks nor roads were being constructed anywhere near the site of the almost-completed
bridge.
The absence of adjoining railroad tracks is easy to
understand. Putting tracks on the new
bridge was considered to be a first step in the future construction of a north-south
railroad route, first proposed by a group of Pine Bluff businessmen in 1906.
The Pine Bluff North and South Railway, as it was called, would compete with
the existing east-west routes through the city and, it was hoped, lower local freight
costs that were deemed to be unreasonably high at the time.
The absence of a roadway leading to the bridge as
it neared completion is a little harder to understand. These days, when we think of rural bridges we
think of them as part of an interconnecting road system. Wouldn’t a road out to the new bridge from
Pine Bluff have been constructed at the same time as the bridge was being
built?
There was, in fact, a very nice road being built in
Jefferson County at the same time the bridge was being constructed, but it was
not related to the bridge project. But
it was an exception to the generally poor road conditions that prevailed in
Arkansas at time. The problem was not so
much a lack of roads as it was a lack of maintenance and improvement of
roads. Local taxes were required to do
that, and not enough local landowners, or perhaps not enough local politicians,
wanted to pay for better local road conditions.
But national attention was being paid.
A United States Department of Agriculture
publication from 1917 gives details on the mileages and types of public roads
that existed in Arkansas at the time: [i]
At the close of 1914, Arkansas reported 50,743
miles of public road, of which 1,097 miles, or 2.16 percent, were
surfaced. Of the surfaced roads, 362.5
miles were plain macadam, 535 miles gravel, 175 sand clay, 21 concrete, and 4
miles were bituminous macadam. … Quite a
number of counties reported a smaller mileage of surfaced roads than was
reported for 1909. Several counties also
reported large increases in total road mileage, with the result that the total
mileage of all roads reported increased from 36,445 miles in 1909 to 50,743
miles in 1914, and that the percentage of surfaced roads shows a decrease on
this account from 2.97 in 1909 to 2.16 in 1914.
In other words, if the figures are correct, Arkansas only had 11.75 more
miles of improved roads in 1914 than in 1909.
The mileages given for improved roads are for roads
“outside of incorporated cities.”
The 21 miles of concrete roadway reported refers to
the exceptional roadway mentioned above, which many readers might now have
guessed is Jefferson County’s historic Dollarway, completed in October
1914. The Dollarway, also called the Dollarway
Road, was actually between 22 and 23 miles in length, and was “concrete
pavement,” meaning the concrete base had an asphalt or bitumen coating. As is often noted, it was the longest stretch
of paved concrete road in the United States at the time. Also significant is the fact that the four small
bridges along its route were the first in Arkansas to be built using what later
became the standard material—reinforced concrete, which contains iron
reinforcing rods or bars.
So in early November 1914, Arkansas had one short
stretch of roadway in Jefferson County that its residents could be proud of,
while overall its roads were in a rather shameful condition. At the same time,
Jefferson County residents and particularly those who lived in Pine Bluff could
brag about their almost-completed free bridge.
This was especially true after Thursday, November 5, when approximately
500 Pine Bluff residents were transported by barges up the river to tour the
bridge, courtesy of the Missouri Valley Bridge and Iron Works, the
contractor. “The visitors were placed
ashore on the south side of the river, mounted the bridge platform and walked
to within one span of the north side of the river,” the Pine Bluff Commericial
reported.[ii] (The bridge had seven spans, one of which was
a lift span.)
In newspapers during 1913 and 1914, the Free Bridge
and the Dollarway were for the most part not dignified by capital letters,
because those descriptive words had not yet become names. The bridge was a free bridge as opposed to a
toll bridge. The road was constructed by
“the dollarway method,” which, according to an Arkansas Gazette article by Jim Leslie, had first been used to pave
West 10th Street in Little Rock.[iii] Leslie doesn’t say whether the 10th
Street project achieved the estimated one-dollar-per-linear-foot from which the
name derives. The final cost of the
Dollarway, however, was closer to $1.36 per linear foot.[iv] (Feel free to multiply that by 5280 to get the
cost per mile. One dollar per linear
foot in 1913-14 was not cheap!)
How the Dollarway was paid for provides a lesson,
perhaps, in why a new road from Pine Bluff to the Free Bridge wasn’t planned or
constructed in a timely manner. Road Improvement Districts of that time period and
the controversial “Bridge District” created to finance the Free Bridge—which
didn’t open for traffic until April 1915—will be discussed in the next issue of
the Quarterly.
But what about those railroad tracks on the bridge?
The tracks were torn out in 1926, and the center
section was opened to automobile and truck traffic. The planned Pine Bluff
North and South Railway never materialized. In his 1974 book Saracen’s Country, Jim Leslie gives two reasons: “The most important of these was the advent of
World War I, which stopped all rail construction in the nation. After the war the need for the connection
became unnecessary, since better regulation of freight rates had developed and
the two lines into the city were giving better service.”
[i] “Public
road mileage and revenues in Southern states, 1914,” Publication 387, USDA
Bureau of Public Roads, 1917, p. 14.
Accessible online through Google Books.
[ii]
“Big Crowd Saw the Free Bridge,” Pine Bluff Commercial, November 5, 1914, p. 1.
[iii] “The
Old Dollarway: It Was Narrow And Windiing—But It Got You to Pine Bluff,” Arkansas Gazette, January 4, 1970, p.
6E.
[iv]
“Dollarway Road” by Claudette Stager, in the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture.
