(Published in the Summer 2016 Jefferson County Historical Quarterly. One interesting fact to keep in mind is that at this time Pine Bluff had two passenger
trains daily to and from Little Rock & Memphis. Travel by train was the norm a hundred years ago.)
100 Years Ago: The Free
Bridge, the Dollarway, and Arkansas Roads, Part V
By David Trulock
Before taking a look at several
road-related events reported in Pine Bluff newspapers during 1916, we will
first return to the beginnings of Free Bridge and Dollarway Road construction in
1913, and to the different materials used for road and street construction at
that time. It’s a bit of a surprise to
read that wooden paving was used for some streets in Pine Bluff.
The initial phase of
construction on the Dollarway is described in a front-page article in the Pine Bluff Commercial on December 20,
1913, under the heading “Will Soon Open Dollarway Road”:
A section of the Jefferson
county end of the Pine Bluff-Little Rock road, which is being constructed with Dollarway
pavement, will soon be thrown open to traffic, according to [an] announcement
at the county engineer’s office.
Construction work began at
the end of the wood block pavement near Bellwood cemetery, and the crew of men
are now grading at a point two and one-half miles from Pine Bluff.
The road will be the longest
of its kind in the South and has attracted much attention throughout the
country.
Presumably there were other
early streets in Pine Bluff made of wood blocks besides West Pullen near Bellwood
Cemetery. A little research shows wood block paving was used worldwide for some
city streets in the late 1800s.[1]
Virgin forests were still being cut down in many places—Jefferson and nearby
counties in Arkansas, for instance—so pine and oak were more readily available and
cheaper than brick. Some wood blocks used in paving looked like large bricks, while
others were more or less square, like cobblestone. Compared to cobblestone,
wood blocks provided a smoother, quieter surface. One disadvantage was that
wood wore out more quickly than brick or stone pavement. Another was that it
retained undesirable odors (horse urine was a pretty common one).
Red brick paving was used on
many streets in Pine Bluff, and old bricks can still be seen occasionally when
the modern asphalt wears through.[2]
As Pine Bluff expanded, some streets were first made of gravel and later paved
over, as mechanized paving methods and more affordable paving material became
available.
Another instance of a wooden
roadway in Jefferson County is the wood planking, supported by ironwork,
originally used on the Free Bridge’s driveways or wagonways. A substantial
amount of lumber was also used in other aspects of the construction of the
bridge. One of those uses is mentioned on the same front page of the Commercial as the Dollarway article
quoted above. The article is headlined “Here
to Build Free Bridge”:
Twenty-five bridge workmen
have arrived in Pine Bluff and are quartered at the Orton Hotel on East Second
avenue. J. A. Cole is the foreman of the
construction gang.
They have been at work
loading five cars of lumber sold to the Missouri Valley Bridge and Iron Company
by Arkansas Short Leaf Lumber Company, on barges at the foot of Nebraska
street. As soon as the lumber is transported
to the free bridge site, seven miles up the river, work of erecting shanties
for the bridge workers will begin.
The Pine Bluff Sand and
Gravel Company has the contract for towing the lumber up the river.
A car of construction
material, such as hoisting machinery, etc., is now en route to Pine Bluff.
This, too, will be taken to the bridge site as soon as possible. It is expected actual construction work will
begin in three weeks.
Apparently, the temporary
shantytown was not as bad as it may sound.
The Pine Bluff Daily Graphic, on
March 15, 1914, reported a “little city” existing at the site, with a power
plant, machine shop, planing mill, offices of the supervisors, a commissary, a
very big cement mixer, and “homes of the laborers.” The article also stated
that “Everything was very clean.”
Post-Construction: Dollarway
Now we jump from the beginnings
of the Dollarway and Free Bridge to what happened immediately after they were
built, and some of the problems associated with their initial use.
For people wanting to travel
from Pine Bluff to Little Rock, one problem with the Dollarway was that it
connected to six miles of unimproved road in Saline County before connecting
with a good road in Pulaski County. Articles about accidents occurring in this
bad section of the road, and about temporary road improvement work there,
appear in Pine Bluff papers in 1915 and early 1916.[3]
A more local problem with
the Dollarway was that the daredevils who liked to speed at nearly 45 miles an
hour caused people living along the new highway to be afraid to use it. Some of
these “country folk,” as one headline calls them, had been against the Dollarway
project from the beginning. Many still used horses and wagons for transportation.[4]
The bituminous-coated
concrete of the Dollarway was only nine feet (three yards) wide, and cars
approaching each other had to move partly onto the gravel shoulders in order to
pass. Several reports of head-on collisions on the Dollarway appear in Pine
Bluff papers of 1915 and 1916, but these were apparently not cases of reckless
or high-speed driving. The occupants of
the cars were not seriously injured and no traffic citations are mentioned. Some of the reported automobile accidents on
other roads in Jefferson County during this time period did involve serious
injury and fatalities.
A historical detail
concerning the Dollarway is that the three-yard width of the paved surface is
what gave dollarway pavement its name. One
foot along the roadway is one-third of a yard. Multiplying this by the 3-yard width of the
pavement gives one square yard of highway surface per linear foot along the
roadway. Using the same type of pavement to build a road more than three yards wide
would have cost more than a dollar per linear foot of road. This is something of a moot issue in the case
of Pine Bluff’s Dollarway, since the cost was actually about $1.35 per linear
foot (see Part II of this series).
Another rather nitpicky point
is that the construction and trash-collection industries often used (and still
use) “yard” as an abbreviation for “cubic yard”. The two “one-half yard” concrete mixers reportedly used for mixing cement, sand, and gravel
on the Dollarway project were each capable of mixing one-half cubic yard of
concrete each. Given the five inch (0.139
yard) depth of dollarway concrete and its three yard width, that means the road
progressed by 1.2 yards (3.6 feet) every time each mixer was unloaded.
The laying of the concrete
was completed at 9 p.m. on October 26, 1914, according to an article in the Commercial the next day. Construction
had started eleven months earlier, so the average rate of progress on the concrete
was two miles per month, as anticipated by the contractor. (Readers could
convert that to feet or yards—linear feet or yards—should they be so inclined,
in order to figure the number of cement mixer loads used.)
Returning to the problem of
Saline County’s six-mile stretch of unimproved road at the north end of the
Dollarway, we find that a solution came about after the Arkansas Legislature in
1915 rearranged the southern boundaries of Saline and Pulaski counties. The problem had been that Saline County could
not afford to contribute funds toward improving the road. Pulaski County could
afford to pay its share. The first paragraph of an October 1915 article in the Commercial describes the situation:
Little Rock, Oct. 30.—Pulaski county will pay
one-half the cost of improving the six-mile section of the Little Rock-Pine
Bluff highway and furnish an engineer to take care of the preliminary work,
County Judge Joe Asher promised the commissioners of Special Road Improvement
District No. 1, formerly a part of Saline County, at a meeting held in the
court house here today. The improvement
will probably make an outlay of $40,000. Members of the board present were S.
L. Kay, Jr, Gordon Greenfield, Dr. G. E. Reed and G. H. Wilson.
Today, I-530 between Little
Rock and Redfield crosses through a corner of Saline County, but Highway 365,
following the route of the original highway, does not. This circumstance exists
because of the 1915 transfer of 22,000 acres of Saline County to Pulaski
County, for the purpose of completing the Pine Bluff-Little Rock highway, which
was accomplished in 1916.
Post-construction: Free Bridge
As mentioned in Part III of
this series, the Missouri Valley Bridge and Iron Works in November 1914 had
agreed to perform work on the approaches and abutments of the bridge, with the
payment for the work to be determined later by arbitration. This was done in August 1915, when the
company received a final payment of $70,000. The settlement was reported in the
August 4 issue of the Commercial, which
said: “This leaves the free bridge, a structure costing about $650,000,
entirely paid for.” That would be $15.2
million in today’s money, and the tax burden for Jefferson County property
owners had just begun.
The post-construction problem
with the Free Bridge was that its location didn’t coincide with any existing roads
on either side of the Arkansas River, so new roads had to be built to connect
with older ones that were still dirt roads.
Clearance work for a road connecting Pine Bluff to the bridge had barely
started in April 1915, when people on the north side of the river who wanted to
get to town began using the bridge.[5] They probably did so for the thrill of
crossing the bridge, and for the challenge of using the connecting dirt roads
with stumps still in them, rather than for the practicality of the journey. The
long-used but unimproved roads to the ferry connecting north-side farms with
downtown Pine Bluff would’ve still been the practical way to go, although some
waiting at the ferry crossing might have been involved.
One newspaper article
provides a good example of this situation. The Commercial reported on September 1 that F. A. Jarvis, who had
recently blocked Free Bridge traffic from coming through farmland he rented (land
known as the Winfrey Place), had decided to reopen the “road” that crossed the
property. As was common in those days,
when a big mud hole formed, or a fallen tree blocked a dirt road, the wagons
(and sometimes cars) simply made an impromptu curve around the
obstruction. Apparently this is what had
happened to Mr. Jarvis. On their way to and from the Free Bridge, “wagoners,”
as the article stated it, had been tearing up his cotton field.
The reason almost no work
had been done is that no Road Improvement Districts had been formed to build
roads on either side of the Free Bridge.
This situation changed in early 1915, at the same time the bridge was
completed, when the Arkansas legislature passed Act 338, the Alexander Road
law.[6]
This made it easier for landowners in Arkansas to form Road Improvement
Districts. The first one formed under the new law in Jefferson County—possibly
the first in the state—was for construction of a road from Pine Bluff to the
Free Bridge.[7] Petitions for building improved roads on the
north side of the bridge were also being circulated in the summer of 1915.[8]
Under the headline “File
Petition for Macadam Road to Free Bridge,” with sub-head “Majority Has Signed,”
the proposed road was described in an August 12, 1915, article in the Commercial:
The road will be about 4½
miles long, including a spur on the old McFadden ferry road which is
three-quarters of a mile. The main road
is to be 18 feet wide and the spur 10 feet wide. The gravel will be 10 inches deep. County Highway Engineer H. H. Humphreys
estimates the road will cost $26,221.52.
Thirteen thousand, two hundred cubic yards of gravel will be required.
The property owners are to pay 50 per cent of
the cost and County Judge Philpot will issue $13,000 worth of county warrants
from the general fund to pay the other 50 per cent, providing bankers and
merchants of Pine Bluff advance the money on the warrants.
Several items in this
article provide enlightening historical information. First, there had been an
Arkansas River ferry crossing upriver from the future Free Bridge site, at the
end of what is now McFadden Road. The road and ferry crossing are shown on a
1905 real estate plat of Jefferson County. (See Ancestry site pertaining to Indexed County Land Ownership Maps.)
Secondly, property owners
themselves were authorized by the Alexander Road law to form a Road Improvement
District, whereas previously only counties could do so by issuing bonds. In
each case a majority of property owners along the route had to sign a petition
to form the road district, but starting in 1915 the property owners took on the
debt themselves, based on a 30% valuation of their property.[9] The other half of the debt was taken care of
by county warrants for which local businesses advanced the money.
So there was a question of
whether business owners would agree to such an advance of funds. Isaac Dreyfus,
owner of one of the first department stores in Pine Bluff, was the first to do
so in the case of the Free Bridge Road improvement district. As a headline in the Commercial of August 18 put it: “Big Merchant Starts Ball Rolling
on Plan to Build Road to Bridge.” Other local
merchants and bankers soon followed the example set by Dreyfus, and the $13,000
worth of county “scrip” was sold fairly quickly.
A two-paragraph article from
the Commercial’s front page of October
22, 1915, tells the story of the beginning of Free Bridge Road construction:
The work of hauling and
spreading gravel on the road to the free bridge was begun today. About 45 men
are engaged on the job. J. P. McNulty
has a contract for hauling the gravel from Pine Bluff, but the placing of the
gravel is under the supervision of P. H. McCarthy, who was employed by the road
commissioners without a contract.
The graveling is starting
just north of St. Joseph’s Catholic cemetery. McNulty says the road probably
will be completed within 40 days at the most. All sub-surface work was done
under the supervision of Mr. McNulty also. McNulty’s hauling contract was the
only one let in connection with the road.
The commissioners—F. H. Walker, J. B. White, and Ed Baughman—are
following closely the progress of the work.
The work took longer than the expected 40 days, and
was still in progress when the big flood of 1916 hit, producing a headline in
the Commercial on February 1 that
appears strange to readers who know about the upcoming 1927 flood: “Arkansas
Valley Suffers Worst Flood in History.” The flood was a less-disastrous version
of the 1927 flood, a preview of a coming attraction in movie language. Interested readers can learn more by looking
up Tom Dillard’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
column of January 24, 2016, in which he says the severity of the 1916 flood
was “eclipsed only by the legendary flood of 1927.”
The relevance of the flood
to the Free Bridge Road story is that after the overflow had subsided (it
lasted about six days), the commissioners of the Free Bridge Road District
wanted the county to appropriate $5,000 to “raise the grade” of the road, which
was still under construction, so that it would stand a good chance of being
above “the extreme high water stage.” County Judge Philpot would not meet with
the commissioners, a news article in the Commercial
on March 31 reported, “and by his absence signified he would not grant the
request of the commissioners.”
In the ensuing five months
the Free Bridge Road was apparently completed, due to the reported incident of
a large, expensive automobile having a blowout on the road. The article appears
in the Commercial on August 21, under
the headline “Two Autos Run Off Free Bridge Road”:
A big Cadillac “12” owned
and operated by S. J. Thomas of England ran down the embankment on the free
bridge road about three miles from Pine Bluff yesterday afternoon shortly after
4 o’clock. A blow-out caused the driver to momentarily lose control of the
machine but luckily neither Mr. Thomas or the other occupant was in the least
hurt. The repair car of the Riley Auto
Company made a quick trip to the scene of the accident in order to make some
adjustments on the crippled car, and … ran halfway down the embankment, a few
feet from the Cadillac car. A passing
autoist in a Ford assisted in pulling out the repair car, and later the
Cadillac was able to continue its journey.
Work was being done at the
time on improving several roads in Jefferson County northeast of the Free
Bridge, one being to Altheimer, Wabbaseka and Humphrey. The other road under
construction went to Sherrill, Ferda and Tucker, and connected with improved
roads on into England in Lonoke County. From there a decent road called the England
Pike connected with Argenta (now North Little Rock), and another Arkansas River
free bridge connected Argenta with downtown Little Rock (see Coda section,
below).
In Part II of this series,
John Gould Fletcher is quoted as saying “the modern age” of travel began in
Arkansas in 1910, when four automobiles containing residents of Pine Bluff made
the journey to Little Rock in four hours, thus averaging about 10 miles an hour
for the trip, or “little more than a moderately
good horse and buggy.” But the year 1916 seems a more fitting beginning for the
modern age of travel in Arkansas, for three reasons.
First, the Federal Aid Act,
passed on July 11, 1916, provided the first federal contributions to road
construction in the states, including Arkansas, which was to receive $1.2
million over the next five years.[10]
Second, that stretch of dirt road the four cars travelled on in 1910 to get
from Pine Bluff to Little Rock had, in 1916, become a completed highway. And
third, particular to Jefferson County, a slightly interrupted but nevertheless
routine journey of a “big Cadillac” across Jefferson County’s Free Bridge
signifies that the roads connecting with the bridge had finally entered the
modern automobile age.
Coda: Arkansas River Bridges in Arkansas in 1916
On Saturday, April 24, 1915,
the Commercial published a “Progress
Edition” that included an article with a listing of bridges in Arkansas
spanning the Arkansas River. (The list
would have still been the same in 1916.)
“The Jefferson county free bridge is the third free bridge which spans
the Arkansas River in this state,” the article pointed out, noting that the
earliest of these bridges was built by Pulaski County in 1897, connecting
Little Rock with Argenta. It was a “big
structure,” said the article, “for vehicles and pedestrians only.”
The other free bridge, built
in 1912, was constructed between Fort Smith and Van Buren with financing from
Sebastian and Crawford counties. It was like Jefferson County’s free bridge in that
it had a lift span, an ultimately unused railroad track down the center, and cantilevered
roadways along its sides. The center section, however, was also used for rubber-tired
street cars that ran on separate tracks alongside the unused railroad track. According to one source, this bridge also cost
$650,000.[11]
Continuing downriver with
the list of bridges: There was a pontoon toll-bridge at Dardanelle, built about
the same time as one at Pine Bluff “but more successfully operated,” the
article said, adding that efforts were being made to build a free bridge at
Dardanelle. (This didn’t happen until the new Highway 22 bridge opened in January
of 1929. See Arkansas Encyclopedia of History & Culture, Dardanelle Pontoon Bridge.)
The 1890 pontoon toll-bridge
at Pine Bluff lasted only a few months. It had been “a big success for a while
and was liberally patronized,” but was destroyed by a “high stage of water”
during which the “swiftness of the current together with the great amount of
drift made it impossible to keep the bridge in operation and the bridge was finally
abandoned at a big loss to the builders.” Perhaps Dardanelle, being upriver from
Pine Bluff, had less driftwood (“drift”) to deal with.
The Commercial article concludes with a list of all Arkansas bridges
across the river:
The completion of the
Jefferson county free bridge makes the eleventh bridge across the Arkansas
River in this state. At Fort Smith and Van Buren there are two railroad bridges
and a free bridge, a pontoon bridge at Dardanelle, three railroad bridges and a
free bridge at Little Rock, the Jefferson county free bridge, the Cotton Belt
railroad bridge eight miles south of Pine Bluff and the Memphis, Helena &
Louisiana railroad bridge at Watson, north of McGehee.
Mention of the Cotton Belt
bridge (the Rob Roy bridge) serves as a reminder that, from 1884 through 1934, Jefferson
County residents—mainly “plantation” owners and workers near Rob Roy, Swan
Lake, and Reydell—had access to the local “Peavine” railroad as a way of
travelling to and from Pine Bluff.[12]
Better roads and the existence of the Free Bridge were what gradually put this
once hugely popular rail line out of business.
Kenneth Hensley referred me to several of the news articles used in this
story, and provided me with photocopies from microfilm of news articles from
the 1930s and 1950s that will be used for a future Quarterly article about the
Free Bridge. Meanwhile, an error from Part I of this series needs to be
corrected: the Free Bridge had only one railroad track down the center—two
rails set at standard gauge—when it was constructed, not “two sets of train
tracks.” —D. T.
[1] “History on
the Road,” http://www.foresthistory.org/publications/FHT/FHTSpring2008/Timblin.pdf;
Caswell Flooring Systems, http://kaswell.com/about-us/history-of-woodblock/;
Nicolson Pavement, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolson_pavement .
[2] Exposed
bricks can currently be seen at Martin Avenue & Walnut, Main Street
& Harding, and 2nd and Poplar (across from True Vine "E" church), among other places. Actually, there are historic structures at Martin & Walnut and Main & Harding, which can be seen via Google Street View.
[3] “Repair
Today Bad Stretch in Road,” Pine Bluff Daily Graphic, p. 2, April 11, 1915; “Autos
Collided on Dollarway Road; None Badly Hurt,” Pine Bluff Commercial, p. 1, November
18, 1915; “Many Autos in Accidents on the Dollarway,” Commercial, p. 1, July 5,
1916.
[4]
“Country Folk Fear To Use Dollarway,” Pine Bluff Daily Graphic, p. 1, September
4, 1915.
[5]
“Free Bridge is Open to Traffic,” Pine Bluff Daily Graphic, p. 1, April 10,
1915.
[6] 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. 22.
[7] The
August 12th article quoted in the next paragraph says it was the
first in Jefferson County; the article “Free Bridge Road Bonds For $13,000 Were
Cashed Today,” on p. 1 in the December 14, 1915, Commercial, says it was the
first in the state.
[8]
“Jefferson County Roads: Three Planned, All of Which Would Connect With New
Free Bridge,” Arkansas Gazette, p. 1, August 7, 1915.
[9] Historical Review, Arkansas State
Highway and Transportation Department, Little Rock, 2003, p. 22.
[10] Ibid, p. 23.
[12]
See, for instance, the Arkansas Railroad Museum webpage on the “Pine Bluff Arkansas River Railway.”
