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  Texas : Features : Columns : "Texas Tales"

International Pavedway

by Mike Cox
Mike Cox
The International Pavedway never existed anywhere but on a map, but most Texans have traveled it many times.

In 1917, when the Washington-based American Highway Association issued the sixth edition of its yearbook, the Texas Legislature had just passed a bill creating a state highway department. But the agency had not yet been organized, and Texas had fewer than a thousand miles of paved roads. The rest of the state’s 10,000 or so miles of roadway amounted to gravel-surfaced or worse.

Even so, the transition from horse to horseless carriage had begun and Texas needed paved roads. In Texas and across the nation, the business community saw that need and began lobbying for what would come to be called infrastructure. Numerous road-boosting associations came into being to press federal and state government for specific transportation routes.

“For a number of years,” the 1917 yearbook explained, “associations have been increasing rapidly in number which have for their object the improvement of highways ranging in length from roads connecting adjacent county seats to transcontinental routes.”

The roads were to be marked “more or less fully by colored bands on poles, fences and bridges, so that the traveler can follow them easily.”

One of those association-promoted routes was the International Pavedway. As envisioned, the IP would stretch 1,960 miles, cutting through 7 states and 88 counties. Beginning at Detroit, it would end at the international bridge in Laredo.

Entering the Lone Star state at Texarkana, the IP would proceed south of the Red River through Clarksville, Paris, and Sherman.

From Sherman, the roadway would have turned south to Dallas and then west to Fort Worth. Down from Cowtown, the proposed road continued to Cleburne, Walnut Spring and Waco. After Waco, the IP was to have extended to Austin, San Antonio and stop at Laredo. Today, of course, the Brazos-to-Rio Grande segment of this route is Interstate 35, the busiest transportation corridor in Texas.

Eventually, most of the dots along the proposed IP got connected by paved roads, but the 1917 route never became a single, named highway.

Another major roadway envisioned back in 1917 was the Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway, a coast-to-coast route covering 3,780 miles between Miami and Los Angeles.

In Texas, the roadway would have gone from Beaumont to Victoria, via Liberty and Houston. At Victoria, the highway would have divided, with one route going down the coast to Brownsville in the Rio Grande Valley and up the river through Laredo and Eagle Pass to Del Rio. The other leg of the roadway honoring the first and only president of the Confederate States of America would have headed west via San Antonio to Del Rio.

From Del Rio, the highway would have split again, one route hugging the river all the way to El Paso (a road that still doesn’t exist as a complete route) and the other through Ozona, Fort Stockton and Marfa.

At El Paso, the highway would have gone to the now-extinct town of Alfalfa Station to New Mexico.

Other association-promoted corridors through Texas included the Jefferson Highway (not to be confused with the Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway), the Meridian Road, the Ozark Trail and the Southern National Highway.

Transportation boomers envisioned the Jefferson Highway as stretching from Winnipeg, Canada to New Orleans. In Texas, it would have cut through Denison, Lenora, Greenville, Mt. Pleasant, Sulphur Springs, Gilmer, Longview and Marshall before crossing into Louisiana.

The Meridian Road was seen as connecting Manitoba, Canada to Galveston, via Fargo, ND, Columbus, O, Wichita, KS, Fort Worth and Houston. Much of the Texas portion of this route is today I-45.

Running from St. Louis to Albuquerque, the Ozark Trail would have cut across the Panhandle through Amarillo, essentially tracking what would become Route 66 and eventually I-40.

The Southern National Highway would have connected Washington, D.C. with San Diego. The roadway would have gone through Dallas and Fort Worth and then across West Texas to Roswell, N.M. and back into Texas to El Paso. Much of this route eventually became I-20.

Associations continue to play a role in promoting transportation improvements, but the notion of using names instead of numbers for interstate highways went the way of the Model A.

© Mike Cox - "Texas Tales"
February 21, 2008 column
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