Roads and Turnpikes, Early. Turnpikes, an important organizational innovation that significantly improved roads in nineteenth‐century America, were state‐chartered corporations that built roads (sometimes on a preexisting roadbed) in return for the right to charge travelers a specified toll. The financial resources of the turnpike corporations gave them a significant advantage over local governments, which usually relied on the labor of uncooperative farmers and the dubious
engineering skills of unqualified commissioners to construct roads. Turnpikes put lengthy stretches of road under unified management, thereby dispensing with the need for coordination among a multiplicity of local governments to improve roads.
Although some historians have labeled the early nineteenth century the “turnpike age,” it would be more accurate to view turnpike growth as coming in waves. Beginning with the opening of the
Philadelphia to Lancaster tollroad, the initial turnpike movement spread rapidly during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, especially in the Northeast. The
New England and Middle Atlantic states alone chartered more than nine hundred companies before 1830. By that time, turnpikes had begun to spread throughout the
Middle West and
South. Although these first waves subsided with the advent of canals and
railroads, individual turnpikes continued to operate as feeder lines to the canals and railroads for many decades. Moreover, new turnpikes remained an option for areas without access to water or rail transport. Turnpike chartering and construction, for example, continued in
California into the 1870s.
Although organized as corporations, most turnpikes were financial disasters. Higher‐than‐expected maintenance costs meant that many turnpikes had to channel toll revenue into maintaining roads. Travelers often managed to carve out “shunpike” trails around tollgates, thereby avoiding the necessity of paying tolls. State regulations granted numerous exemptions that compounded the problems of collecting tolls. In New York, for example, the legislature exempted from paying tolls travelers residing with one mile of a gate, performing militia duties, serving on juries, or going to a grist mill. Shunpiking and political pressure for toll exemptions reflected an undercurrent of popular distrust of turnpikes, as many common folk viewed the corporations as unjustified grants of state privilege to “aristocratic” proprietors.
Despite the well‐known lack of profitability, Americans eagerly invested in turnpikes because they provided indirect benefits in the form of higher land values and increased commerce. Turnpikes were part of the town rivalries endemic to nineteenth‐century America; residents of small towns and villages hoped that a turnpike would transform their locality into a great regional trade depot. Although such dreams usually proved elusive, contemporary observers nevertheless remained convinced that turnpikes significantly improved transportation, raised land values, and spurred local commerce. The combination of poor direct returns and high indirect benefits undermined charges that turnpikes were “aristocratic institutions”; consequently, they came to be viewed as mechanisms of community improvement. The strong relationship between community support and the turnpike corporations perhaps accounts for the popularity of turnpikes throughout the nineteenth century.
Roads and turnpikes figured in national politics as well. In 1816, Congress authorized federal support for a road into the interior. Construction of such a road had already begun at Cumberland, Maryland, in 1811. This so‐called National Road reached Wheeling, West Virginia, on the Ohio River by 1818, and Vandalia, Illinois, where it ended, by 1838. The
Whig party's program of federally funded internal improvements included road construction. Democrats also supported the National Road, but Andrew
Jackson's 1830 veto of the Whig leader Henry
Clay's bill to fund a sixty‐mile road in Kentucky—the so‐called Maysville Road Veto—came to symbolize the party divisions of the day.
See also
Antebellum Era;
Canals and Waterways;
Early Republic, Era of the;
Economic Development;
Highway System.
Bibliography
Daniel B. Klein , The Voluntary Provision of the Public Goods? The Turnpike Companies of Early America, Economic Inquiry 28 (1990): 788–812.
Daniel B. Klein and and John Majewski , Economy, Community, and Law: The Turnpike Movement in New York, 1797–1845, Law and Society Review 26, no. 3 (1993): 469–512.
John Majewski
