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By Rickie Longfellow
In 1799, Mississippi Governor Winthrop Sargent signed a bill creating the First Road Act. When Mississippi became the 20th state in the Union on December 10, 1817, the roads were little more than meandering trails for the approximately 70,000 people...
By Rickie Longfellow
The Cumberland Gap, which measures 1,304 feet in altitude, is Nature's passage through the Cumberland Mountains between Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia. One of three natural breaks in the rugged Appalachian Mountain range, it served as a gateway in...
By Rickie Longfellow
Highway One follows the Pacific coastline from Baja to the top of the Olympic Peninsula. The most scenic is the 139 miles from Monterey to Morro Bay near San Luis Obispo.
John L.D. Roberts, M.D., from New York founded the town of Seaside in...
By Rickie Longfellow
County Highway S-2 is a desert road in south-central California with a fascinating history. Beginning at California Highway 79 near Warner Springs, the road leads south through the Anza-Borrego Desert in the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. Known as...
By Rickie Longfellow
The oldest constructed roads discovered to date are in former Mesopotamia, now known as Iraq. These stone paved streets date back to about 4000 B.C. in the Mesopotamia cities of Ur and Babylon. The location in the land of the Sumerian people offered...
By Rickie Longfellow
Motorists on Interstate 77, a major north/south highway, pass easily and quickly through the Big Walker Mountain Tunnel near Wytheville, Virginia, and East River Mountain Tunnel at Bluefield, West Virginia. The twin lane East River Mountain Tunnel is...
By Rickie Longfellow
If your parents, grandparents or great grandparents had an automobile during the time of the 1929-1939 Great Depression, which wasn't great in the positive sense, chances are they didn't have money to operate a car.
In 1928, 4.6 million automobiles were sold...
By Rickie Longfellow
For those motorists planning to travel the Pennsylvania Turnpike this week, have no fear-it is not abandoned.
But there is a 13-mile stretch of the Turnpike, with three tunnels and a travel plaza, east of the Breezewood area, that was...
Rickie Longfellow was a Program Assistant in the Federal Highway Administration's Ohio Division Office. As a writer-editor for many years, she decided to combine her love of history with her interest in highways by writing a column, "Back in Time," for FHWA News. Ideas for the column come from...
If you've read an anti-sprawl book, you've read the horror story: the evil Highway Lobby (motto: Let's Pave Over America) tricked Congress in 1956 into building Interstate highways instead of providing aid to transit as Congress otherwise would have done-thereby forcing people who longed for...