To meet all these demands, the NPS in effect jettisoned its original 5-year plan and embarked on a looser, but much larger, road program tailored to larger authorizations. Between 1930 and 1933, Congress tripled the annual park road authorizations. In 1934 and 1935, the Administration allocated $18.3 million of emergency relief funds for park roads and parkways.[1][N 1] With these funds the NPS and BPR greatly expanded their efforts, and in the single year of 1936, they completed 204 miles of park roads and 142 miles of approach roads.[2] By 1941, when the war put an end to roadwork in the parks, 1,781 miles of park roads and 255 miles of access roads had been completed at a cost of about $87 million.[3]
To some extent, roads in the national parks were demonstration roads for the embryonic State highway landscaping and erosion control programs of the 1930’s. For years before environmental design became popular, the National Park Service had employed landscape architects, naturalists and foresters to advise on the location and construction of its roads. Because of this advice, damage to the landscape from roadbuilding was much less in the parks than on State highways or even on roads in the adjacent national forests constructed by the BPR. Furthermore, the park roads were highly visible models of what could be accomplished by good slope grading and landscaping to blend a highway into its natural surroundings and control erosion damage.
The National Parkways
In May 1928 Congress instructed the Secretary of Agriculture to build a highway from Washington to Mount Vernon as a memorial to President Washington and to have it finished in time for the bicentennial of the first president’s birth in 1932. The BPR, acting for the Secretary, selected a scenic location along the shore of the Potomac River and designed a landscaped four-lane undivided highway in the style of the Westchester County parkways. No effort was spared to make this the most modern and beautiful highway in the United States:
Every possible effort is being put forth . . . to make this road one of the most attractive in North America. The alignment as designed is a succession of long, easy curves; the grades rise and fall gently with the natural roll of the hills ; the cut and fill banks will be cut to flat slopes and rounded so as to merge with the natural topograph; and the bridges . . . will be graceful flat arches faced with native stone.[4]
The BPR finished the Mount Vernon Memorial Highway on schedule, at a cost considerably above the $4.5 million originally provided by Congress. In 1930 it became the first unit of the George Washington Memorial Parkway authorized by the Capper-Cramton Act (46 Stat 482).
The George Washington and other later Federal parkways in the Washington metropolitan area became commuter arteries in the same manner as the Westchester County parkways. The Blue Ridge and Natchez Trace Parkways, however, developed along quite different lines and much closer to the original Bronx River recreational road concept.
These parkways were begun as emergency relief projects without specific authorization by Congress. After they were well started, Congress recognized them as national parkways in acts providing for their administration and maintenance by the National Park Service. When originally planned in the 1930’s, these parkways were conceived as modern motor roads with extremely wide rights-of-way—actually elongated parks sited to provide scenic views for the motorists and recreational opportunities at selected places along the way.[N 2] Thus they became not merely cross-country highways, but recreational destinations in themselves similar to the national parks and monuments.
The BPR as construction agent for the NPS let the first contract for the Blue Ridge Parkway in February 1936, and by the end of 1939, 305 miles were completed or in various stages of construction and 140 miles of continuous paved parkway were open to traffic, attracting 300,000 visitors that year.[5] The Natchez Trace Parkway developed much more slowly and by 1939 only 36 miles were completed.
Most of the Federal highways were in the national forests, the national parks or the national parkways, but there were others. In the West, considerable mileages of local roads in Indian reservations remained under Federal control after the States took over the main primaries and secondaries. Some of the larger military reservations contained well over 100 miles of roads maintained by the Army or Navy.[N 3] Over the years, the Government added steadily to its road inventory so that now almost 7 percent of the rural road mileage is under Federal control.[N 4]
The First Foreign-Aid Program
A land route connecting the countries of the Americas has been a dream of visionaries going back to Spanish times. These early schemes did not involve the United States until May 1928 when Congress, by joint resolution, requested the President to explore the possibility of an international highway at the forthcoming Pan American Highway Congress scheduled to meet in Rio de Janeiro in August 1929.[N 5] In March 1929, Congress authorized the appropriation of $50,000 to enable the Secretary of State to coop-
- ↑ $16.0 million from the National Industrial Recovery Act and $2.3 million from the Hayden-Cartwright Act of 1934. In addition the Civilian Conservation Corps spent tens of millions in the national parks improving minor roads and trails.
- ↑ The rights-of-way, including all access rights, were purchased by the States and transferred to the Federal Government. They averaged 125 acres per mile, but varied in width from 400 feet in tight places to as much as ½ mile at special park sites.
- ↑ In World War II an average cantonment for 30,000 men required 18 miles of primary roads, 7 miles of secondaries and 3 miles of local roads.[6]
- ↑ In 1973, 215,747 miles of rural road were under Federal control as compared to a total national rural mileage of 3,175,654 miles.[7]
- ↑ Congress was responding to a previous resolution of the Sixth International Conference of American States calling for the construction of a highway connecting North, Central and South America.[8]
- ↑ Bureau of Public Roads Annual Report, 1935, p. 51.
- ↑ BPR, supra, note 48, pp. 58, 61.
- ↑ Bureau of Public Roads Annual Report, 1941, pp. 71, 72.
- ↑ BPR, supra, note 5, p. 42.
- ↑ History of the Blue Ridge Parkway Project, Typescript of unknown authorship, dated April 2, 1940, in the files of the National Park Service, Denver, Colorado.
- ↑ Road Builders Annual Meeting Centers on War Restrictions, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 128, No. 11, Mar. 12, 1942, p. 393.
- ↑ Federal Highway Administration, Highway Statistics, 1973 (Department of Transportation, Washington, D.C., 1974) p. 210.
- ↑ BPR, supra, note 5, pp. 42, 43.
