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45-535: Plank roads were brought to the United States by Syracuse engineer George Geddes who brought them to New York from Canada . In turn, the concept is thought to have been brought to North America from Russia by the then Governor General Lord Sydenham . The first plank road in North America led out from Toronto , and was frequently cited by Geddes in his promotion of plank roads. The Toronto project

90-416: A jarrah tramway lay upon 2.3-metre-long (7.5 ft) sleepers , bounded by two 70-centimetre-wide (28 in) strips of jarrah planks for cart and carriage wheels. The 90-centimetre (35 in) gap was filled with limestone rubble to be used by horses. This reduced the cost of road building by up to 85% after its widespread introduction in 1908. However, increased traffic and suburban development rendered

135-587: A "timber road made of good, well-hewn timber" from Detroit, in Wayne county to the village of Ann Arbor in the county of Washtenaw . Later on, in 1844, the state authorized the building of plank roads from Detroit to Port Huron and from near Sylvania, Ohio to Blissfield, Michigan . Then in 1846, Charters were given to the Corunna and Northampton and the Marshall and Union City Plank Road companies. Eventually,

180-609: A conservation organization established in 1997, conducts public education, advocacy, river cleanups and conservation projects. Water quality in the Hackensack River improved somewhat by the late 2000s following the decline in manufacturing in the area, as well as from enforcement of Clean Water Act regulations and from the efforts of local conservancy groups. Urban runoff pollution, municipal sewage discharges from sanitary sewer overflows and combined sewer overflows, and runoff from hazardous waste sites continue to impair

225-402: Is found that the cost of repairs on a McAdam [macadam] road is easily greater than upon a plank road- without taking into account the great difference in the first cost. The McAdam road out from Toronto cost four hundred dollars every year to keep a mile in order... if the [plank] road is constructed, the repairs will be trifling until the road is worn out . Geddes goes on to mention that, over

270-563: The Bay , Clinton , Gratiot and Saginaw counties were allowed to double their tolls. During the 1800s, 202 plank road companies were established in Michigan, and 5,802 and 1/2 miles of plank roads were chartered, with roads as long as 220 miles (from Zilwaukee to Mackinaw City , and going through Traverse City ) to as short as one mile (in Sault Ste. Marie ). The man who signed the law

315-639: The Don and Danforth Plank Road Company in the late 18th and the early 19th centuries. Highway 2 from Toronto eastwards was a plank road in the 19th century that was later paved. In 1833 Scarborough-Markham Plank Road was authorized to build a road from Danforth Road to Highway 7 to Ringwood and east on Stouffville Road to Main Street Stouffville. Plank roads are used exclusively in the Canadian fishing outport of Harrington Harbour , Quebec because

360-473: The Farmer's Companion and Horticultural Gazette reported that " A farm adjacent to a plank road increases in value from 10-15 percent...and commands a sale from the fact that the produce never lacks a market, and has a more regular and higher net value." The most plank roads (eight) went out of Detroit to various cities, with Grand Rapids (seven) following close behind. However, the craze did not last long. Of

405-535: The Fayetteville and Western Plank Road were constructed. In 1852 there were thirty-nine bills for plank road charters, and in the 1854-55 legislative session, thirty-two charters were granted. The tolls allowable in North Carolina were .5 cents per mile for a horse and one rider, 2 cents per mile for a teamster with two horses, 3 cents for a teamster with three horses, and one with six horses, 4 cents. In

450-688: The Gem of the Prairie supported plank roads. In 1845, proponents of a Chicago-Rockford road, such as J. Young Scammon and Walter Newberry did receive a charter, but none of the proposed roads were ever built. Later on, in 1847, however; newspapers such as the Prairie Farmer carried articles praising plank roads, and one of the first plank roads in the Midwest (apart from Michigan) went from Milwaukee to Watertown . In Indiana , and throughout much of

495-789: The Hackensack , the Paterson , and the Newark , were major arteries in northern New Jersey . Garfield Avenue in Jersey City was also a plank road known as "Old Bergen Point Plank Road"; built in 1850. The main street in Passaic was owned and maintained by a plank road company. The roads traveled over the New Jersey Meadowlands (at the time known as the "Hackensack Meadows"), connecting the cities for which they were named to

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540-708: The Hudson River waterfront. Parts of the Lincoln Highway were a plank road through Newark, as were parts of Route 27. In 1912, the New York Telephone Company was granted permission to lay wire under the Paterson plank road. There were also plank roads in the central part of the state. One such road was created to go from Freehold to Keyport . It followed roughly the path that is currently used by Route 79 . Built in 1850, another one

585-728: The New Jersey Meadowlands , connecting the cities for which they were named to the Hudson River waterfront. U.S. Route 1 in Virginia follows the Boydton Plank Road from Petersburg southwards to just north of the North Carolina line. On the U.S. West Coast the Canyon Road of Portland, Oregon was another important but short artery and was built between 1851 and 1856. Kingston Road (Toronto) (Governor's Road) and Danforth Avenue , in Toronto , were plank roads built by

630-827: The Somerset levels near Glastonbury , England. This type of road was also constructed in Roman times. From the mid-1840s and to mid 1850s, the United States experienced the Plank Road Boom and a subsequent bust. The first plank road in the US was built in North Syracuse, New York , to transport salt and other goods; it appears to have copied earlier roads in Canada, which had copied Russian ones. The plank road boom, like many other early technologies, promised to transform

675-725: The 1850s, about 500 miles of plank roads were built. Spurred on by the original success of plank roads in the United States, the Viscount of Barbacena and the Baron of Nova Friburgo , in the Rio de Janeiro province , began building a plank road. The road extended at least 14 miles, but eventually rotted. Plank road A plank road is a road composed of wooden planks or puncheon logs , as an efficient technology for traversing soft, marshy, or otherwise difficult ground. Plank roads have been built since antiquity, and were commonly found in

720-673: The 4th and 7th century AD, both linked the eastern and western shores of the formerly inaccessible, swampy bog. A part of the older trackway No. II dating to the period of the Roman Empire is on display at the permanent exhibition of the Archaeological Museum Hamburg in Harburg, Hamburg . This type of plank road is known to have been used as early as 4,000 BC with, for example, the Post Track found in

765-555: The 5,082 and 1/2 miles chartered, only 1,179 miles were built by 89 of the original 202 companies. When Mark Twain rode from Kalamazoo on the Grand Rapids plank road, asked how he liked his trip, he replied "It would have been good if some unconscionable scoundrel had not now and then dropped a plank across it." For a brief time, plank roads were very popular in North Carolina . The Greenville and Raleigh Plank Road and

810-541: The Canadian province of Ontario as well as the Northeast and Midwest of the United States in the first half of the 19th century. They were often built by turnpike companies. The Wittmoor bog trackway is the name given to each of two historic plank roads or boardwalks , trackway No. I being discovered in 1898 and trackway No. II in 1904 in the Wittmoor bog in northern Hamburg , Germany. The trackways date to

855-627: The Hackensack include Mill Creek, Berrys Creek , and Overpeck Creek . The present Meadowlands consist of roughly 8,400 acres (34 km ) of open, undeveloped space in addition to developed areas that had been part of the natural wetlands which were heavily developed by H. Bert Mack and M. Bolero in the 1960s. The area includes portions of Kearny , Jersey City , North Arlington , Secaucus , Lyndhurst , Rutherford , East Rutherford , Carlstadt , North Bergen , Moonachie , Ridgefield , South Hackensack , Teaneck , and Little Ferry . The area

900-582: The Midwest, social reformer Robert Dale Owen was a prominent supporter of plank roads. In 1849, the New Harmony and Mount Vernon plank road company nominated Owen (who was already the director of the company) to go to New York, and find out how roads were constructed. After returning, he wrote a number of newspaper articles and a hugely popular pamphlet titled "A Brief Practical Treatise on the Construction and Management of Plank Roads" in 1850. So huge

945-716: The New Jersey legislature enacted a law to claim any plank road owned by a charter which has or will be expiring. Pennsylvania incorporated 315 plank road companies, the second most of any state. After the initial craze in New York, in late 1844 and early 1845, many regional newspapers in Fort Wayne and Chicago , and throughout the Midwest called for plank roads. Newspapers such as the Chicago Democrat , and

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990-608: The United States was the Syracuse-Central Square road, and was a massive success. Subsequently, applications to form new plank road companies poured in. By 1847, a general incorporation law was passed by the state legislature. In New York state, under the general incorporation law, from 1847 to 1854 more than 340 plank road building companies were incorporated, building about 3,500 miles of plank roads. The New York Senate reported in 1870 that plank roads were more profitable than gravel or stone roads Three plank roads,

1035-517: The acceptable grade to one foot in ten) and 1867 (changing the gravel specification to nine feet wide, and seven inches thick. Tolls on the roads ranged from two cents per mile, (for two horse wagons, and every "neat score of cattle", with an additional 3/4 cents for every animal if there are more than two animals), to a maximum of one cent per mile (for one horse vehicles and every sled or sleigh) and went to as low as one-half cent per mile for every score of sheep or pigs. By 1869, plank road companies in

1080-410: The area consisted of several diverse ecosystems based on freshwater , brackish water , and saltwater environments. Large areas were covered by forests. And the area was once inhabited with Mountain lions , Eastern elk , Eastern wolves , American marten , Fisher (animal) , & American black bears before being made extinct in the area due to hunting . Considered by residents of the area through

1125-635: The center of the New York metropolitan area and its outgrowth into New Jersey makes conservation of the vast wetland a difficult proposition. In spite of this, the New Jersey Legislature , promoted by Richard W. DeKorte , created the Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission in 1969 to attempt to address both economic and environmental issues concerning the wetland region. The commission

1170-544: The centuries as wastelands, the Meadowlands were systematically subject to various kinds of human intervention. The four major categories are: The Meadowlands Sports Complex , the site of multiple stadia and a racetrack, was built in the Meadowlands beginning in the 1960s. The race track was the first venue in the complex to open, on September 1, 1976. The location of the New Jersey Meadowlands near

1215-476: The charters were to run for sixty years. The law was subsequently amended in 1851 (shortening charters to sixty years, and making the greatest allowable grade one foot every twenty feet, as well as requiring the companies to make a report to the auditor general before the first Tuesday in January), 1855 (allowing the substitution of gravel covering nine feet wide, and ten inches thick for plank), 1859 (restoring

1260-601: The country should be lined with these roads.” Other written items included Observations on Plank Roads (1850) by George Geddes, History, Structure and Statistics of Plank Roads in the United States and Canada (1851) by William Kingsford , and A Manual of the Principles and Practice of Road-Making (1871) by William M. Gillespie. Throughout the Mid-Atlantic region, some 700 companies, and about 7,000 miles of plank road were chartered by 1857. The first plank road in

1305-473: The eight-year span the Toronto plank road lasted, the cost of maintaining one mile of the macadam road would be sufficient to re-plank the wooden road three times. Proponents of plank roads stated that plank roads would make it much easier to carry goods and travel in general. They were stated to be 1/3 as expensive as gravel roads. Plank roads were said to give a return on investment of 20% They also claimed that

1350-499: The interest in building plank roads became so high that in 1848, a general incorporation law was passed. The law stated that any company could operate a plank road so long as their road That the road be two to four rods wide, sixteen feet of which was to be a good, smooth, permanent road, well drained by ditches on either side. At least eight feet of the road was to be covered with plank three inches thick. The law provided further that no grades were to be greater than one in ten and that

1395-425: The list of great improvements which have given to this age the character which it will bear in history above all others-the age of happiness to the people-the plank road will have a prominent place, and it deserves it...the plank road is of the class of canals and railways. They are the three great inscriptions graven on the earth by the hand of modern science... They also published an editorial saying "every section of

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1440-631: The plank road craze. In 1847, Hunts Merchants Magazine published an article titled “Plank Roads-New Improvement." In 1849, Niles' Weekly Register said plank roads were "growing into universal favor." In the 1850s, the New York Tribune praised their ease of construction. In March 1850, Scientific American said they viewed plank roads as a means of “completely reforming the interior or rural transit trade of our country.” In 1852, Hunts Merchants Magazine published an article titled "The First Plank Road Movement," extolling plank roads. In

1485-497: The river's water quality . In 2015 EPA awarded grants to conduct research on Meadowlands wetlands. The NJSEA owns or holds management rights to preserve wetlands in the Meadowlands district. As of 2016 over 3,900 acres of wetlands have been preserved by NJSEA and other property owners. The New Jersey Legislature established the Meadowlands Conservation Trust in 1999 to protect and manage land in

1530-401: The roads will last for at least eight years, and if they don't, that will be because of more people travelling on the road, which would thus result in more tolls collected. Much of the plank road building occurred in places where lumber was comparatively affordable due to thriving timber industries, as wood was usually over sixty percent of a plank road's cost. National newspapers helped spread

1575-536: The routes unsatisfactory over time, and by the 1950s, they had been replaced with bitumen surfaced roads. Types of roads New Jersey Meadowlands New Jersey Meadowlands , also known as the Hackensack Meadowlands after the primary river flowing through it , is a general name for a large ecosystem of wetlands in northeastern New Jersey in the United States , a few miles to

1620-559: The town is built directly over a hilly, rocky shore. ATVs are the only mode of transportation there. In Perth , Western Australia , plank roads were important in the early growth of the agricultural and outer urban areas because of the distances imposed by swamps and the relatively-infertile soil. As it cost £2,000/km to construct roads by conventional means, the local councils, known as road boards, were experimenting with cheaper approaches to road building. A method called Jandakot Corduroy had been developed at Jandakot south-east of Perth:

1665-431: The way people lived and worked and led to permissive changes in legislation seeking to spur development, speculative investment by private individuals, etc. Ultimately, the technology failed to live up to its promise, and millions of dollars in investments evaporated almost overnight. Three plank roads, the Hackensack , the Paterson , and the Newark , were major arteries in northern New Jersey . The roads travelled over

1710-467: The west of New York City . During the 20th century, much of the Meadowlands area was urbanized , and it became known for being the site of large landfills and decades of environmental abuse. A variety of projects began in the late 20th century to restore and conserve the remaining ecological resources in the Meadowlands. The Meadowlands stretch mainly along the terminus of the Hackensack and Passaic Rivers as they flow into Newark Bay ; tributaries of

1755-605: Was authorized to review and approve land development projects, manage landfill operations, and oversee environmental restoration and preservation projects. The commission oversaw the closure of most of the landfills in the Meadowlands district. The commission was subsequently renamed the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission, and merged with the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority (NJSEA) in 2015. The Hackensack Riverkeeper,

1800-495: Was forested with Atlantic white cedars before the early Dutch settlers (17th century) cleared the forests and used dikes to drain the land. The Dutch farmers used the drained tidal lands to create "meadows" of salt hay ; hence, the area was referred to by locals as the Meadows. In more recent times, the Meadowlands became known for being the site of large landfills and decades of environmental abuse. Before European settlement,

1845-479: Was in West Long Branch known as Larry's Creek Plank Road. In southern New Jersey 1864 legislature approved a plank road across the salt marsh near Atlantic City. This plank road was a 16 mile, one hundred foot wide, plank road leading to Atlantic City called the "Atlantic Turnpike". The oil industry in that area in the late 1800s fueled the development of the plank road through Pleasantville NJ. In 1901,

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1890-497: Was one of the major supporters of plank roads in Michigan, governor Epaphroditus Ransom . Ransom signed the general plank road incorporation act, and throughout his governorship viewed plank roads as the solution to increasing Michigan's economy. Plank roads were very popular in rural areas, because, even when it was wet and muddy, people could still travel on plank roads. Properly maintained plank roads were known to cut four to six day trips to as short as ten to fifteen hours. In 1854,

1935-618: Was passed in 1851, allowing for any five people to form a plank road company as long as the "width of the road will be 60 feet, with 16 feet covered with stone, gravel or wood, and with no ascent over five degrees." While the first plank road was built in New York, the first company chartered with the intent to build a plank road was created in Michigan in 1837. That company was the Detroit, Plymouth and Ann Arbor Turnpike Company, chartered by Michigan state legislature on March 22, 1837 to build

1980-418: Was proposed by Darcy Boulton , and built under Sir Francis Bond . By 1861, the governments of Upper and Lower Canada had built between 127–162 miles of plank roads, and private companies 194–214 miles. Geddes enthusiastically reported that wooden roads lasted eight years, and cost much less than compacted crushed stone macadam roads. Over that part of the road in Toronto, that wore out in eight years... It

2025-549: Was the demand for plank roads, by 1850, Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Illinois-set up standardized procedures for the incorporation of plank road companies. Indiana passed its plank road legislation in September 1849 The enthusiasm for plank roads was exceptionally strong in Northern Ohio . Nine companies were chartered during 1845, eight 1848, thirty-seven in 1849, and eighty-nine in 1850. A general incorporation law

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