Swift's first chapter of The Big Roads lays out the problem with the surface roads that most people would have encountered in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.  It could be construed, too, as a description of the general condition of roads throughout human history.  It's true that some ancient civilizations spent time and money and uncounted hours of labor on improved road surfaces - the Romans, famously, and the Inca in South America, for instance - but those improved systems were fairly limited in scope, and those old road builders' empires, big as they were, weren't all that big compared to the whole surface of the planet.  In many places, the concept of "road" would only arrive with the Europeans (for better or worse), and it would then be several more centuries of mud and dust before anything would resemble what today we would consider a "proper" road surface:

     "They [the roads] were there, but hardly in the form we think of them.  The routes out of most any town in America were 'wholly unclassable, almost impassable, scarcely jackassable,' as folks said then -- especially when spring and fall rains transformed the simple dirt tracks into a heavy muck, more glue than earth...people braved them to the train and back, or to roll their harvest from their farms to the nearest grain elevator.  For any trip beyond that, they went by rail."  {1}

                 Grade level crossing at LaSalle County East 8th Road, Illinois.

     Driving south through Illinois following a trip to the Illinois Railway Museum, I was a few miles east of I-39 on a paved county road, enjoying the view and the lack of traffic.  Approaching an intersection, I could see that beyond the crossing road there was no further asphalt.  Now, I've been on enough county roads to know that it's hardly rare for a road to simply terminate at some farmer's field.  Sometimes the track does continue,  but it's as a private access road.  Looking before me that day, though, I noted that some half-mile ahead there were signs of some kind, "stop" or "railroad" I couldn't make out.  O.K., I thought, signs like that aren't usually put up on private roads, and I knew from looking at my map that the roads showed no breaks.  Fine!  I'm going!  Over the crossing road I went, and down onto a "classic" dirt road:                     

                   Looking south along LaSalle County East 8th road toward the rail crossing.

      Ha!  This!  This is what Swift was writing about!  This is the kind of road that was the bane of travel before the coming of "hardened" surfaces.  This, indeed, would have been the kind of road that Dreiser and his traveling companions would have been familiar with during their childhood years in Indiana.  It was the kind of "happened-upon" thing that makes the oddly traveled trips worth making.

     Looking about as I stopped to take photos (of course I did) I could well imagine trying to traverse that road after a good soaking rain.  Actually, more like that I could easily imagine avoiding that road after a good soaking rain.  Good for the crops, no so much for the wagon -- or car.  And this is a better example of "dirt road."  East 8th continued past the next crossroad on down, but I didn't dare that course.  Farther south, East 8th fell most definitely into that condition described as "unclassable...scarcely jackassable."  So I avoided it and turned on the road that was paved instead.

     It was that kind of wheel-sucking road surface that gave rise to the movement for Better Roads! in the late 19th Century, first by the middle-class bicycling enthusiasts, then by the automobile enthusiasts that followed in the early 20th.  The first widespread improvement was the addition of macadam, a layer-cake application of crushed and graded rock that was rolled down into an all-weather surface, and of which examples still abound in the rural counties as the typical gravel road, as seen at right.  As far as improvements go, this manner of hardened road would likely have made up the majority of the roads traversed by Dreiser & Co on their drive away from the Hudson River.

     Of course, macadam is still dusty, and can only handle a few tons of vehicle weight before it begins to come undone, so experiments were underway prior to the Second World War with cement and concrete.  Municipal streets had been done in brick or cobbles or Belgian block long before this, but those street materials were still subject to frequent maintenance, and the idea of doing thousands of miles of rural roads with bricks just didn't sit well with highway planners.  Further experiments needed to be done.

                 Loop 1 of the AASHO Road Test near Ottawa, IL, adjacent to I-80.

     The major experiments, in the years following the Second World War, yielded concrete examples (literally and figuratively) that are still with us today.  As I prepared to make my trip to the Railway Museum, I recalled that Swift had described the "test loops" that the American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO) had ordered built to determine what concrete mixes would make for good Interstate construction.  That would be something to stop for, I thought, to have look-see at a little slice of highway history.  Somewhere in northern Illinois, I thought I remembered, and looking back through his book, I found the passage relating how transport officers -

     "...devised what still ranks among the biggest civil engineering experiments in history.  On the plains west of Chicago, [they] built a chain of six looping test tracks, each a quiltwork of paving types, thicknesses, and base layers, 836 test sections in all...

     Then they moved  a company of army Transportation Corps soldiers into a barracks at the complex, put them behind the wheels of 126 trucks - everything from pickups to big semi rigs, all loaded with concrete blocks - and sent them around the loops.  Nineteen hours a day they drove, every day for two years..."  {2}

     What they discovered went directly into the construction practices of the Interstates.  What was important to me, though, what I also recalled from the book, was Swift wrote that one of those loops still existed: "The four biggest loops were incorporated into the lanes of Interstate 80...But one of the others, Loop 1, survives a mile or so west of Ottawa, Illinois." {3}  Not a lot to go on, but enough.  Google satellite anyone?  Oh, yes!  I looked about at Ottawa's countryside for a little while, where the satellite imagery did indeed depict some loops in the vicinity, but not west of Ottawa.  When I re-read that bit about the test loops being incorporated into the highway, I looked again to the west of the town, and sure enough, there it was!  A half-mile long, a skinny loop, right on the verge of the Interstate.  Even at the resolution available in the Google image, the thing showed myriad levels of deterioration.  I marked the spot in my map book, and mentally marked that as a destination for the trip back home from the museum.

                                                     Loop 1: road test concrete, showing different levels of deterioration, adjacent to I-80.

      After I'd found a turn-out to park on, and had got out to survey the scene, I was slightly surprised to see that the whole thing was behind barbed wire, but on reflection, I considered that it is, after all, highway property.  Plus, there is almost no distance between the Loop and the shoulder of the Interstate, so keeping the casual viewer (like me) away from the 70+ mph traffic is in everyone's best interest.

         Loop 1 of the Road Test adjacent to I-80, including the by-now usual view that includes my saloon and the surrounding countryside.

     The testing was run in the mid-1950s, and some of the segments of the Loop's concrete show deterioration well beyond the intervening years, while some segments still look pretty good.  It's true that the Interstates are in less-than-great condition today, but considering the age of much of the paving that makes up so many of their thousands of miles says something about the views held by the eraly highway officials and engineers.  Some of what they believed of auto traffic in the U.S. was wrong (some of their ideas were even very wrong), and they could hardly have conceived of the continuing growth in the number of vehicles, much less the weight carried by them.

     Never-the-less, they were determined to make the highways as safe and sane as they could, devoting countless hours and years to the design and implementation of what they saw as the best way forward for American drivers.  Right or wrong, they didn't do it to make a profit, they did it for the public good.  As someone who has spent a fair number of hours on the Interstates - as much as I love and hate them - I appreciate their work, and was happy to have made the side-trip to see something of their experimentation.

      Please refer to the Notes page for book details.

     {1} "They [the roads] were there..."  pg 11-12.

     {2} "...devised what still ranks..."  pg 198.

     {3} "The four biggest loops..."  pg 199.

                                                                                                                            The fruits of experimentation: the Interstate around Indianapolis.