Roads scholarship

Is it just me, or are people actually beginning to pay more attention to the histories of roads?  Road history is something I'm exploring in my own (fairly slow-moving) research at the moment, relating to Massachusetts' Route 2, the road I spend a good deal of my time on.  But a couple of interesting pieces of work also came to my attention this summer, focusing on both the distant and recent past of one of the east coast's most-traveled corridors.

I've been reading (also slowly) Eric Jaffe's new book The King's Best Highway: The Lost History of the Boston Post Road, the Route That Made America (Scribner, 2010), which follows the first organized postal route in colonial America (Ben Franklin, anyone?).  The book isn't terribly weighty, but it does give a sense of some of the political, military, and other factors that went into creating the road, which has now morphed into coastal Route 1 and inland Route 91 in central New England.

There's a bit more critical depth  in parts of National Public Radio's series about everyone's least favorite road, I 95.  I'm looking forward to going through the segments in detail one of these fine days, although some things about the mix are a little jarring--for example, the juxtaposition of a segment on the hardships of migrant workers traveling up and down the coast with one called "Eat Your Way Down I-95." I guess that's how it is with highways, though--love 'em, hate 'em, can't hardly avoid 'em.

 

I went out today to start beta-testing some surveys that I want to use with motorists at tourist sites, and decided that I would begin at the Upper Pioneer Valley Visitor Information Center in Greenfield, MA. This facility has been open for about a decade, and I've read about it off and on in the Greenfield paper, but this is the first time I've actually been in there. It's a bit tricky to find - you have to get off Interstate 91 or Route 2 (whichever of the nearby big roads you happen to be travelling on), get onto Route 2A, keep a sharp eye out for signs (the main directional sign is partly obscured by a "Left Lane Must Turn Left" sign), then take a smaller side road, sidestep an Applebee's Restaurant, and resist the impulse to turn into a motel parking lot.

Unlike most roadside rest areas, this one - once you manage to find it - has a decidedly local flavor, which is explained in part by the fact that it's funded by the state but operated by the Franklin County Chamber of Commerce. It's a showcase for beautiful local crafts, and was conceived very much as a gateway point for the local area as much as a pitstop for those on the big roads. Route 2 (a.k.a. the Mohawk Trail), which stubbornly remains two lanes wide west of my own town of Athol, is another reason for this flavor; the visitor center was purposely not sited on Interstate 91 itself so that the Route 2 traffic, especially the fall leaf-peepers, would be more easily able to access it. One motorist was complaining at considerable length to the manager this afternoon about the obscure location and limited hours (it's open 362 days a year, but closes at 5 p.m. every day), but all the other visitors I saw there spent quite a lot of time browsing the shelves and apparently enjoying the ambience.

It occurred to me, in fact, that this facility itself might make a useful entry-point for some ethnographic inquiry. The site seems to challenge the usual "convenience is paramount" model for the roadside rest stop, and to insert some insistent localness (in the form of the somewhat convoluted access route and orientation to Route 2, as well as in its emphasis on local items for sale) into the highway experience. I was talking to people today about their general enjoyment (or otherwise) of the driving experience, and a bit about how fuel prices and other modes of transportation factored (or not) into their decisions about how they were getting to where they were going. There weren't any big surprises in what I was hearing (people really like driving!) but I wonder if asking them about finding the Greenfield Visitor Center might tease out some opinions about the interface between the usual seamlessness of high-speed motor travel and the localness of this site.

Emlenton: Under the Interstate

So tonight I’m in Emlenton, in a bed and breakfast inn right on the Allegheny River. By far the tallest thing in Emlenton is the I80 bridge that crosses the river just downstream from the B&B; I can see it up in the sky when I look out the window. There’s a great deal of truck traffic charging back and forth across it—the new version of the railroad that opened up this part of Pennsylvania in the 1860’s.

I’m going to look at Emlenton more closely tomorrow, but one interesting thing did strike me about it this evening when I was taking a brief walk by the river on my way to look for some dinner. The town has been severely plaqued—that is, there are heritage plaques all over the place, and one of them, next to the river, actually commemorates the four hotels that once lined the riverbank not far from where I’m staying. Emlenton doesn’t have a once-grand downtown like Titusville or Oil City, or the distinction of being the firstest or the mostest at anything, but it does appear to be determinedly marketing its heritage nonetheless, and one of the things it’s marketing is its own former history as a little river resort town and transportation hub.

This reminds me of John Sears’s good discussion in Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (University of Massachusetts Press, 1989) about how Mauck Chunk, Pennsylvania (now renamed Jim Thorpe) developed simultaneously as a coal terminus and a tourist destination, and for many of the same reasons—mountains, river, trains, people’s curiosity about the marvels of a young and flourishing industry. Interesting to see tourism itself being folded into the heritage mix.