How America Built 10,000 Miles of Plank Roads Before Asphalt Existed

Before asphalt, America paved 10,000 miles of roads with wood. This is the forgotten story of the plank-road craze of 1846–1857 — the wooden highways farmers called "the farmer's railroad" — and why they rotted away within a decade. In 1846, a young surveyor named George Geddes laid sixteen miles of wooden planks across a dirt road outside Syracuse, New York. Within five years, more than 1,388 companies had chartered wooden highways across America — 10,000 miles of them, built for about $1,500 a mile by men with axes, saws, and ox teams. The planks carried triple the load of a dirt road, in any weather. Then the wood began to rot. CHAPTERS: 0:00 Sixteen Miles of Wood 1:05 The Mud 2:09 The Farmer's Railroad 3:25 The Boom 4:33 Life on the Planks 5:43 The Rot 6:58 The Fall 8:03 Legacy SOURCES: The Plank-Road Craze, encyclopedia.com: https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/... Turnpikes and Toll Roads in Nineteenth-Century America (EH.net): https://eh.net/encyclopedia/turnpikes... Chicago's Plank Roads (Chicago & Cook County Cemeteries): http://chicagoandcookcountycemeteries... Old Plank Road, Sandhills Heritage Gateway: http://sandhillsheritagegateway.org/a... Hudson Memory — Plank Road: https://www.hudsonmemory.org/historic... If you care about the men who built this country with their hands, subscribe — a new forgotten engineering story every day. #AmericanHistory #HistoryDocumentary #Engineering #ForgottenHistory Visuals and voiceover in this video were generated with AI.