clerk was hired to oversee all financial accounts and record-keeping for the department.31
Between 1915 and 1918, as part of its expanding duties, the CHD was made responsible for the construction and maintenance of all highway bridges on the trunk line system. With this authority, the CHD began replacing all remaining ferries along the lower post road with new bridges designed and built by state engineers: in Westport in 1917, in Stratford in 1921, in Groton also in 1921 (by converting an existing railroad bridge to auto use), and in Mystic in 1922.32 By the mid-1920s, with the trunk line system still expanding to include more miles of primary and secondary highways, all major river crossings on the system had been bridged to accommodate automobile and truck traffic. In 1923, bridge tolls were removed from all public crossings still charging them, making Connecticut, for the first time since its founding, a toll-free state—the only exceptions being those tolls charged by the last three ferries remaining in the state: the Windsor to South Windsor ferry, the Rocky Hill to Glastonbury ferry, and the Chester to Hadlyme ferry, all low-volume crossings on the Connecticut River, and all now under the auspices of the Connecticut Highway Department.33
A FEDERAL-STATE PARTNERSHIP IS FORMED
Of course, the coming of the automobile and the need for better highways was hardly a phenomenon unique to Connecticut; it was happening nationwide. Perhaps the best measure of the speed with which automobility took hold of the nation—and the pressure for improved roads that increasing auto traffic placed on highwaymen in every state—were the sales of Henry Ford’s Model T, the first car manufactured at an affordable price with the common man in mind. Introduced in 1907 at a price of $850 (when most other automobiles cost several thousands of dollars), by 1915 the sales price dropped to half that amount. By that time, Ford had already sold more than one million Model T automobiles, which he joked, mocking the efficiency of his own mass production techniques, could be had in any color, “so long as it was black.” Over the next decade, Ford’s assembly line methods lowered the unit price of the nation’s most popular automobile even further, until one could be had in 1924 for a mere $290. By that time, ten million Model T Fords had already been sold, and production was approaching two million vehicles a year.34 With thanks to Henry Ford and his Model T, the automobile went from being a luxury plaything for the rich in the 1910s to a necessity for the everyman in the 1920s. When a woman from Muncie, Indiana, was asked by a Department of Agriculture interviewer in the 1920s, “Why do you own a Model T but you don’t own a bathtub?” she replied with a surprised look, “You can’t go to town in a bathtub.”35
As automobility became increasingly common, many other states formed highway departments and initiated statewide road improvement programs. As their number increased, they gathered at annual “road conventions,” like the one hosted by Commissioner MacDonald in Hartford in 1904, to share their knowledge and experiences. Some seven hundred highwaymen from twenty-eight states attended the Hartford convention, along with a federal representative from the Department of Agriculture’s Office of Road Inquiry.36 Such gatherings established a social bond among highwaymen and a national consensus on certain policy issues, in particular the need for federal funding of good roads. By 1914, as Congress studied the possibility of a national highway program, state highwaymen created a nationwide organization of their own called the American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO), which worked closely with federal officials and Congress to sort through the legal, legislative, and engineering details of a national highway effort.
There were several overriding concerns, first and foremost the legality of such a program. After efforts in the early 1800s to create a national highway program were vetoed by three different presidents on the grounds that the national government had no authority to build roads within individual states, the issue was resolved in 1907 by the U.S. Supreme Court in Wilson v. Shaw, which stated directly the government’s right under the Constitution to build interstate highways: “This power in former times was exerted to a very limited extent … and many of our statesmen entertained doubts as to the existence of the power to establish ways of communication by land … [but] land transportation has so vastly increased [and] a sounder consideration of the subject has prevailed and led to the conclusion that Congress has plenary power over the whole subject. Congress, therefore, has … the power … to authorize the construction of a public highway connecting several states.”37
But what roads should the federal government build? What should the purpose of such a program be? As in many states, the debate centered on whether a highway program should focus on short sections of roadway whose improvement was intended to aid rural farmers in reaching the nearest railroad or market town, or on longer stretches of improvements that would facilitate long-distance interstate travel for everyone. By 1916, when Congress passed the first Federal Aid Highway Act, appropriating $75 million over five years to states with functioning highway departments (on a fifty-fifty matching basis), a decision was made to use federal funds for “such projects as will expedite the completion of an adequate and connected system of highways, interstate in character.” In an effort to placate rural citizens, funds were apportioned according to a formula weighted one third on the area of the state, one third on its population, and one third on its rural road mileage. Once the improved highways were built, they were to be maintained by their respective states.38
It was a momentous decision. For the first time in the nation’s history, the federal government agreed to direct funding of highway improvements. The program itself, however, was much less momentous, mainly because the diversion of manpower and resources to the war in Europe delayed improvements under the new federal program. By the time the five-year program ended in 1921, less than five hundred miles of highway had been improved nationwide, barely a drop in the proverbial bucket.39
Yet the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1916 established an important precedent, and when the program came up for renewal—just in time to meet the postwar boom in automobile ownership—it was thoroughly revised to create a more aggressive road-building program. The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1921 created a historic partnership between federal and state governments, with the states building in effect a trunk line system of federal-aid highways, to a maximum of 7 percent of a given state’s total road mileage. In addition, three-sevenths of the federal system was to be comprised of roads “interstate in character,” on which the state was free to spend up to 60 percent of its federal appropriation. Once again, states were held responsible for ongoing maintenance of the federal highways (at their own expense) as they were for the matching state money required by the program.40
To help states define the federal system, the Department of Agriculture formed a Joint Board of Interstate Highways to select the final network from the 7 percent mileage submitted by each state. In 1925, the secretary of agriculture approved and numbered a system that included some 169,000 federal-aid highway miles nationwide.41 In Connecticut, this network consisted of three east-west routes: U.S. Route 1 along the shoreline from Greenwich to Stonington, U.S. Route 6 across the center of the state from Danbury to Killingly, and U.S. Route 44 in northern Connecticut from Salisbury to Putnam. These were supplemented by four north-south routes: in western Connecticut, U.S. Route 7 from Norwalk to North Canaan; U.S. Routes 5 and 5a in the center of the state from New Haven to Enfield and Suffield, respectively; and U.S. Route 202 from Danbury to Granby.
The designation of an ongoing federal highway program helped states like Connecticut in several ways. First, the influx of federal funds added to the budgetary power and prestige of the Connecticut Highway Department. Second, the highways assigned to the federal system, interstate in character, were by definition more heavily traveled, and therefore more costly than other routes to improve and maintain. Third, federal approval and funding of highway projects allowed the federal government to institute policy requirements, such as design standards, that improved safety and created uniformity from state to state. But most importantly, the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1921 established a megagovernmental model of joint federal-state cooperation and financing that through the years could be expanded to match the state’s expanding highway needs. It was also
