MacDonald addressed the matter of funding, which he requested be doubled to $500,000 per year. In addition, he suggested that legislative appropriations be made in multiyear intervals, so that his office together with the towns could plan for future improvements. To help pay for the additional funding, MacDonald suggested that the income generated by the registration and licensing fees collected by the Department of Motor Vehicles be used exclusively for the highway program. It was an early example of a user tax applied to the age of automobility. Much the way those who crossed a bridge might pay a toll to help repair the bridge, it was considered only fair that those who owned the cars that ran on and damaged the state’s highways should pay for the repair of those highways. As had been the case since the program’s inception, the remainder of the funds for Connecticut’s good roads program would continue to come from the general funds of the state.6
With these important modifications agreed to by the legislature in 1907—state responsibility for project selection and ongoing maintenance, the designation of a high-priority trunk line system for cross-state traffic, and the funds collected by the Department of Motor Vehicles to be used only for highway improvements—MacDonald released the state’s good roads program from the shackles of history and created the state’s first truly modern highway program, one with a forward-looking agenda.
The legislature confirmed this new approach by adopting the commissioner’s designated trunk line system into law as the state’s official highway network. Over the years, this network of state highways would continue to expand, reaching 1,340 highway miles by 1913 and 1,566 miles by 1923. However, at the core of the state system from the start were fourteen major cross-state routes. These included three east-west corridors: Route 1 from Greenwich to Rhode Island; Route 6 from Danbury across the central portion of Connecticut to Killingly; and in the northern portion of the state, Route 44 from Salisbury to Putnam. And there were three north-south corridors: Route 7 from Norwalk to North Canaan; Routes 5 and 10 in the center of the state from New Haven to Suffield and Granby, respectively; and in eastern Connecticut, Routes 2 and 32 from New London to Stafford and Thompson, respectively.7
Trunk line system, 1923. Highways function best when part of a system of local feeder roads, secondary highways, and main through routes.
Connecticut Highway Department
In addition, various secondary roads that functioned as collectors of traffic headed to or from trunk line routes were also added to the system. A combination of state and local funds was used to improve these secondary highways, which in the early years of the program were designated as “state-aid” roads. Those roads that were left at the bottom of the highway hierarchy were considered town roads, and they remained the responsibility of the local community.8
From the beginnings of the state-controlled program in 1907 to about 1923, MacDonald’s objective was simple: to pave over as many miles of dirt highways in the state as possible, with routes included in the trunk line system being given the highest priority. The objective in these early years of the new program was simply to keep pace with the growth of traffic created by the increasing number of automobiles and trucks registered in the state, which grew from 2,700 autos and 60 trucks in 1907 to 153,000 autos and 30,000 trucks by 1923—with no letup in sight. And that did not include traffic created by out-of-state vehicles entering Connecticut from New York and Massachusetts, an important element of travel in the region since the earliest days of the Connecticut colony.
BRIDGES AND FERRIES IN THE EARLY AUTO AGE
Preparing the state’s major river crossings to accommodate automobility presented its own set of difficulties. First, there was the matter of seven toll bridges around the state, some of which were still in private hands as of 1887. These seven toll bridges included three over the Housatonic River: the Washington Bridge at Stratford, the Zoar Bridge at Oxford, and Bennett’s Bridge at Southbury. Since the first two toll bridges were already town owned, and Bennett’s crossing abandoned by its private owner, the General Assembly in 1889 was able to enact a simple bill that allowed for the transfer of these bridges into the hands of Fairfield and New Haven counties, who were to maintain the crossings from that point forward, sharing the costs equally.9
More problematic were the three privately owned bridges across the Connecticut River in Hartford County: the Dixon Bridge at Suffield, an old timber crossing last rebuilt in 1832; a new suspension bridge at Warehouse Point that had only been completed in 1886 by the Windsor Locks & Warehouse Point Bridge and Ferry Company; and Hartford Bridge at Hartford, a covered wooden bridge last rebuilt in 1818. The seventh toll crossing, Rope Ferry Bridge, spanned the Niantic River in East Lyme.
Unlike turnpike roads, most of these toll bridges were profitable enterprises that paid dividends to their stockholders. To free such a bridge, a dollar value would have to be determined for the assets of the corporation—bridge, toll house, perhaps some adjacent lands—that was satisfactory to all concerned, and the assets purchased by a public agent of the state, often the town(s) involved. And then there was the matter of maintenance, which in the case of a bridge meant not only small ongoing repairs but also the eventual rebuilding of the structure, a much more expensive undertaking.
The most important of these Connecticut River toll bridges was the one at Hartford. As an important crossing on the upper Post Road to Boston, Hartford Bridge was well used throughout the nineteenth century. But as commerce and traffic increased following the Civil War, so did the public’s weariness at having to stop and pay a toll as they crossed the river. As one newspaper suggested, “The public … are sick of groping for pennies in their pockets and chafe in these days of easy communication at the idea of barriers across the highways.”10
In 1887, a petition containing ten thousand signatures was submitted to the legislature asking that the Hartford Bridge be freed at once. As a result, and consistent with the tradition of town responsibility for highways, a law was passed that session appointing three commissioners to estimate the cost of purchasing the existing bridge, decide which towns benefited most from the bridge, and assess the cost of the purchase against those towns “in such proportion as said commissioners shall find to be equitable.” Though existing law would have assessed the bridge purchase against Hartford and East Hartford, the towns on either shore, the legislature was apparently looking for a way to spread the burden among any and all towns that benefited from the bridge, leaving it to the commission and the Superior Court to decide which towns those might be. Once the corporation had been bought out and the bridge freed, the act authorized the creation of a “Board for the Care of Highways and Bridges across the Connecticut River,” composed of representatives of the chosen towns, to maintain the structure.11
The Hartford covered bridge as it appeared in the 1890s.
Crossing the Connecticut, by George E. Wright, 1908
After holding several public hearings on the matter, the commissioners filed their report with the superior court on August 14, 1888. The report set damages to the bridge company at $210,000, and assessed the damages against the five towns of Hartford, East Hartford, Glastonbury, South Windsor, and Manchester in the amounts of $95,000, $66,000, $25,000, $12,000, and $12,000, respectively. However, when the five towns objected to the arbitrariness of the assessments, which had been determined without regard to any particular formula using, say, population or grand list, the court postponed any further action.12
To ease the burden on the five towns, the following spring the legislature enacted a law requiring the state to contribute 40 percent (or $84,000) toward the total cost of the bridge purchase. With the assessments of each of the five towns reduced accordingly, the new scheme was approved
