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Road controversy is nothing new
While Monday night’s transportation task force meeting had it contentious moments, it was a relatively calm one for Jackson County, considering the subject.
Transportation issues around here have generated controversy for years, according to our indispensable Cafe reference book, The History of Jackson County.
Turning to the chapter titled “Economic Development,” written by one of my former Western Carolina University professors, John Bell of Cullowhee, we find a wealth of information about early road construction in Jackson County.
An 1844 post office map indicated only two roads in the county – one that connected Balsam and Cowee gaps, and one from Waynesville to Charleston (S.C.) via Soco.
Bear in mind that at that time Jackson County had not officially been established and that the Tuckaseigee River was the dividing line between Haywood and Macon counties. Jackson was carved out in 1851, with the Plott Balsams forming its eastern boundary and the Cowee Mountains bordering the new county to the south and west.
Bell first described the “building of state-authorized toll roads, the interstates of an early era.”
Construction of a Western Turnpike that would stretch from Salisbury to the Georgia line by way of Waynesville and Franklin was authorized in 1848, with proceeds from North Carolina’s sale of Indian lands paying for the 16-foot wide road. According to Bell, those living within 2 miles of the road were obligated to “labor six days a year” to maintain it.
That road was completed sometime during the 1850s, Bell said, and was still the only “first-class” road in the county in 1880. Another road was built from Webster to the South Carolina line to connect with the Keowee Turnpike; it was later extended from Webster to Qualla.
According to Bell, the last toll road approved by the state was the Central Turnpike through what is now Canada community. Surveyed in 1883, its route stretched some 20 miles from L.J. Smith’s store to the Transylvania County line by way of Rich and “Dogin” (Dodgen?) mountains and “Tennessee” (Tanassee) Creek. But that road was apparently never built; commissioners authorized a new road in 1896 over nearly the same route, Bell said.
The second phase of road construction in the county was building and maintaining a system of unpaved county roads, though according to Bell, “there was really no system because roads developed where people needed them as settlements expanded.”
New roads for the county were secured in two ways: one was for officials to declare certain roads public after continued public use and the other was for citizens to ask for a road then have it surveyed and award payments to property owners, Bell said.
Examples cited by Bell include commissioners in 1871 ordering that “William Henderson’s road from the old Cullowhee road to Woods Gap be made public ... In 1875 three men surveyed a road from Canada to Cashiers Valley and the commissioners ordered it built. Cherokee land bonds were authorized to pay for building a road from the mouth of Cullowhee Creek to the top of Cullowhee Mountain in 1877. This road was considered to be ‘the direct route to South Carolina.””
Then we get to the part that sounds familiar.
“Despite the many roads and bridges built by 1890, people expressed great dissatisfaction with the condition of the roads,” Bell wrote.
The road from Sylva to Webster was so bad during the winter that the editor of The Tuckaseigee Democrat said that “driving an animal on it ‘should have subjected the driver to a prosecution for cruelty to animals.’”
According to Bell, the main reason for the bad roads was an “antiquated system of localized road maintenance.” A Tuckaseigee Democrat editorial charged that road crews performed “just enough work to keep from being indicted for their neglect,” a view Bell said was shared by the county Farmers’ Alliance.
County leaders realized that before the system could be changed, people’s attitudes had to be changed. One local editor compared such a process to “pouring water on a stone.”
But through the efforts of the Farmers’ Alliance, the “good roads movement,” and the local press, attitudes began to change, Bell said, and state geologist Joseph Hyde Pratt called a “Good Roads Meeting” in Webster in 1909. Telling those present how good roads had helped open Switzerland up to tourism, he helped organize a county good roads association led by Coleman C. Cowan. H.A. Pell headed the Cashiers Good Roads Association that in 1914 pressed for an automobile road from Toxaway to the South Carolina line.
All that helped, but what really changed people’s minds was the coming of the automobile, “which could not plow through mud like animals could,” Bell said.
While records don’t show when the first car entered the county, the most memorable one, according to Bell, was driven by Henry Ford in 1902. The pioneer auto maker visited some mineral properties near Toxaway and then drove down to Sylva to board a train.
And by 1923, car owners were complaining that the road from Cullowhee to Tuckasegee was nearly impassable for autos.
“The age of the automobile had arrived, but roads suitable for them had not,” Bell wrote.
Nowadays it seems that while we have “the roads suitable for automobiles,” we have more vehicles than are suitable for our roads.
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