AUTOMOTIVE HISTORY – JANUARY 16, 1916 – THE FEDERAL HIGHWAY ACT
America was on the move in the early 1900’s - quite literally.
Much of the nation’s highway infrastructure left little to be desired until the passage of the “Good Roads Act,” formally known as the Federal Aid Highway Act, of 1916.
Why is that significant? Well, what came from that legislation was the Bankhead Bill, which in effect paved the way for highways as we know them today. One of the nation's earliest transcontinental roads, in fact, is the Bankhead Highway.
Instrumental in getting America headed in the right direction was Sen. John H. Bankhead of Alabama with the passage of the bill that bears his name.
“The Bankhead Highway was the the nation’s first all-weather, cross-country highway,” said Dan Smith of Fort Worth, a retired meteorologist who wrote the book The Bankhead Highway in Texas, published in 2013. “The Lincoln Highway was first, but you couldn’t use it all year because it went up through the northern U.S. and through the mountains out west, and winter weather made the roads impassable. The Bankhead Highway crossed the country through the South, and you could rely on it all year around.”
Federal assistance allowed the states to construct and maintain better roads, Smith said. That quickly led to a network of reliable long distance roads which had an immediate and positive impact.
“America’s roads were terrible,” Smith said. “They were dirt, and they zigzagged along earlier trails and property lines. There were no reliable maps because the roads were often re-routed. The roads were whatever people made them to be, particularly in Texas. The Bankhead Bill allowed a major improvement over that.”
Smith said that in 1916 Texas was the only state without a highway department. [Texas] quickly formed the agency in early 1917 as a requirement of the Good Roads Act. Federal Funds were made available to the states on a 50/50 cost sharing basis to build and maintain good roads, and Texas wasted no time mapping out where to build them. By the end of 1917 the highway department showed 26 numbered roads in the state. Texas Highway No.1 would stretch across Texas, from El Paso to Texarkana.
“That became the Bankhead route,” Smith said. “It was nearly one-third of the cross-country highway.”
The Bankhead Highway Association was also formed and Asa Rountree was its CEO.
“Rountree was a newspaper man, a publisher, a salesman and most of all a good roads enthusiast,” Smith said. “He was also from Alabama and knew Sen. Bankhead.”
Smith said over the years Rountree made a good living traveling constantly and selling the idea of the Bankhead Highway. His Bankhead Highway Association helped generate the matching funds which made the roads possible.
Much of the Bankhead is still on the ground today, although it is known by many other names in various cities.
Only a handful of places, including Aledo, Willow Park and Weatherford, still call it Bankhead Highway or Bankhead Drive on street signs. In other cities, it was (and sometimes still is) known as U.S. 80, U.S. 67 or Texas 1. In west Fort Worth, it is Camp Bowie Boulevard. In Arlington, it’s Division Street. But more than just that Texas connection, Bankhead Highway was one of the first coast-to-coast roads in the United States, starting at the Zero Milestone on the White House South Lawn in Washington and ending near the Pacific Ocean in San Diego.
“The Bankhead name is hanging on in a few places,” Smith said. “The longest stretch named Bankhead Highway is in Parker County. That’s something about which they can be very proud.”
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