Roads Built Cities Before Cities Built Roads
It's a fascinating evolution from animal trails to highways
The social critic and author, Jane Jacobs maintained that pre-historic cities were actually trading centers established near sources of specific materials, such as water or dressed leather that people were willing to travel far to obtain.
She mentions obsidian, as one example, a volcanic glass highly desired for making knives and spear points which pre-historic people living in volcanic regions around Mt. Ararat in Turkey became good at shaping. These trading centers were located near existing trails and they became the seedbeds for cities which later formed in those locations.
Moreover, her theory suggested that agriculture came into being at those places because people had no compelling need to move on. They had long been able to receive what they needed through the trade which came to them over long-established trails. They started raising their own meat, grain and vegetables right where they were and thus had good reason to settle there permanently and to build the settlements which later became towns.
In North America, the earliest roads were created by the native peoples by following already existing paths made by animals. Trails created by herds of buffalo shaped the routes used by indigenous tribes and those, in turn, were taken by colonists. I suspect that this was also the case across Europe, Asia and Australia.
Thomas Hart Benton once said that the buffalo blazed the way for the railways to the Pacific. That animal “blazed” with its hoofs the course of numerous roads and railways in use today, instinctively finding the points of least resistance across America’s great mountain ranges.
It was the buffalo who “discovered” the Cumberland Gap, the first great gateway to the west cut through the Cumberland Mountains in Tennessee and followed by native Americans and later American pioneers. It is one of the most important mountain passes in North America and a significant part of the country’s early history.
The buffalo also opened a way from the Potomac River to the Ohio River. A notable example of a railway following an ancient buffalo and subsequent native trail is the Baltimore and Ohio Railway. This Railroad was the first common carrier railroad and the oldest railroad in the United States with its first section opening in 1830.
And there are many more examples, including The Oregon Trail, the Santa Fe Trail, the Chisholm Trail, the Mojave Trail and the 440-mile long Natchez Trace, running from Nashville, Tennessee to Natchez, Mississippi. Today it’s a beautifully wooded paved road which parallels the original although you can still walk along portions of the ancient path.
I find it an amazing fact of nature that many of the roads we drive on today were footpaths before we got here and animal trails before that.
The man who developed the first durable paved roads used in England and America was John Loudon Macadam, a Scottish civil engineer who closely (if not exactly) followed the ancient Roman method of layering and packing different sizes of rocks in a well-drained roadbed.
During the Civil War, both Union and Confederate armies made use of one of the only macadamized roads in America, running northeast-to-southwest down the Shenandoah Valley. Because the road was macadam, troops, horses, wagons and heavy artillery could move rapidly without becoming bogged down in mud during rains.
General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson was able to outrun advancing Union armies by several rapid advances along the Shenandoah ridges, allowing his troops to swoop down and attack the Federals from their rear. Thanks to the macadam road surface the Federal troops had moved swiftly down the valley and were surprised by Jackson’s attacks.
Today’s use of the term “macadam” refers to an asphalt paved surface but asphalt was not widely used until the 1870’s. It is a naturally occurring substance, however, and people made use of it for hundreds of years before it became widespread.
Originally “macadam”, named after John Macadam, meant any lasting paved road surface using differently-sized rock and which was impervious to rain. Later on, when tarry substances were mixed with the stones and used as pavement, people began calling it “tar-mac” which is still used today to refer to airport runway surfaces, despite the fact that they are paved with concrete.