Gallery I · Transportation · The Museum of Everyday Living
Paying the Road
For most of American history, a long road was something a traveler paid for at a gate. Follow the toll road from the turnpike companies of the 1790s and the National Road (today US 40) to the turnpikes of the 1940s and 50s, and the moment in 1957 when many of them were taken into the Interstate System.
The story in seven stops
| Years | What happened | On the map | The road today |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1792–1840 | States chartered private turnpike companies. Investors bought shares, built a gravel or stone road, and collected tolls at gates where a pike (a pole) was turned aside once a traveler paid. The Philadelphia and Lancaster road, chartered 1792 and opened 1795, was the first long one. Between 2,500 and 3,200 companies built and ran toll roads over the century. | Brown: roads that still carry a turnpike company's name | Local and state roads named Turnpike or Pike: Jericho, Newburyport, Boston–Worcester, Little River, Midlothian |
| 1806–1839 | Congress paid for the one great federal road: the Cumberland or National Road. Work began at Cumberland, Maryland, in 1811, reached Wheeling on the Ohio in 1818, and stopped at Vandalia, Illinois, when the money ran out in the late 1830s. | Thick red line and black landmarks | US 40, the "National Pike" |
| 1830s–1900 | Washington handed the road to the states, and the states built toll houses on it, such as La Vale in Maryland (1836) and Petersburg and Searights in Pennsylvania (about 1835). Stone arch bridges, the road's spans, still stand along it. | Red dots: US 40 bridges built before 1940, from the National Bridge Inventory | Toll houses are museums; the oldest span in the inventory on US 40 crosses Little Wheeling Creek, built 1817 |
| 1913–1926 | The Good Roads movement and the automobile brought free, tax-paid roads. Auto trails like the Lincoln Highway (1913) were marked coast to coast, then in 1926 the federal government numbered the routes. The National Road became part of US 40. | Grey: Lincoln Highway; dashed red: the rest of US 40 | US 30 and US 40 |
| 1940–1956 | The toll road came back as the superhighway. The Pennsylvania Turnpike opened on 1 October 1940 from Carlisle to Irwin, and after the war state turnpikes were built in Maine, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Indiana, Massachusetts, Kansas, Oklahoma, Florida and others, without federal money. | Gold lines | Most are still tolled; Connecticut's turnpike dropped its tolls in 1988 |
| 1956–1992 | The 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act built the Interstates as free roads paid for by a fuel tax. Congress let the existing turnpikes be counted in, and on 21 August 1957 the Bureau of Public Roads added about 2,100 miles of toll roads in 15 states to the system. Along the National Road, I-70 and I-68 took the through traffic. | Blue: I-70, I-68 and I-80 west, the roads that replaced US 40 | US 40 is a local road; Breezewood, Pennsylvania, is where I-70 joins the toll turnpike |
| Today | About 2,900 miles of the Interstate System are turnpikes, and newer toll roads are often run by private operators under long leases. Electronic tolling has replaced most toll booths. | Purple: toll bridges; gold dots: bridges that carry a toll road | E-ZPass, SunPass and other electronic systems |
What the data shows
| Layer | Source | Roads | Miles mapped |
|---|---|---|---|
| Old turnpike roads (1790s–1850s company roads whose names survive) | BTS National Highway Planning Network | 106 | 840 |
| The National Road, 1811–1839 (today US 40) | BTS National Highway Planning Network | 1 | 522 |
| US 40 beyond the old National Road (numbered 1926) | BTS National Highway Planning Network | 1 | 1,542 |
| Lincoln Highway, the 1913 auto trail (today US 30) | BTS National Highway Planning Network | 3 | 303 |
| Turnpike era toll expressways, 1940 onward (some since freed) | BTS National Highway Planning Network | 45 | 3,439 |
| Interstates that took over the US 40 corridor (I-70, I-68, I-80 west) | BTS National Highway Planning Network | 4 | 2,172 |
| Points | Source | Count | Oldest built |
| Landmarks: toll houses, mile 0, turnpike ends | Museum research (locations approximate) | 12 | 1795 |
| US 40 / National Road bridges built before 1940 (National Bridge Inventory) | BTS National Bridge Inventory | 102 | 1817 |
| Toll bridges (National Bridge Inventory) | BTS National Bridge Inventory | 698 | 1897 |
| Bridges carrying a toll road (National Bridge Inventory) | BTS National Bridge Inventory | 8,637 | 1901 |
The highway network shows only roads on the national network, so some old turnpikes and parts of US 40 are not drawn. Road names come from the network's own records.
Think about it
| Grade band | Question |
|---|---|
| K–2 | Draw a toll gate. Who waits at the gate, and what do you hand them? |
| 3–5 | Why would a company build a road if travelers had to pay to use it? |
| 6–8 | Find the National Road on the map. Which states did it cross, and why did it end at Vandalia? |
| 9–12 | In 1939 the Bureau of Public Roads said most long routes could not pay for themselves with tolls. Why did tolls work on the Pennsylvania Turnpike but not across the whole country? |
| AP Human Geography / Econ | Use Breezewood to explain how a toll road and a free road meeting in one place shapes the businesses that grow there. |
Sources
- Federal Highway Administration, "Why Does the Interstate System Include Toll Facilities?" fhwa.dot.gov
- Daniel B. Klein and John Majewski, "Turnpikes and Toll Roads in Nineteenth-Century America," EH.Net Encyclopedia. eh.net
- U.S. Bureau of Public Roads, Toll Roads and Free Roads (1939), House Document 272, 76th Congress.
- Bureau of Transportation Statistics, National Highway Planning Network and National Bridge Inventory, via geodata.bts.gov; U.S. Census Bureau, TIGER state boundaries.
Scan or share: newschoolworks.com/q/Y682XK
A newSchoolWorks.com museum.