Dirt Roads to Dixie: Accessibility and Modernization in the South, 1885-1935 (review)

Southeastern Geographer Vol. XXXI, No. 2, November 1991, pp. 103-108 REVIEWS Dirt Roads to Dixie: Accessibility and Modernization in the South, 1885—1935. Howard Lawrence Preston. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. xii and 206 pp., maps, photographs, notes, bibliographic essay, and index. $38.50 cloth/$18.95 paper (ISBN 0-87049-676-X) Automobile travel in the South is not as adventurous as it used to be. In 1910 Seymour Cunningham set off from his home in Litchfield, Connecticut , for Charleston, South Carolina, with his wife and four-year-old daughter in his sturdy Pierce-Arrow 48. The trip ofmore than a thousand miles on "treacherous, often impassable, and largely unmapped roads" took 34 days. Eight years earlier Mayor Charles A. Bland of Charlotte, North Carolina, had assured his listeners that "North Carolina was saved from the invasion of Sherman because the roads were so bad he could not get through," and little had been done to improve them in the intervening decades. Cunningham relied on the 1910 Blue Book of the American Automobile Association, the first automobile guide to the South; much of its information had been culled from Civil War records because nothing better or more up-to-date was available. He carried tire chains and mud hooks, an axe, a shovel, a crowbar, 100 feet of strong manila rope, cement , and an ample supply of soapstone; spare valve parts, extra brake linings, five gallons of motor oil, a large bucket of grease, tire tubes and patches, a full set of brake shoes, and all the necessary tools; an oilskin canvas large enough to cover the entire car; a large basket for canned goods and a trunk ofclothing; and two absolute essentials, a compass and a gun. "I should take every one ofthem again," he said, "ifrepeating the trip." The improvement of highways has been called the third deity in the trinity of southern progress, along with better education and industrial development. Dirt Roads to Dixie is an entertaining and readable history of the good roads movement in the South, although it is biased toward the Progressive ideal ofbetter farm-to-market roads and against the business leaders who were instrumental in securing the construction of good through highways. The good roads movement originated at the end of the 19th century 104Southeastern Geographer with Progressives who believed that the improvement of local farm-tomarket roads, in addition to giving farmers better access to markets, would liberate farm women, keep young people on the farm, enable farm families to take full advantage ofthe cultural and economic opportunities of the city without actually having to move there, and thus halt the decline in rural values. "The country dweller would be uplifted and stimulated" by good roads, burbled one advocate, "and love of rural life would fill the nation." Preston is dismayed that the Progressive good roads movement failed, but he may be guilty of overstatement when he claims that "the twentieth century rural South would not have been so chronically backward " if early advocates had been able to foster a good network of farmto -market roads. Most of the Progressive good roads advocates were well-meaning city folk who wanted to save poor downtrodden farmers, but the farmers had no great wish to be "saved" for the benefit of city visionaries if salvation meant an increase in their taxes. Grass-roots pressure for the development of good local roads in the rural South had to await the widespread ownership of automobiles, which was a product of the prosperity associated with the First World War. Around 1910 southern business leaders began to take over the leadership of the good roads movement from Progressives, and they transformed it from an effort to build local farm-to-market roads into a wellfunded , highly visible, and sustained effort to construct long-distance through highways for tourists. Automobile owners wanted roads that were less exciting, small-town merchants realized that tourists were good for business, real-estate developers like Leonard Tufts (Pinehurst, N.C.) and Carl Fisher Graham (Miami Beach) needed good roads to make their developments accessible, and automobile manufacturers realized that better roads would help them sell more cars. The...