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87 10 From Turnpike to Parkway From its inception, the most heavily traveled portion of the Maysville Road was the eighteen-mile section that connected Lexington and Paris—long known as the Paris Pike. Beginning at Main Street in central Lexington, the original track followed North Limestone Street to Bryan Station Road, which then angled northeast across open farmland, eventually arriving at the courthouse square in Paris. By the 1820s farms lined the route, and more than a dozen inns and taverns provided meals and overnight accommodations for carriage and stagecoach passengers and drovers. In 1827 James Darnaby and William Ellis Jr., the state-appointed surveyors, completed a general survey of the entire Maysville Road. Their map located the existing road and offered proposals for route alterations, the most substantive being a radical modification of the Lexington-to-Paris section. The surveyors suggested a new, nearly straight road from central Lexington to the fourteen-mile point south of Paris. The old track that traversed this section followed an irregular alignment on low land, paralleling creeks in some places, fording them in others—the track forded Houston Creek at least three times, for example.1 Road builders completed the realignment proposed by Darnaby and Ellis by the mid-1830s; the road became part of the Maysville, Washington, Paris, and Lexington Turnpike, and tollhouses were installed at regular intervals. The new road flanked Houston Creek on the northwest and relegated the old track to the status of back road. Though local residents proposed modifications to the new road, largely to try to retain direct access to the road or make direct links between the old road and the new, the Darnaby and Ellis alignment remained the primary route for more than 170 years.2 Though the road’s surface was periodically upgraded—in 1918 the Bourbon County section received a fresh, water-bound macadam surface, and the following year contractors applied hot asphalt oil to seal the surface—its historic turnpike configuration did not adapt well to motorized traffic as automobile ownership expanded in the 1920s.3 Though engineers widened and realigned the road segment on Lexington ’s north side from North Limestone to North Broadway in the 1930s, the road’s rural Fayette and Bourbon County sections retained its turnpike dimensions—the two narrow lanes, though asphalt-surfaced, were a mere twenty-two feet wide and had no shoulders or turning lanes. The Lexington-to-Paris interurban rail line was in 88  Overland Roads and the Epic of Kentucky’s Settlement operation by 1912 and made its last run in 1934. The interurban ran abreast of the road on one side, and stone and wood-plank farm-frontage fences further encroached on the right-of-way, confining the entire roadbed to an aislelike passageway. More than two dozen farms fronted the road, and their slow-moving horse vans and hay wagons often traveled the road amid high-speed automobiles and heavily loaded tractor -trailers. The road’s antique character and dimensions limited its capacity, while increasing traffic led to frequent accidents—from minor to horrific—and escalated concerns for travelers’ safety among state transportation officials and road users. Kentucky Transportation Cabinet engineers developed plans to rebuild the road and widen the Paris Pike to four lanes in the late 1960s, but protests and lawsuits by abutting landowners, public hearings and debates, and the development of revised construction plans and proposals protracted the reconstruction process. Farm owners and area citizens voiced concerns that the corridor’s historic and aesthetic landscape qualities should be maintained, even enhanced, not obliterated by a four-lane highway insensitively built to the specifications of a functional but visually debased interstate From 1901 to 1934 interurban railroad lines linked Lexington to the state capital and the surrounding county seats of Paris, Georgetown, Versailles, and Nicholasville. The Kentucky Traction and Terminal Company interurban system trackage was compatible with Lexington’s streetcar tracks, and the rolling stock included both passenger and freight cars. An interurban freight car is shown here on West Main Street in Lexington circa 1926. In the era before widespread availability of the automobile and the truck, people living in surrounding counties could commute to Lexington for shopping and social events via the interurban. Lexington businesses shipped freight to farms and towns along the lines. The interurban track from Lexington to Paris lay immediately adjacent to Paris Pike. (J. Winston Coleman Jr. Photographic Collection, Transylvania University Library) [3.22.51.241] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 02...

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