A plank road is a road composed of wooden planks or puncheon logs, as an efficient technology for traversing soft, marshy, or otherwise difficult ground. Plank roads have been built since antiquity, and were commonly found in the Canadian province of Ontario as well as the Northeast and Midwest of the United States in the first half of the 19th century. They were often built by turnpike companies.
The Wittmoor bog trackway is the name given to each of two historic plank roads or boardwalks, trackway No. I being discovered in 1898 and trackway No. II in 1904 [1] in the Wittmoor bog in northern Hamburg, Germany. The trackways date to the 4th and 7th century AD, both linked the eastern and western shores of the formerly inaccessible, swampy bog. A part of the older trackway No. II dating to the period of the Roman Empire is on display at the permanent exhibition of the Archaeological Museum Hamburg in Harburg, Hamburg. [2] [3]
This type of plank road is known to have been used as early as 4,000 BC with, for example, the Post Track found in the Somerset levels near Glastonbury, England. [4] This type of road was also constructed in Roman times.[ citation needed ]
From the mid-1840s and to mid 1850s, the United States experienced the Plank Road Boom and a subsequent bust. The first plank road in the US was built in North Syracuse, New York, to transport salt and other goods; [5] it appears to have copied earlier roads in Canada, which had copied Russian ones. [6] The plank road boom, like many other early technologies, promised to transform the way people lived and worked and led to permissive changes in legislation seeking to spur development, speculative investment by private individuals, etc. Ultimately, the technology failed to live up to its promise, and millions of dollars in investments evaporated almost overnight. [6]
Three plank roads, the Hackensack, the Paterson, and the Newark, were major arteries in northern New Jersey. The roads travelled over the New Jersey Meadowlands, connecting the cities for which they were named to the Hudson River waterfront.
U.S. Route 1 in Virginia follows the Boydton Plank Road from Petersburg southwards to just north of the North Carolina line.
On the U.S. West Coast the Canyon Road of Portland, Oregon was another important but short artery and was built between 1851 and 1856.
Kingston Road (Toronto) (Governor's Road) and Danforth Avenue, in Toronto, were plank roads built by the Don and Danforth Plank Road Company in the late 18th and the early 19th centuries. Highway 2 from Toronto eastwards was a plank road in the 19th century that was later paved. In 1833 Scarborough-Markham Plank Road was authorized to build a road from Danforth Road to Highway 7 to Ringwood and east on Stouffville Road to Main Street Stouffville.
Plank roads are used exclusively in the Canadian fishing outport of Harrington Harbour, Quebec because the town is built directly over a hilly, rocky shore. ATVs are the only mode of transportation there.
In Perth, Western Australia, plank roads were important in the early growth of the agricultural and outer urban areas because of the distances imposed by swamps and the relatively-infertile soil. As it cost £2,000/km to construct roads by conventional means, the local councils, known as road boards, were experimenting with cheaper approaches to road building. A method called Jandakot Corduroy had been developed at Jandakot south-east of Perth: a jarrah tramway lay upon 2.3-metre-long (7.5 ft) sleepers, bounded by two 70-centimetre-wide (28 in) strips of jarrah planks for cart and carriage wheels. The 90-centimetre (35 in) gap was filled with limestone rubble to be used by horses. This reduced the cost of road building by up to 85% after its widespread introduction in 1908. [7] However, increased traffic and suburban development rendered the routes unsatisfactory over time, and by the 1950s, they had been replaced with bitumen surfaced roads.
A boardwalk is an elevated footpath, walkway, or causeway typically built with wooden planks, which functions as a type of low water bridge or small viaduct that enables pedestrians to better cross wet, muddy or marshy lands. Such timber trackways have existed since at least Neolithic times.
The Sweet Track is an ancient trackway, or causeway, in the Somerset Levels, England, named after its finder, Ray Sweet. It was built in 3807 BC and is the second-oldest timber trackway discovered in the British Isles, dating to the Neolithic. The Sweet Track was predominantly built along the course of an earlier structure, the Post Track.
Stouffville is one of the seven train lines of the GO Transit system in the Greater Toronto Area, Ontario, Canada. Its southern terminus is Union Station in Toronto, and its northern terminus is Old Elm in Whitchurch-Stouffville. There are connections from almost every station to Toronto Transit Commission or York Region Transit bus services.
A footbridge is a bridge designed solely for pedestrians. While the primary meaning for a bridge is a structure which links "two points at a height above the ground", a footbridge can also be a lower structure, such as a boardwalk, that enables pedestrians to cross wet, fragile, or marshy land. Bridges range from stepping stones–possibly the earliest man-made structure to "bridge" water–to elaborate steel structures. Another early bridge would have been simply a fallen tree. In some cases a footbridge can be both functional and artistic.
King's Highway 48, also known as Highway 48, is a provincially maintained highway in southern Ontario that extends from Major Mackenzie Drive in Markham, through Whitchurch-Stouffville and East Gwillimbury, to Highway 12 south-east of Beaverton. The route is generally rural and straight, passing near several communities within the Regional Municipality of York. The route is 65.2 kilometres (40.5 mi) long. Most part of the road has a speed limit of 80 km/h (50 mph), except within town limits, where the speed limit is reduced to 60 km/h (37 mph) or 50 km/h (31 mph).
Unionville GO Station is a train and bus station in the GO Transit network located in Markham, Ontario, Canada. It is a stop on the Stouffville line. The station is also served by Highway 407 East Express buses, which run westbound to Highway 407 station, northbound to Mount Joy GO Station, and eastbound to the Oshawa GO station.
Historic roads are paths or routes that have historical importance due to their use over a period of time. Examples exist from prehistoric times until the early 20th century. They include ancient trackways, long-lasting roads, important trade routes, and migration trails. Many historic routes, such as the Silk Road, the Amber Road, and the Royal Road of the Persian Empire, covered great distances and their impact on human settlements remain today.
A corduroy road or log road is a type of road or timber trackway made by placing logs, perpendicular to the direction of the road over a low or swampy area. The result is an improvement over impassable mud or dirt roads, yet rough in the best of conditions and a hazard to horses due to shifting loose logs.
Dickson Hill is a small community in northeast Markham, Ontario, Canada, located near Highway 48 and 19th Avenue, on the border to Whitchurch-Stouffville.
The Hackensack Plank Road, also known as Bergen Turnpike, was a major artery which connected the cities of Hoboken and Hackensack, New Jersey. Like its cousin routes, the Newark Plank Road and Paterson Plank Road, it travelled over Bergen Hill and across the Hackensack Meadows from the Hudson River waterfront to the city for which it was named. It was originally built as a colonial turnpike road as Hackensack and Hoboken Turnpike. The route mostly still exists today, though some segments are now called the Bergen Turnpike. It was during the 19th century that plank roads were developed, often by private companies which charged a toll. As the name suggests, wooden boards were laid on a roadbed in order to prevent horse-drawn carriages and wagons from sinking into softer ground on the portions of the road that passed through wetlands. The company that built the road received its charter on November 30, 1802. The road followed the route road from Hackensack to Communipaw that was described in 1679 as a "fine broad wagon-road."
The history of road transport started with the development of tracks by humans and their beasts of burden.
The Corlea Trackway is an Iron Age trackway, or togher, near the village of Keenagh, south of Longford, County Longford, in Ireland. It was known locally as the Danes' Road. It was constructed from oak planks in 148–147 BC, making it contemporary with the Siege of Carthage.
There have been routes and trackways in Ireland connecting settlements and facilitating trade since ancient times and the country now has an extensive network of public roads connecting all parts of the island.
The Archäologisches Museum Hamburg is an archaeological museum in the Harburg borough of Hamburg, Germany. It houses the archaeological finds of the city of Hamburg and the neighbouring counties to the south of the city. It focuses on northern German prehistory and early history as well as the history of the former city of Harburg. The museum is also home to the cultural heritage landmarks commission of the city of Hamburg and the adjacent district of Harburg in Lower-Saxony and thus supervises all archaeological undertakings in the region.
The Ratcliff or Baker Hill Site is a 16th-century Huron-Wendat ancestral village located on one of the headwater tributaries of the Rouge River on the south side of the Oak Ridges Moraine in present-day Whitchurch–Stouffville, approximately 25 kilometers north of Toronto. The Ratcliff Site is located on the east side of Highway 48, south of Bloomington Road in Whitchurch–Stouffville. The ravine on the village site was infilled during the early 1950s to allow for the expansion of a neighboring quarry.
The Wittmoor bog trackway is the name given to each of two historic corduroy roads, trackway No. I being discovered in 1898 and trackway No. II in 1904 in the Wittmoor bog in northern Hamburg, Germany. The trackways date to the 4th and 7th century AD, both linked the eastern and western shores of the formerly inaccessible, swampy bog. A part of the older trackway No. II dating to the period of the Roman Empire is on display at the permanent exhibition of the Archaeological Museum Hamburg in Harburg, Hamburg.
The Wittemoor timber trackway is a log causeway or corduroy road across a bog at Neuenhuntdorf, part of the Berne in the district of Wesermarsch in Lower Saxony, Germany. Originating in the pre-Roman Iron Age, it is one of several such causeways which have been found in the North German Plain, particularly in the Weser-Ems region. It was excavated in 1965 and 1970 and prehistoric wooden cult figurines were discovered in association with it. It is trackway number XLII (IP).
The Plank Road Boom was an economic boom in the United States that lasted from 1844 to the mid 1850s, largely in the Eastern United States and New York. In the span of ten years, over 3,500 miles (5,600 km) of plank road were built in New York—enough road to go from Manhattan to California—and more than 10,000 miles (16,000 km) of plank road were built countrywide.
Corduroy Road Ruin Historic Site is a heritage-listed former stagecoach route and now disused road at East Coonamble Road, Curban, Gilgandra Shire, New South Wales, Australia. It was designed by n/a and built from 1850 to 1923. It is also known as Cobb & Co route. The property is owned by Gilgandra Shire Council. It was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 5 October 2018.
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