(Host) Commentator and Vermont Humanities Council executive director Peter
Gilbert tells us about the development of the Interstate Highway System
and a research project that is documenting the construction of the
interstates here in Vermont.
(Gilbert) In the summer of 1919, a young
Lieutenant Colonel named Dwight D. Eisenhower participated in the first
Army transcontinental motor convoy. It was a test of the military’s
ability to move troops and equipment from one coast to the other during
wartime. The trip from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco took 62 days.
Eisenhower learned first-hand about the difficulties of traveling
cross-country on poor, mostly dirt roads. This early experience
influenced his decisions as President to champion the building of the
interstate highway system. That’s why it’s named the Dwight D.
Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.
The interstates are a tangle of consequences – both intended and unintended.
Interstate construction began about 50 years ago, in 1958
and lasted into the 1970s – and in Vermont they spurred great economic
development; they made travel more convenient and remote places
more accessible. They also cut family farms in two, paved pastures,
bull-dozed historic buildings, and reshaped the landscape itself. They
contributed to, among other things, sprawl, the decline of the
railroads, and the growth of the auto and gasoline industries, air
pollution, and climate change. Some businesses and
communities thrived, others suffered, depending on where entrance and
exit ramps were. Suddenly houses in the Northeast Kingdom and Champlain
Islands became potential weekend getaways for residents of Boston and
even New York.
UVM professor Paul Bierman is leading a project
funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities to study the
cultural changes to rural America caused by the coming of interstates,
using Vermont as a case study. Central to the project is an archive of
34,000 large-format negatives, taken before, during, and after the
construction of Interstates. Some of the images were taken to document
and value what property was taken by eminent domain to build the
highways.
The images have been scanned, described, and indexed;
about 20,000 are accessible on the website of UVM’s Landscape Change
Program. Field researchers will document land use changes, environmental
impacts, and patterns of construction and development resulting from
the highways. UVM student researchers are anxious to capture the oral
histories of people who witnessed the highways’ construction and whose
lives were affected, positively and negatively. And in the fall, UVM students and others will visit fairs and
libraries around the state to display images of the highways’
construction and discuss the project.
The interstate highway
system was, for better and for worse, the last massive federal
investment in national infrastructure; the political and economic
climate in which the highway system was built was very different from today’s.
The
late Charles Kuralt, who knew something about being on the road, said
that "Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to
travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything."
Now it’s time to look carefully at the highways themselves and see what we will see.