Ancestry Magazine

My mother’s family came from Oklahoma. In exploring my family’s past, I came across the Historical Atlas of Oklahoma, a book with a whole lot of maps that I find appealing. My third edition trumpets on the cover that it’s “updated from the 1980 census.” The book includes maps of early trails, cattle trails, and railroads. It doesn’t take a Magellan to notice that the same routes are used on all three maps.

I was thinking about this on a recent trip to San Antonio—a nice place to be, particularly in January when the temperature is 40 degrees warmer than it is back at my home office. When I opened my hote l window, the reassuring sound of the interstate reminded me of water rushing. I started to think of ways that highways are like rivers and how one led to the other and helped shape our lives and our ancestors’ lives along the way.

My thoughts unfolded like this: what began as natural routes for the wanderings of animals presented advantages over other paths for the wanderings of men. Indian trails became wagon roads, railroad grades, and highway routes. Easy places to ford rivers became terminals for trade routes. The National Pike became U.S. 40. The Chisholm Trail became the Rock Island line and then U.S. 281. The Texas Road became the Missouri Kansas & Texas (MKT) rail route, then the Shawnee Cattle Trail, and then U.S. 69.

History
The U.S. Postal Service had a large impact on the development of commercial routes in the early part of the nineteenth century. It all started when the post office established “stands” at inns and trading posts.

The need for regular delivery of mail augmented the development of shipping networks. In 1823, the post office designated all “navigable waters” as mail routes, enhancing the development of scheduled shipments. In 1838, they designated railroads as mail routes. In 1845, they defined “star routes” giving trustworthy, low-bidders the right to deliver mail on those routes via whatever means necessary.

The steam engine had its first impact on transportation in the form of steamboats, which pushed keel boats off western rivers by 1850. Overland travel was organized by stagecoach lines including Butterfield, Holladay, and Central Overland California, which operated an express delivery service known as the Pony Express (although it operated only for eighteen months—April 1860 to October 1861—just until the creation of telegraph lines across the Rockies, the Pony Express lives on in popular memory today as if it had lasted much longer).

But the development of the steam engine led to an even more radical change in land travel than it did for river travel—it made railroads possible. Routes were built in the West largely through government subsidy. A railroad company received right of way and land in exchange for building lines. By 1867, there was a line from sea to shining sea, and the railroads became the vital arteries for growth in the United States for the rest of the century.

Changing Routes
Nothing stays the same forever, not even the empire of the railroads. In the late 1800s, the invention of the internal combustion engine led to the invention of the automobile. Shortly thereafter, Henry Ford decided to make an affordable mass-produced car.

At the same time, there was an outcry for better roads for these cars and for bicycles. This led to the creation of early highways, such as the Lincoln Highway, the Dixie Highway, and the National Pike. Having seen what happened to towns that didn’t get rail service first, far-sighted merchants formed associations and lobbied for the routing of highways to their towns.
Highways made rich people so much richer that they talked the government into funding a network of highways known as U.S. highways, the most famous being Route 66, running from Chicago to Santa Monica. Just like rail, eventually a network of paved roads covered the entire country.

In the 1950s, the federal government began its interstate highways project. I’ve heard that the original idea was to build roads that the defense department could use to move convoys at one-hundred miles per hour, but I would hate to see them try it today—we have an S-curve on I-15 that would send them right off the road. Besides, I don’t see the military on the interstate—I see big trucks. The military can move more stuff faster and more efficiently using trains.

What Travel Did for Our Ancestors
It’s not uncommo n for a traveler to look at a town and wonder why it’s here. Increasingly, however, I’m learning that the reason a spot became a city was because that specific location held a commercially important place in a route.

Take Houston and Galveston for example. The penurious merchants of Galveston once boasted the busiest port and the largest city in Texas, but they refused to spend the money to deepen their harbor, even if it would allow larger merchant vessels to dock there. They also refused to allow a railroad from the mainland to reach the docks, which meant all cargoes going in or out of Galveston required expensive extra handling.

I can only imagine how the folks in Galveston felt in 1876 when a ship steamed past Galveston, right up Buffalo Bayou to the new Port of Houston—fifty miles inland. Houston eventually became one of the nation’s largest seaports, and Galveston had to settle for being just a nice, relaxing place to visit.

A similar situation shaped Jefferson and Dallas. Both cities lie in northeast Texas, but in 1870, the population of Dallas was only about 3,000, and the population of Jefferson was 4,180. Jefferson was the head of the navigable waters of Big Cypress Creek and steamboats first docked there in 1844. By 1870, the tonnage shipped from Jefferson was second in Texas only to Galveston (and we know how that turned out).

Then Dallas got rail lines. In 1872, Dallas was connected to a north-south line by the Houston & Texas Central and population jumped to 7,000. A year later, Dallas was connected to an east-west line by the Texas & Pacific. By 1885, the respective populations of Dallas and Jefferson were more like 20,000 and 3,500. Dallas thrived, Jefferson withered. And, like Galveston, Jefferson today is a nice, relaxing place to visit.

The Road More Traveled
To a lesser extent, interstate highways have had the same effect.

Take the Baker Hotel, a thirteen-story, 450- room, giant of a luxury hotel that you can see from five miles away. It looms over the small town of Mineral Wells, Texas.

The nearby town of Weatherford is a lot older than Mineral Wells, and it was once known as the Peach Capitol of Texas (they grow a lot of watermelon there now). Situated halfway between Ft. Worth and Ft. Belknap, Weatherford was a regular stop on the stage route between those points.

The railroad came to Weatherford in 1880; by 1890, the town’s population was 5,000. In comparison, Mineral Wells’s population in 1890 was 577. But then Mineral Wells, home to 400 mineral springs where people could come take “the cure,” got the railroad, too.

By 1920, Mineral Wells had health-seeking tourists and a population of 7,890 versus only 6,000 in Weatherford. Nine years later, the luxurious Baker Hotel was built to accommodate those tourists—to the tune of 1.25 million. And before it closed in 1972, the hotel claimed visits by Bonnie and Clyde, Judy Garland, Clark Gable, Will Rogers, Tom Mix, Marlene Dietrich, and Helen Keller; entertainers like Guy Lombardo, Dorothy Lamoure, Lawrence Welk, and Pat Boone were booked to play.

Having an interstate is pretty much a game of beggar thy neighbor, where one city grows and another withers, similar to Dallas and Jefferson with the railroad, and Galveston and Houston with ships. So in the 1950s, when the Federal Government launched the interstate highway program, and Interstate 20 went to Weatherford, not Mineral Wells
. . . well, you get the idea.
I’m not saying that if I-20 went through Mineral Wells, the Baker would still be open today. What I am saying is that it might. But even without the interstate or the Baker, Mineral Wells is still a nice, relaxing place to visit—and Weatherford is, once again, bigger.

Mapping It Out
If you drive the stretch of U.S. 69 between Durant and Muskogee, Oklahoma, you’ll notice a town every ten or twenty miles, each one courtesy of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway which erected a depot at each ten-mile interval while constructing the railroad across the Unassigned Lands.

Modern roads have genealogies, and by understanding them, we also get a better understanding of how these roads affected our families. Men don’t always choose the best route for a road first, as is shown by all of the abandoned railroads in the United States—even the line completed by the Golden Spike was abandoned less than twenty years later. Still, it works out often enough.

If you look around today, you see a network of interstate highways, each with its own genealogy. The evolution of the simple game trail into the complex, modern superhighway had a big impact on the growth of cities and towns by enabling commerce in ways that conferred a competitive advantage. In the process, our own lives were directly changed.

Did your ancestors work or travel on the Erie Canal? The National Road? The Union Pacific Railroad? Near Route 66? Close to an interstate highway? Or did they live in a town known for its relaxed pace? Understanding the nature of the transportation network available to your ancestors adds a new perspective to understanding those ancestors and their lives. And it might make you feel like you have a connection—even if you live by an interstate and they lived by a river.

Or, if you open your window, at least you might hear a similar sound.