Miles and Miles of Texas: 100 Years of the Texas Highway Department

by Carol Dawson, Roger Allen Polson, Geoff Appold (Photographer)

Overview

On the eve of its centennial, Carol Dawson and Roger Allen Polson present almost 100 years of history and never-before-seen photographs that track the development of the Texas Highway Department. An agency originally created “to get the farmer out of the mud,” it has gone on to build the vast network of roads that now connects every corner of the state.

When the Texas Highway Department (now called the Texas Department of Transportation or TxDOT) was created in 1917, there were only about 200,000 cars in Texas traveling on fewer than a thousand miles of paved roads. Today, after 100 years of the Texas Highway Department, the state boasts over 80,000 miles of paved, state-maintained roads that accommodate more than 25 million vehicles.

Sure to interest history enthusiasts and casual readers alike, decades of progress and turmoil, development and disaster, and politics and corruption come together once more in these pages, which tell the remarkable story of an infrastructure 100 years in the making.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781623494568
Publisher:	Texas A&M University Press
Publication date:	09/23/2016
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	668,582
Product dimensions:	8.90(w) x 11.20(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

CAROL DAWSON is an Austin-based writer and artist. She is the author of four novels and one book of non-fiction. She teaches writing workshops, was writer-in-residence at the College of Santa Fe, and is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. ROGER ALLEN POLSON is former executive assistant to the deputy executive director of the Texas Department of Transportation. He is recognized by the American Association of State Highways and Transportation Officials, the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, and United Press International for his writing, video, and radio productions.

Interviews

Austin, TX

Editorial Reviews

“This authoritative and surprisingly entertaining narrative is about a lot more than asphalt. In Carol Dawson and Roger Polson’s hands, the story of the Texas Highway Department is the story of Texas itself—of Native American migration and Spanish exploration, of wars and revolutions, of skullduggery and heroism, of vicious prejudice and noble common purpose, of engineering triumphs and disasters, of greedy shortsightedness and grand shimmering visions.” —Stephen Harrigan, author of The Gates of the Alamo and A Friend of Mr. Lincoln
 

Stephen Harrigan

“For their diligent research, authors Carol Dawson and Roger Polson deserve high accolades.  Their deep digging has resulted in the motherlode of entertaining stories.  Weaved well together, they tell the story of TxDOT and its lead actors whose visions and leadership have left a significant positive mark on Texas.” — Lawrence Olsen
 

Lawrence Olsen

2016-11-09
An engaging, appropriately sprawling history of the Texas Highway Department over its first century.It's entirely fitting that an agency of Texas government should have been mired in controversy at the outset. As Texas novelist and historian Dawson (House of Plenty: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of Luby's Cafeterias, 2006, etc.) and former Texas Department of Transportation official Polson observe, for the first 15 years, officeholders struggled to control "the largest, wealthiest department or agency ever devised for any state in the United States." It's surprising, perhaps, that the narrative should take so straightforward a view of the shadier aspects of the department's past, in which a couple of governors helped themselves to highway funds, a couple of others used roads as political favors, and the national government had to flex plenty of muscle to direct federal funds toward road-building within the state. Indeed, as the authors write, as far back as the early 1920s, owing to the odd way funds were distributed across the counties, "the federal government actually pronounced Texas ineligible to participate in a federal project to begin determining the location, design, and construction of interstate highways." For all its birth in corruption, though, the department emerges in this account as competent and capable of herculean tasks, such as building the great span over the Pecos Gorge and funneling traffic safely through the gnarled metropolises of Houston and Dallas. Furthermore, the interstate actually did get built, despite the reluctance of Texans to float bonds in favor of a pay-as-you-go system: the first miles laid outside Corsicana in 1956, the last a stretch of highway between Amarillo and Lubbock completed nearly four decades later. Texas was among the last of the states to finish up the job, but then, "the other states' task seldom compared with a fraction of what Texas had to accomplish."Road warriors and transportation buffs will be pleased with this well-illustrated, well-written volume.

Kirkus Reviews