If you think the roads of Massachusetts are chaotic now, you should have seen them before they had numbers.
That was the free-wheeling reality of road travel here and in most other states until well into the automobile age, which started slowly and exploded in the 1920s. By 1926, there were already 10 million cars on the road in the U.S., 580,000 of them in Massachusetts.
Congestion in the cities was already a major issue. Imagine a world in which everyone driving in to Boston had to use Beacon St., Mass. Ave. or Broadway in Everett – and much narrower versions of those.
But leaving the congestion behind get out of the cities, and things truly became confusing. With one important exception, roads weren’t numbered and even with maps, navigating was a guessing game. For long distance travel, the driver had to have a map that showed which colored blazes on telephone poles – truly – would take them along a route from, let’s say, Newton to Agawam. And if the oil company or road promoter that had named that “trail” hadn’t bothered to keep up the blazes – well, people figured it out, if they could.
The exception was the New England Highway Marking System, established in 1922, under which the highway divisions of the six states agreed to number and mark major routes. So, once you found Route 5 coming out of Somerville, you could make it to Worcester via Waltham, Wayland and points in between. All major routes went right through the centers of towns, on established (though not necessarily paved) roads. Route 5 was also blazed as the Yellowstone Trail, which ran from Plymouth to Seattle. (Motto: “A good road from Plymouth Rock to Puget Sound.”)
The New England system pointed the way for what was needed, as did the state of Wisconsin, which had the good sense to adopt route numbers in 1919. But within Massachusetts, if the origin and destination weren’t major communities, there was a blazed trail which needed the right map, or nothing. And long distance interstate travel was entirely a matter of trails like the Yellowstone, the Lincoln Highway – and an ever-shifting array of others, many of which were semi-scams. “In nine cases out of ten these transcontinental highway associations are common nuisances and nothing else. They are more mischievous than constructive. And in many instances they are organized by clever boomers who are not interested in building roads but in obtaining salaries at the expense of an easily beguiled public,” opined the Reno Evening Gazette.
Through the mid-20s, as the number of car travelers increased, the auto trails came and went, and confusion and anger rose proportionally, support advanced within the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads and the state highway departments to establish a system of federal roads with numbers to replace the blazes on rocks and barns and telephone poles. From early 1925 through 1926, the BPR held a series of group and regional meetings of the highway officials to decide what how the federal routes should run, how they should be numbered, and what the official federal highway sign should look like.
The New England states met last, on June 15 in Boston, and then the whole collection of regional plans was turned over to the BPR and the “Joint Board” of state highway officials. On Nov. 11, 1926, the Joint Board approved the final plan for the national system, and the U.S. routes we know today (U.S. 1, U.S. 20, U.S. 3) came to life. Signage began at once, and some of the New England Routes gave way to their federal successors (N.E. 5 became U.S. 20). But some major roads would wait for Massachusetts to get serious about adopting its own intrastate number system, and so today’s Route 2 remained N.E. 7 until 1929.
== Craig Sandler, Mass. Almanac/SHNS
