Two Centuries in the Making
The Interstate Highway System didn't begin in 1956. It was the endpoint of 145 years of federal road-building experiments, military lessons, and one president's conviction that the country needed a connected national network.
Long before the first shovel of interstate-grade concrete was poured, the federal government had already tried, and mostly struggled, to build a national road network. This page traces that entire arc: the country's first federally funded road, the private highway associations of the early auto age, a young Army officer's brutal cross-country convoy, and the legislative act that finally tied a funding mechanism to a 40,000-mile vision.
What follows is every major milestone, in order, each sourced to the Federal Highway Administration, the Library of Congress, the Eisenhower Presidential Library, or peer-reviewed transportation history.
Every Milestone, Start to Today
Sources & Further Reading
- The National Road, Federal Highway Administration
- Ask the Rambler: Was the Lincoln Highway the First Transcontinental Highway?, Federal Highway Administration
- 1919 Transcontinental Motor Convoy, Eisenhower Presidential Library
- Contributions and Crossroads: Our National Road System's Impact, Timeline, Federal Highway Administration
- Pennsylvania Turnpike Fact Sheet, Federal Highway Administration
- National System of Interstate and Defense Highways Act Signed Into Law, Library of Congress, Research Guides
- The Size of the Job, Federal Highway Administration, 50th Anniversary
- The Last Piece of the Interstate Highway System May Have Been the Toughest, American Society of Civil Engineers
- The Interstates and the Cities: Highways, Housing, and the Freeway Revolt, Poverty & Race Research Action Council
- How Interstate Highways Reinforced Segregation, HISTORY
- Right-of-Way, Uniform Relocation Act, Federal Highway Administration
- Claim That One in Every Five Miles of Interstate Must Be Straight for Planes to Land Is a Widespread Myth, PolitiFact
- Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act: Highway Bridges, Congressional Research Service, Congress.gov