Karl Raitz - Kentuckys Frontier Highway: Historical Landscapes Along the Maysville Road

Kentuckys Frontier Highway

KENTUCKYS FRONTIER HIGHWAY

Historical Landscapes along the Maysville Road

KARL RAITZ AND NANCY OMALLEY

Cartographic Design and Production by Dick Gilbreath, Gyula Pauer Center for Cartography and GIS

Copyright 2012 by The University Press of Kentucky

Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,
serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University.
All rights reserved.

Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky
663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008
www.kentuckypress.com

Unless otherwise noted, photographs were taken by Karl Raitz between 2005 and 2007.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Raitz, Karl B.

Kentuckys frontier highway : historical landscapes along the Maysville Road / Karl Raitz and Nancy OMalley.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8131-3664-6 (hardcover : acid-free paper)

ISBN 978-0-8131-3666-0 (pdf) (print) -- ISBN 978-0-8131-4069-8 (epub) (print)

1. Historic sitesKentuckyMaysville Region. 2. LandscapesKentuckyMaysville Region. 3. TrailsKentuckyMaysville RegionHistory. 4. RoadsKentuckyMaysville RegionHistory. 5. Maysville Region (Ky.)History, Local. 6. Maysville Region (Ky.)Description and travel. 7. Frontier and pioneer lifeKentuckyMaysville Region. 8. Maysville Region (Ky.)History. I. OMalley, Nancy. II. Title.

F459.M47R35 2012

976.9323dc23 2012032833

This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

Member of the Association of
American University Presses

Maps

Illustrations

As Carl G. Fisher wrote in 1912: The highways of America are built chiefly of politics, whereas the proper material is crushed rock, or concrete.

George R. Stewart,

U.S. 40: Cross Section of the United States of America

Some changes have long historical trajectories that are technology-dependent, such as a roads cross-sectional form and its configuration in relation to topographic surfaces. Other changes occur within much shorter temporal windows, such as the weathering of smooth, black asphalt into a checked surface, sun-bleached and oxidized to a whitish gray. Just so, the roadside is in continual adjustment as businesses are established and fail, or as changes in travel technologyfrom stagecoach to interurban rail to private automobilerender nineteenth-century taverns anachronistic or motivate construction of a fast-food franchise restaurant.

Such change does not necessarily obliterate established landscape elements such as road sections, bridges, townhouses, taverns, or gas stations. Some elements recede from view when engineers make minor road realignments that bypass them; others stolidly remain standing along the road, but people convert them to new uses. The historical composite road-roadside landscape is therefore a complex palimpsest of structures and land uses that represent a host of incommensurable yet intersecting engineering technologies, legal edicts, political imbroglios, societal milieus, and economic conditions. Acknowledging that a road landscape is exceptionally complicated signals frustration because its very complexity implies that not even the best-informed person can begin to enumerate, never mind understand, all the interrelated factors that create and reside in a single mile of road. On the other hand, by its very nature as a public thoroughfare, the road is always open to our inspection, our questions and musings, as long as we remain open to serious engagement with its surfaces, signs, structures, and situations.

Now orphaned by the realignment of the road, the Ellis Tavern at Ellisville in Nicholas County once stood directly next to the thoroughfare, convenient to the passing traveler in need of libations, a hot meal, stabling and feed for a horse, or a nights accommodation. The massive stone construction promised sanctuary within, and visitors found solid respectability in the person of James Ellis, proprietor, who also built a log courthouse, jail, and a pen for stray livestock near the tavern when Ellisville served as the county seat.

The metaphor of road-as-intersection acknowledges the roads position as a node within any number of knowledge networks or systems that range from the abstract to the concrete, from the theoretical to the functional, from the historic to the current.

A little more than a mile west of the Maysville Road in southwest Mason County, an old road said by some to follow a historical buffalo trace cuts across a farm pasture entrenched into the land surface by iron-shod horses hooves and iron-rimmed wagon wheels. Some abandoned roadways are marked today by linear depressions across farm fields and pastures; others continue in use as farm driveways or field access roads.

The twentieth centurys first two decades brought a host of revolutionary changes to road-building technology and engineering practices. Portland cement, invented in the 1870s, was first used to produce concrete street surfacing in Bellefontaine, Ohio, in 1891. In 1909 the Association of American Portland Cement Manufacturers offered prizes for the best articles on the increasing importance of concrete for road construction; Good Roads Magazine published the winning essays. By the 1910s concrete was coming into general use for road construction in the Northeast and Midwest, especially in urban areas.

The rapidly escalating market for large-scale farm machinery on Californias Central Valley bonanza wheat farms after the Civil War stimulated the development of track-type tractors. The crawler tractors arrival paralleled that of the gasoline engine, which, when petroleum fuels became available and engine electrical systems had been perfected, led to the manufacture of a gasoline enginepowered crawler tractor by a Stockton, California, machinery manufacturer in 1906. Soon thereafter road-construction contractors had access to track-type Caterpillar tractors equipped with bulldozer blades that allowed engineers to design and build roads that required moving large volumes of earth and rock to reduce grades by hill cuts and valley fills or embankments.