page_title: U.S. Route 1
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: U.S. Route 1 / History
context_page_description: U.S. Route 1 or U.S. Highway 1 is a major north–south United States Numbered Highway that serves the East Coast of the United States. It runs 2,369 miles, from Key West, Florida north to Fort Kent, Maine, at the Canadian border, making it the longest north–south road in the United States. US 1 is generally paralleled by Interstate 95, though the former is significantly farther west between Jacksonville, Florida, and Petersburg, Virginia. The highway connects most of the major cities of the East Coast—including Miami, Jacksonville, Raleigh, Richmond, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston passing from the Southeastern United States to New England.
  While US 1 is generally the easternmost of the main north–south U.S. Highways, parts of several others occupy corridors closer to the ocean. When the road system was laid out in the 1920s, US 1 was mostly assigned to the existing Atlantic Highway, which followed the Fall Line between the Piedmont and the Atlantic Coastal Plain north of Augusta, Georgia. At the time, the highways farther east were of lower quality and did not serve the major population centers.
context_section_description: The direct predecessor to US 1 was the Atlantic Highway, an auto trail established in 1911 as the Quebec-Miami International Highway. In 1915 it was renamed the Atlantic Highway, and the northern terminus was changed to Calais, Maine. Due to the overlapping of auto trail designations, portions of the route had other names that remain in common use, such as the Boston Post Road between Boston and New York, the Lincoln Highway between New York and Philadelphia, Baltimore Pike between Philadelphia and Baltimore, and the Dixie Highway in and south of eastern Georgia. North of Augusta, Georgia, the highway generally followed the Eastern U.S. Fall Line, rather than a more easterly route through the swamps of the Atlantic Coastal Plain. Brickell Avenue is the name given to the 2.4-mile (3.9 km) stretch of US 1 in Miami, Florida, just south of the Miami River until the Rickenbacker Causeway.
  When the New England road marking system was established in 1922, the Atlantic Highway within New England was signed as Route 1, with a Route 24 continuing north to Madawaska; New York extended the number to New York City in 1924 with its own Route 1. Other states adopted their own systems of numbering, and by 1926 all states but Maryland had signed the Atlantic Highway as various routes, usually changing numbers at the state line. In 1925, the Joint Board on Interstate Highways created a preliminary list of interstate routes to be marked by the states, including US 1 along the Atlantic. This highway began at Fort Kent, Maine, and followed the existing Route 24 to Houlton, and Route 15 to Bangor, beyond which it generally followed the Atlantic Highway to Miami. In all states but Georgia that had numbered their state highways, Route 1 followed only one or two numbers across the state. The only significant deviation from the Atlantic Highway was between Augusta, Georgia, and Jacksonville, Florida, where Route 1 was assigned to a more inland route, rather than following the Atlantic Highway via Savannah.
  One of the many changes made to the system before the final numbering was adopted in 1926 involved US 1 in Maine. The 1925 plan had assigned US 1 to the shorter inland route (Route 15) between Houlton and Bangor, while US 2 followed the longer coastal route via Calais. In the system as adopted in 1926, US 2 instead took the inland route, while US 1 followed the coast, absorbing all of the former Routes 24 and 1 in New England. Many local and regional relocations, often onto parallel superhighways, were made in the early days of US 1; this included the four-lane divided Route 25 in New Jersey, completed in 1932 with the opening of the Pulaski Skyway, and a bypass of Bangor involving the Waldo-Hancock Bridge, opened in 1931. The Overseas Highway from Miami to Key West was completed in 1938, and soon became a southern extension of US 1.
  With the construction of the Interstate Highway System in and after the 1950s, much of US 1 from Houlton to Miami was bypassed by Interstate 95. Between Houlton and Brunswick, Maine, I-95 took a shorter inland route, much of it paralleling US 2 on the alignment proposed for US 1 in 1925. Between Philadelphia and Baltimore, I-95 leaves US 1 to pass through Wilmington. Most notably, I-95 and US 1 follow different corridors between Petersburg, Virginia, and Jacksonville, Florida; while US 1 followed the Fall Line west of the coastal plain, I-95 takes a more direct route through the plain and its swamps. Although some of this part of US 1 was followed by other Interstates—I-85 between Petersburg and Henderson, North Carolina, and I-20 between Camden, South Carolina and Augusta, Georgia—the rest remains an independent route with four lanes in many places. By the late 1970s, most of I-95 had been completed, replacing US 1 as the main corridor of the east coast and relegating most of it to local road status.
caption: The beginning of U.S. 1 as of March 1951.
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