Miles and miles of Texas
Subtitle: 100 years of the Texas Highway Department
By: Carol Dawson, with Roger Allen Polson ; Geoff Appold, photo editor ; foreword by Willie Nelson
Contributors: Polson, Roger Allen, author
Edition: First edition.
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 407
ISBN-13: 9781623494568
Subjects: Politics and government; Texas. State Department of Highways and Public Transportation; Highway engineering; Texas. Highway Department; Texas. Department of Transportation; Highway departments; Texas; History
Description: 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 381-392) and index.
Table of contents: title: Tracks, trails, mud, and money; title: Out of the mud and into the mire : the Ferguson years; title: "Fergusonism"; title: The "Rock core of integrity"; title: The wolves return; title: War and peace; title: The midcentury : Eisenhower's dream; title: The 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s; title: The quiet giant : the 1990s; title: From 2001 to the centennial.