TEXAS HISTORY

Carol Dawson with Roger Allen Polson

Geoff Appold, Photo Editor

Foreword by Willie Nelson

Miles and Miles of Texas: 100 Years of the Texas Highway Department

Texas A&M University Press

Hardcover, 8.5 x 11, 978-1-62349-456-8, 368 pages; 147 color, 247 b&w photos, 7 maps; bibliography; index. $39.95

September 2016

Reviewed by Barbara Brannon

On April 4, 1917, Texas made a monumental leap into the modern era — though it was the forty-fifth state of forty-eight to do so. With some 200,000 automobiles already choking its paltry thousand miles of roads, Texas at last realized that its size alone would qualify it to collect more than any other state of the bonanza set aside by the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916. States were mandated to establish a highway department in order to qualify for funding. Gov. James Ferguson was the official who signed the Texas Highway Department into existence that day.

As TxDOT (the Texas Department of Transportation, renamed in 1975 and again in 1991) celebrates its 2017 centennial, the agency now manages more than 79,000 miles of roads, more than any other state, plus 100 safety rest areas and 12 Travel Information Centers.

It’s appropriate, then, that authors Carol Dawson and Roger Allen Polson chose the title of the Tom Canfield/Diane Johnston song classic (which most Texans know from recordings by Asleep at the Wheel, or earlier by Bob Wills) for the title of this equally monumental hundred-year history.

Dawson, an accomplished author and teacher in both nonfiction and fiction, blends her storytelling expertise with the copious insider knowledge of TxDOT staffer Polson to provide a sweeping, but quite readable, history. House histories don’t always manage to pull this off — but Miles and Miles of Texas: 100 Years of the Texas Highway Department manages to synthesize a great deal of valuable documentary information and visual content with the long view of transportation in Texas going back as far as the tracks of migratory animals and the arrival of human beings in North America. Several other states commissioned historical volumes, especially on the fiftieth or seventy-fifth anniversaries of their creation (South Carolina, Tennessee, Wisconsin, for instance; Paving Tobacco Road: A Century of Progress by the North Carolina Department of Transportation, published in 2003, has long been one of my favorites). Texas’s volume now provides an accessible overview, a contextual grid for more technical or scholarly episodes of the state’s complex transportation history to be understood.

From the early scandals and abuses of the aforementioned Pa Ferguson and his wife, Miriam “Ma,” through the mapping of Texas’s first twenty-six state highways, through the engineering of bridges and underpasses and roadside parks, through the postwar Interstate Highway System, highway beautification projects like “Don’t Mess with Texas,” and on into the current era of urban traffic management and super tollways, Dawson and Polson carry the reader on an informative and enjoyable journey. Portrayals and portraits of figures like Sen. John Hollis Bankhead of Alabama (for whom the coast-to-coast highway was named in 1916), Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Lady Bird Johnson provide a familiar point of entry; profiles of highway engineers such as Gibb Gilchrist (whose leadership during the 1920s and 1930s provided a model of integrity for the fledgling agency, and who later served as president of Texas A&M University) and DeWitt Greer (whose foresight endowed Texas with its generous mileage of interstate access roads), and case studies of bridge builders, contractors, and line employees introduce players less well known to most readers.

Feats of engineering such as the Pecos High Bridge and the Baytown Tunnel show the kind of challenges the department faced over the years. Accounts of mishaps and crimes aren’t lacking, either. Episodes of bootlegging, smuggling, murder, and the notorious escapade of Bonnie and Clyde plunging past a repair barricade on U.S. 83 into the Red River in 1932, are easily located—they’re collected in a series of black-background pages two-thirds the way through.

The interior of the volume is handsomely designed, with hundreds of photographs and maps scattered throughout, many never before published, and others, like the 1917 highway route map shown at right, handily compiled in one place for researchers. TxDOT has put its treasure trove of archives to good use. An appendix with a roster of highway/transportation commissioners is helpful; one could’ve wished for a list of agency directors as well. To my eye, the lackluster dust jacket design and plain-jane cloth cover don’t succeed as well as the interior; more inspired typography could have showcased Randal Ford’s intriguing center-line cover image to better effect. Readers will simply have to peruse the inside spreads for eye-popping photos from TxDOT’s long line of award-winning photographers such as Michael Amador, Geoff Appold, Griff Smith, and more. Photo editor Appold rightly calls attention to the assistance of TxDOT librarian Anne Cook, a resource for combing the agency’s archive of half a million images and documents for the best ones to tell this story.

When Dawson and Polson appeared on a Texas Book Festival panel back in November with new agency head James Bass, the room was packed to capacity; many in the audience proudly identified themselves during the Q&A as “TxDOT family.” If this group’s interest and loyalty are any indication, Miles and Miles of Texas will stand as a landmark for the next century and the beckoning road forward.

Carol Dawson, Roger Polson, and James Bass discussing Miles and Miles of Texas, Texas Book Festival, Nov. 2016. Photo by Barbara Brannon

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