When the States selected the 7 percent systems required by the Federal Highway Act of 1921, they included over 8,000 miles of forest highways. These roads were either entirely within the national forests or were necessary to the surrounding communities for access to and use of the forests. There were also about 5,400 miles of public roads within the national forests, but not on the Federal-aid system. These last and the roads on the Federal-aid routes the Secretary of Agriculture grouped into a forest highway system on which one-half of the forest highway appropriations were to be spent.[N 1] The Secretary concentrated 70 percent of these funds on approximately 1,000 miles of main Federal-aid routes lying entirely within the forests in order to keep pace with the improvement by the States of the adjoining portions of these routes.[2]
This policy complemented the policy of stage construction that was being followed by most of the western and southern States. To insure early completion of some kind of improvement on the principal primary routes, the Government coordinated not only the scheduling of improvements with the adjoining States, but also adopted comparable construction standards. As traffic increased, these standards were upgraded:
Meanwhile, as the traffic increases standards of construction are being constantly raised. Grades and curvature are being reduced and widths increased, and projects constructed originally as unsurfaced earth roads are being surfaced.[3]
Through the 1920's and 1930's, Congress authorized about one-tenth as much for forest highways as for Federal aid to the States.[N 2] This was applied where it was most needed to keep up with traffic, mostly for second- and third-stage construction or reconstruction, so that by 1939, two-thirds of the annual program was rebuilding or upgrading previous work. Even this did not keep up with demand, and a number of States and even counties supplied "cooperative funds" to supplement the Federal apportionments for roads of particular interest to them. Some State highway departments spent their own funds to blacktop forest highways carrying heavy through traffic. Eventually the main highways through the national forests were taken over by the States, rebuilt, and incorporated into their own highway systems.
Roads in the National Parks
Before the creation of the National Park Service in 1916, each national park superintendent reported directly to the Secretary of the Interior; each had his own road budget, and made his own arrangements for laying out and maintaining roads.[N 3] There was no overall plan for developing the national parks and making them accessible to the public, but in the annual appropriations to the Interior Department, Congress might include amounts for specific roads in certain parks, generally those with strong local political support.
In 1924 Congress gave the Secretary of the Interior general authorization to construct, reconstruct and improve roads and trails in the national parks and appropriated $2.5 million each for fiscal years 1924, 1925, 1926 and 1927 for such roads. In the same Act, Congress directed the Secretary of Agriculture to turn over 5 percent of the war-surplus road equipment and supplies to the Secretary of the Interior for use in park road construction.[4]
This act gave the Secretary the means to plan ahead, and in 1925 he had the National Park Service (NPS) prepare a 5-year plan of road improvements in 17 national parks and monuments, totaling some 1,510 miles. Since the NPS had a very small engineering staff, Director Stephen Mather arranged with Chief MacDonald, in 1926, for the BPR to handle the engineering and construction for this program on a reimburseable basis.[N 4]
Under this agreement, which, with some changes is still in effect, the NPS and the BPR built some of the most scenic and spectacular highways in North America, one of which was described thus by Chief MacDonald in his annual report for 1927:
One of the most interesting of the national-park projects is the work on the Transmountain Highway in Glacier National Park. Here is a road in which practically every conceivable obstacle has been met and overcome. The 16-foot roadway is being literally hewn out of the solid rock of the Garden Wall in order to reach and cross the Continental Divide.[5]
By 1931 only one-fifth of the 5-year program was finished, yet already some roads were in need of rebuilding to higher standards. Furthermore, the National Park Service had acquired the Colonial National Historical Park and the Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountains Parks in the East and had begun road programs in all of them that were ultimately to run into the millions of dollars. In January 1931, Congress authorized (46 Stat 1053) the Secretary of the Interior to build approach roads, not exceeding 60 miles long from the park gateway of isolated national parks to the "nearest convenient 7 percentum road" and required that $1.5 million of the annual park road authorizations be spent on such roads. And in 1933 President Roosevelt, by executive order, transferred to the NPS 64 military parks, national cemeteries, historical areas and national monuments that had formerly been in the charge of the War Department or the Department of Agriculture. Most of these areas had roads in need of modernizing.
- ↑ The original forest highway system as finally approved by the Secretary in 1926 comprised 13,459 miles of which 11,271 miles were in Alaska and 11 western States and 2,188 miles in 17 eastern and southern States.[1] In addition, there were thousands of miles of trails and logging roads not in the forest highway system, but necessary for the protection and use of the forests. One-half of the forest highway appropriations went to these "forest development roads."
- ↑ Forest highway appropriations for fiscal years 1917 to 1941 were $108.5 million. Federal aid in the same period was $1.1 billion. Forest highways also received a share of the emergency relief funds provided by Congress during the New Deal.
- ↑ However, for many years roadwork in Yellowstone National Park was handled by the Army Corps of Engineers.
- ↑ This informal arrangement was legitimized by Congress in the Agricultural Appropriation Act of 1928 which authorized the Secretary of Agriculture to perform engineering services for other agencies of the Government in connection with roads.
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