The End of the Country Road | JSTOR Daily - 0 views
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Enter any online forum dedicated to local politics, especially one in a rural area, and one of the hot topics is likely to be potholes and bad roads. Yet, as the environmental studies scholar Christopher W. Wells writes, when “good roads” first became a political issue, in the years after the Civil War, rural people were decidedly not the ones advocating for them.
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In fact, in the early years after the Civil War, as freight and passenger railroads spread across the country, long-distance travel by road actually became less common than it had been.
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The interest in “good roads” came mostly from the cities. Railroad executives wanted better rural roads to more efficiently move agricultural commodities to their stations.
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