[This is an expansion of an article we published in August, with added materials from the Georgia Historic Newspapers database and website housed at the University of Georgia]
The Marietta History Center participates in the Dixie Highway Yard Sale each year, and Georgia still has signs marking once-important roads.
But what was Dixie Highway?
The Dixie Highway was one of the earliest attempts to build a north-south interstate highway system, running from Canada to Florida. US Highway 41 along the early route was part of the network, as was Atlanta Road.
The Cobb County section ran along present-day Old Highway 41 and Atlanta Road from Acworth to the Chattahoochee River near Smyrna.
Before that highway was developed, there were no paved highways in Georgia, and paving was left to rural roads in urban areas.
Before Dixie Highway
The movement to pave roads did not begin with the spread of automobiles. This began in the 1870s with his increased use of bicycles and his partnership with cyclists, farmers, and the United States Post Office. They had their own reasons for preferring smooth paved roads to dirt roads and highways that often turned into lakes of mud. heavy rain.
In 1891, the United States’ largest cycling organization, the American Bicyclist Federation (now called the League of American Bicyclists), issued an open letter urging farmers to join highway improvement committees.
This partnership evolved into the Good Roads Movement, which gained further momentum as the automobile became America’s primary mode of transportation.
The beginning of Dixie Highway
The Dixie Highway itself began in 1912 with the purchase of an island off the coast of Miami, Florida by Karl Fisher, an entrepreneur and auto industry executive who planned to develop the island into a tourist destination and resort. . The island later became known as Miami Beach.
Fisher knew that for the project to be successful, Miami Beach would need access to the Model T Ford, which had become popular and affordable since production began in 1908.
The Dixie Highway was not Fisher’s first role in developing the United States’ highway system. He helped plan and build the Lincoln Highway between New York City and San Francisco.
So in 1914, he contacted Indiana Governor Samuel Ralston and suggested that the governors of states between the upper Midwest and Florida discuss a north-south paved road. [The original version of this paragraph stated the year as 2014, thereby missing the correct date by a century! A reader pointed this out to us. Thanks to the reader, and apologies for the error!]
The idea was so popular within the states along the proposed route that the Dixie Highway was never a single road, but instead was divided into various points based on politics and lobbying of cities along the route. It was a north-south road network divided into parallel expressways. .
Part of the lobbying efforts during America’s involvement in World War I was to emphasize the usefulness of highways in the war effort.
In the May 12, 1918 issue of the Atlanta Georgian, a Hearst newspaper published in Atlanta at the time, VDL Robinson, executive director of the Dixie Highway Association, wrote, “Highways as a War Measure: Good Roads I wrote a front-page opinion piece titled “Indispensable.” Go to many states in Georgia. ”
“Ask Colonel L.N. Gallagher, Quartermaster of the Southeast Supply Depot, what a well-paved highway from Detroit or Chicago to Atlanta would mean to a nation at war,” Robinson wrote in the article. I’m writing inside. “This will allow fleets of trucks to transit with government supplies needed by 18 military camps in the Southeast, as they currently do from Detroit to the Atlantic Coast.”
Cobb County and the Dixie Highway
Georgia had a web of Dixie Highway components that became four separate roads by the time it entered Florida.
Cobb County was located on the northwest portion of the Dixie Highway, which entered Georgia via Chattanooga and passed through Acworth and Marietta along what is now Old Highway 41. According to Thomas Scott’s book “The Origins of Cobb County and the Southern Suburbs,” the Atlanta Road segment of Dixie Highway was paved between Marietta and Smyrna in 1920, and by 1923 it was paved between Smyrna and the Chattahoochee River. The section was paved.
At the same time, cities in the county were paving local roads, and in 1921 Marietta took the lead in issuing bonds to pave roads leading into the city.
Dixie Highway end
Dixie Highway’s decline was a result of its success. By the late 1920s, the federal government funded highway improvements and created a numbered highway system to replace named highways like the Dixie Highway. Various branches of the road network were given numerical names.
The development of the interstate highway system after World War II dealt the final blow to the Dixie Highway, as the remaining sections of the highway became less important for regional travel.
However, the Dixie Highway became the forerunner of interstate highways and created permanent commercial activity along its entire length from Canada to Florida.
Read more about Dixie Highway
Ed Jackson, who was with UGA’s Carl Vinson Institute of Government and passed away in January of this year, wrote a really nice concise history of the Dixie Highway, complete with maps and photos. You can read his work at this link.
The New Georgia Encyclopedia has a page about Dixie Highway.
Dr. Thomas Scott’s book “The Origins of Cobb County and the Southern Suburbs” provides information specific to Cobb County regarding highway development.