The Auto Trails: North America's Predecessors to Numbered Highways

In the early 20th century, with the advent of the automobile becoming inexpensive enough to be affordable by the Middle Class, America's highway infrastructure was nearly non-existent. Road networks were essentially a series of dirt roads and plank roads outside of major cities, and the interurban railways of the day were usually more reliable forms of transportation. Historic Yellowstone Trail Marker in North Fond du Lac, WI. Image: RoyalBroil, Wikipedia Commons From these paths, an informal network of roads began to coalesce that would be become known as Auto Trails . Today we're going to look at this system, and how from the Auto Trails, the US Highway System, and later the Interstate Highway would come to fruition. To understand the Auto Trail in the context of transportation history, one must go back to the beginning of the development of the transportation system of the United States, which begins thousands of years before the United States even existe