Around Burlington: Before concrete, there was the Burlington-Mount Pleasant Plank Road Co.
The old adage that “you simply cannot get there from here” seems to apply to traveling across Iowa in the 1830s. Back then, Burlington had aspirations to become a transport hub, but the reality of impassable roads kept creeping in.
Largely speaking, roads existed only on maps. The reality of overland travel west from Burlington was a series of rough clearings marked by blazes on trees. Once open prairie had been reached, the trees vanished and the road was marked by stakes 1,100 yards apart.
As many travelers were to discover, it is relatively easy to become disorientated when your trail markings are sticks driven in the ground every fifth of a mile.
Muddy sloughs, snow and cold made travel at certain times of the year unthinkable, and transportation to the rapidly growing prairie villages of New London and Mount Pleasant often was limited to saddling your horse and heading west.
By the end of the 1840s, Burlington’s road west was becoming a scandal as thousands of covered wagons now crossed the river, passed through town and then promptly sank to their axles in the mud.
Communities such as Davenport and Dubuque worked to improve their road system and eventually Burlington merchants realized they must meet this competition or lose the lucrative immigrant trade.
Their answer was to be a privately built toll road stretching from Burlington to Mount Pleasant that would serve not only the traveler but also return a healthy profit for the road investors.
The road was envisioned to be the super highway of its day. It would be extensively graded and hard surfaced. But because little rock was available and concrete roads were in the future, the road would have to be made of wood planks.
Critics of the project argued that the real answer should be a railroad. But the money class in Burlington argued that railroads were just a passing fancy and, in 1848, the Burlington-Mount Pleasant Plank Road Company was formed.
As soon as sufficient funds were pledged, the survey work began with the route closely following today’s old U.S. 34 to New London. At that point the road moved to the north along high ground and traces of the roadway can still be seen.
Those traces show the road was built atop as grade raised two feet above the surface of the adjoining land with the roadway being 30 feet wide.
Sawed 4-inch by 6-inch stringers were placed on a portion of the raised surface and then sawed white oak planks, 3-inches thick and 8-foot long were nailed to the stringers to create the road surface. The road was 8-feet wide and ran along the north edge of the raised strip.
Planking came from the sawmills built along the road and much of the raw timber was hauled from the woods along the Skunk River. It is estimated that 5 million board feet of oak was required to complete the 32-mile road.
When the road finally opened it initially prospered. Tolls were collected at Jobe’s Hotel in Mount Pleasant, Billy’s Toll Hose in New London and other offices at Danville and Middletown.
Plank road travelers could also stop for refreshments at the numerous taverns the spring up along the road. There was the Eight Mile House in Middletown and Boak’s Hotel in New London. But the most famous of these stops was the Duke Hill Hotel in Jimtown. Jimtown today is only remembered by an engraved bolder sitting alongside a country road.
Jimtown, named for its friendly Hoosier inn keeper, was a scattering of rough buildings, with dirt trails branching off to Iowa City and south to Lowell and Denmark.
But what it was best remembered for was as a legendary watering hole that drew teamsters and travelers. At any time of the day, the hotel’s bar was filled with these customers fortifying themselves against the demands of the road.
However, the real artistry in the road's creation was not in its construction and support system, but rather in its financing. The local money men were well connected to Burlington’s city government and were able to convince the city to pick up the bulk of the funding.
In a complicated arrangement, with much sleight of hand, the city borrowed the then astronomical amount of $20,000 from eastern bankers and then that money was in turn loaned to the plank Road Company. When the company eventually defaulted, the series of lawsuits that were generated went all the way the U.S. Supreme Court and took 50 years to resolve.
It is estimated that these suits, penalties, interests, and principal eventually cost the city $500,000 and serious eroded its borrowing ability while the Plank Road founders escaped any personal liability
That default was caused by the inevitable arrival of the railroad that sped travelers and freight west at a costs far below what the plank Road Company could match. Travelers now speed along the long abandoned route on ribbons of cement with little thought of the old road paved with native oak and local scandal.
This article originally appeared on The Hawk Eye: Around Burlington: Difficult travel called for desperate measures
