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Old Dixie Highway went coast-to-coast
By the Kaufman County Historical Commission
Editor's note: The following history of the Dixie Highway is adapted from the original history written by the Kaufman County Historical Commission when it sought permission to obtain a Texas State Historical Marker designation.
The American love affair with the automobile began shortly before the turn of the 20th century. Texas was no exception, and it is believed that the first auto excursion in the state was the one made in October 1899 by Edward H. R. Green and his auto's manufacturer, George P. Dorris, over a rutted wagon road between Terrell and Dallas.
A portion of this very route would later become a segment of the transcontinental Dixie Overland Highway and still later of U. S. Highway 80, the subjects of this narrative.
In October 1913 the Forney Commercial Club addressed a letter to the Terrell Commercial Club indicating their support of a county-wide Good Roads program:
“The recent rainy weather has demonstrated that while we may have good roads during a drouth, when the rain begins to fall we are all stuck up in the mud. With this practical example before us, it seems an opportune time to begin to agitate the question of good roads. When we undertake this it would be the better part of wisdom to attempt it on a scale which will be worthwhile after we have accomplished our aim.”
Both Terrell and Forney commissioner's precincts, as well as others in Kaufman County, led by their Good Roads associations, scheduled road bond elections to be held in February 1914.
It is interesting to note that promotional material published by the Terrell Good Roads Association assured their voters that the election had “nothing to do whatever with the National Highway movement seeking to designate one of the Kaufman County roads as a course of travel for automobilists from coast to coast . . . a movement fathered by the National Highway Association, aided and supported by the local automobile enthusiasts.”
Apparently resistance was strong among some landowners, who thought that improved roads would be of little direct benefit to them but would certainly result in increased taxes, and among tenant farmers who predicted that rents would go up.
Surprisingly enough, the 1914 road bond elections in Kaufman County resulted in most of the smaller precincts, including Forney, passing their road bonds, but Terrell, the county's most prosperous city, did not, much to the chagrin of the Terrell Commercial Club and Good Roads Association.
In the Terrell newspaper article quoted above the reference to the National Highway movement seeking to designate a Kaufman County road as a coast-to-coast route may well have been occasioned by inquiries made locally by representatives of the Southern National Highway Association.
This group was organized in February 1913 in Asheville, North Carolina, by Dell M. Potter, of Clifton, Arizona. This organization's stated purpose was to establish a route to be recommended to Congress as a practicable line to connect with the San Diego-El Paso road, far enough south to permit of all-the-year travel between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.
In the absence of federal funding for highways, which was not initiated until 1916, national automobile roads at that time were being developed by local and state authorities and private promotional associations.
The results of these early efforts would eventually be a network of some 250 auto trails bearing names rather than numbers (e.g., the Meridian Highway, the Bankhead Highway, the Victory Highway, the National Old Trails Road). The Southern National Highway, for whatever reason never gained much support, despite continuing efforts to promote it well into the 1920s, and was
supplanted by other named trails.
DIXIE OVERLAND
HIGHWAY
Meeting with much greater success than the Southern National Highway was the transcontinental southern route named the Dixie Overland Highway.
This route was first conceived by the Automobile Club of Savannah, Georgia, in July 1914. The Dixie Overland Highway Association was soon organized and eventually incorporated on 14 February 1917 with headquarters in Columbus, Georgia.
Its stated purpose was to foster the development of a highway from Savannah to Los Angeles, through the states of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.10 In May 1919 the western terminus was changed to San Diego. Other cities on the route included Columbus, Georgia; Montgomery, Alabama; Meridian, Jackson, and Vicksburg, Mississippi; Monroe and Shreveport, Louisiana; Dallas, Fort Worth, Abilene, Sweetwater, and El Paso, Texas; Roswell and Alamogordo, New Mexico; and Tucson, Phoenix and Yuma, Arizona.
Billed as America's Shortest and Only Year Round Ocean-to-Ocean Highway, the Dixie Overland Highway (DOH) was promoted on the basis of its all-season passability due to its southern latitude and comparatively low altitude. Road building authorities in each of the 75 counties on the route (including Kaufman County) were urged to enter into a formal agreement with the association to guarantee construction and maintenance within their boundaries.
There is no record of Kaufman County or any of its precincts concluding any such agreement with the Dixie Overland Highway Association, but as a result of the road bond elections of February 1914 some $1,125,000 was invested in the improvement of roads and bridges in the county.
It is known that the Forney precinct used at least a portion of its $225,000 bond issue to gravel and curb the portions of Bois d'Arc and Trinity streets that would become part of the DOH route through town.
It should be noted that nowhere in Kaufman County Commissioners Court records does the name Dixie Overland Highway appear and the name was rarely, if ever, used in the Terrell newspaper (there are no surviving Forney newspapers from this period). Where its name did appear in print, it usually was called simply “the Dixie Highway” (albeit inappropriately so, since there was another route officially named the Dixie Highway connecting Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, and Miami, Florida).
The route of the DOH through Terrell followed the present alignment of Moore Avenue, and between Terrell and Forney it approximated that of present U.S. 80. Its route within Forney itself, however, was quite different from today's U.S. 80. Approaching from Terrell, the DOH entered Forney on Kaufman Street east of Mustang Creek, crossed the creek and proceeded westward on Kaufman Street to Cedar Street, thence south on Cedar Street to Buffalo Street, thence west on Buffalo Street to N. Bois d' Arc Street, thence south on Bois d'Arc Street through downtown to Trinity Street, thence west on Trinity to the western city limit overlooking the floodplain of the East Fork of the Trinity River, thence through the river bottoms into Dallas County.
An idea of the traffic over the Dixie Overland Highway in its heyday can be drawn from statistics compiled by the county in 1919 for a federal grant application indicating 375 autos, 55 trucks, and 40 horse-drawn vehicles daily.
After the Forney segment of the Dixie Overland Highway was abandoned about 1931 with the completion of the new route of U. S. Highway 80 , businesses either relocated to the new highway or closed. Now Trinity Street, once a busy transcontinental thoroughfare, is a dead-end residential street.
Improvement of the DOH in Kaufman County was piecemeal, as it most likely was everywhere on its route, since the work was done at the discretion of the commissioner precincts. It was not until 1917 that a Texas Highway Department was established and not until 1921 that federal legislation compelled the state to assume the responsibility of construction and maintenance of highways receiving federal funds.
It was only in 1921 that land for widening the right-of-way of the DOH between Terrell and Forney was obtained by donation and the route established as a “first class” road. The paved surface of the highway in Forney stopped at the city limits. On the west side of town this was the point where the highway began its descent into the East Fork floodplain.
From there almost to the East Fork bridge the highway was a slippery black mud slope during wet weather, and the farmer at the top of the slope made a nice income with his mule team towing autos out of the borrow ditches alongside the highway. The river bottom itself was frequently flooded and the highway submerged. And for many days after the floodwaters receded the stretch through the bottoms (known locally as Reagin's Lane) was an impassable mire.
As one might expect, Reagin's Lane and the Forney slope became infamous, as indicated in the Garland News of 21 March 1924:
“Since the completion of the road connecting Rockwall and Terrell by way of Chisholm (i.e., Highway 205) traffic on the Dixie Highway will be diverted through Garland (i.e., on the Bankhead Highway), especially in rainy weather, when the stretch of that highway between Terrell and Mesquite is impassable.
Hardly any less a problem for travelers on the DOH through Forney was the East Fork bridge. This was a long, narrow affair only wide enough for one vehicle at a time to cross. It had a pull-off area near the middle to allow one vehicle to pass another but, of course, there was no way of determining which driver should be the one to yield right-of-way, and as a result many a round of fisticuffs were fought on that bridge. Nor was it unknown for one vehicle to crowd another off the edge into the river bed.
This series of obstacles on the route of the DOH in the river bottoms west of town, together with its zig-zag course through town, came to be known as The Forney Gap.
On the west side of the East Fork bottoms the Dixie Overland Highway continued to Mesquite over a stretch with many a twist and turn, crossing the Texas & Pacific railroad tracks at two different points (the sites of several fatal locomotive and automobile crashes).
In October 1926, the Dixie Overland Highway was the route for a record-breaking transcontinental auto trip between San Diego and Savannah. The event was sponsored by the San Diego Chamber of Commerce, and the driver was Ed Fletcher, president of the Dixie Overland Highway Association. Fletcher in his memoirs reported that at the time only about 5 percent of the route was paved, and San Diego was fighting for it to become the first entirely paved coast-to-coast highway.
Fletcher received permission from every authority on the route to exceed the speed limits, his Cadillac with his four other passengers averaged between 50 and 55 m.p.h. over much of the course. On the Texas leg, Fort Worth officials came out to meet them but the driver never slowed under 55 as they sped by. They arrived in Dallas early in the evening and were met by a police escort which conducted them to a garage for refueling. Fletcher estimated that they were greeted at Dallas by a crowd of 2,500. After a 46-minute rest they continued on to Shreveport. Remarkably, there was no notice of this event in the Terrell newspaper, so presumably either the people of the city had not been informed of it or else they were not interested enough to come out after dark to witness it. (There is no surviving Forney newspaper from this time.) Under skies threatening heavy rain, which on the dirt roads of Georgia would have aborted the race, Fletcher and his crew arrived at Savannah, finishing the course in 71 hours 15 minutes, beating the national record by 11 hours 56 minutes.
U. S. HIGHWAY 80
Within two months after Fletcher's record-setting transcontinental excursion over the Dixie Overland Highway the name of the DOH was officially changed to U.S. Highway 80. In fact, as of November 1926 the American Association of State Highway Officials, at the insistence of U.S. Bureau of Public Roads, adopted a plan abandoning the entire confusing system of named interstate highways in favor of a U.S. numbered highway system.
The official route of U.S. Highway 80 as it was initially defined differed only slightly from that of the Dixie Overland Highway. About 1927 the Bureau of Public Roads issued a release describing Route 80 as being 2,671 miles long, of which about 30 percent had a dust-free paved surface. Another 50 percent were surfaced with gravel, sand-clay, or soil, some of which was oiled to reduce dust. It included only 86 miles of totally unimproved roadway.
By the late-1920s U.S. 80 (often referred to in Kaufman County records as Texas Highway 15) was in need of major improvements due to the ever-increasing volume of auto traffic. In February 1928 the Forney Good Roads Committee, whose promotional slogan was Bring Forney Precinct Out of the Mud Hole, led a successful campaign to pass $40,000 in road bonds to match with federal and state funds in rerouting the highway past the Forney Gap.
The new concrete bridge over East Fork (referred to in the letter above) was completed at a cost of $115,000, making it one of the most expensive projects undertaken by the state Highway Commission. Finally, in September 1931, it was announced that the Forney Gap was at last closed, and a giant celebration at Forney was to be staged jointly by Terrell and Forney, with speakers of statewide prominence and an expected crowd of over 5,000. The new link was 11.6 miles long, five miles of which were in Kaufman County, the remainder in Dallas County. The new route was a major improvement over the old Dixie Overland Highway in that all the right-angle turns and two hazardous grade crossings were eliminated, it had an all-weather surface, it shortened the distance between Forney and Dallas by 1.3 miles, and it was at least $100,000 less expensive than renovating the old route.
During World War II U.S. 80 was a major artery for the movement of armaments and troops.
In an informal get-together of several long-time Forney residents in 1995 they were asked what event during their lifetimes had had the greatest positive impact on Forney. Most agreed that it was the opening of the new route of U.S. 80 over Broad Street in 1931.
The other side of that coin was that one of the greatest negative impacts resulted from the eventual rerouting of the highway to bypass the city. Planning of this bypass was announced in late 1947,27 and was completed in the early 1950s, when the section of U.S. 80 between Terrell and Dallas was transferred to the route of the new Interstate Highway 20, a four-lane divided freeway that roughly paralleled U.S. 80 but bypassed the cores of the cities along its route.
At Forney it ran just outside the northern city limit and consequently diverted the traffic on U.S. 80 away from the businesses in town which had so heavily depended upon it. This was a final blow to the already declining economy of Forney, and the town sank into a slump from which it has begun to recover only in the last 20 or so years.
The American love affair with the automobile began shortly before the turn of the 20th century. Texas was no exception, and it is believed that the first auto excursion in the state was the one made in October 1899 by Edward H. R. Green and his auto's manufacturer, George P. Dorris, over a rutted wagon road between Terrell and Dallas.
A portion of this very route would later become a segment of the transcontinental Dixie Overland Highway and still later of U. S. Highway 80, the subjects of this narrative.
In October 1913 the Forney Commercial Club addressed a letter to the Terrell Commercial Club indicating their support of a county-wide Good Roads program:
“The recent rainy weather has demonstrated that while we may have good roads during a drouth, when the rain begins to fall we are all stuck up in the mud. With this practical example before us, it seems an opportune time to begin to agitate the question of good roads. When we undertake this it would be the better part of wisdom to attempt it on a scale which will be worthwhile after we have accomplished our aim.”
Both Terrell and Forney commissioner's precincts, as well as others in Kaufman County, led by their Good Roads associations, scheduled road bond elections to be held in February 1914.
It is interesting to note that promotional material published by the Terrell Good Roads Association assured their voters that the election had “nothing to do whatever with the National Highway movement seeking to designate one of the Kaufman County roads as a course of travel for automobilists from coast to coast . . . a movement fathered by the National Highway Association, aided and supported by the local automobile enthusiasts.”
Apparently resistance was strong among some landowners, who thought that improved roads would be of little direct benefit to them but would certainly result in increased taxes, and among tenant farmers who predicted that rents would go up.
Surprisingly enough, the 1914 road bond elections in Kaufman County resulted in most of the smaller precincts, including Forney, passing their road bonds, but Terrell, the county's most prosperous city, did not, much to the chagrin of the Terrell Commercial Club and Good Roads Association.
In the Terrell newspaper article quoted above the reference to the National Highway movement seeking to designate a Kaufman County road as a coast-to-coast route may well have been occasioned by inquiries made locally by representatives of the Southern National Highway Association.
This group was organized in February 1913 in Asheville, North Carolina, by Dell M. Potter, of Clifton, Arizona. This organization's stated purpose was to establish a route to be recommended to Congress as a practicable line to connect with the San Diego-El Paso road, far enough south to permit of all-the-year travel between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.
In the absence of federal funding for highways, which was not initiated until 1916, national automobile roads at that time were being developed by local and state authorities and private promotional associations.
The results of these early efforts would eventually be a network of some 250 auto trails bearing names rather than numbers (e.g., the Meridian Highway, the Bankhead Highway, the Victory Highway, the National Old Trails Road). The Southern National Highway, for whatever reason never gained much support, despite continuing efforts to promote it well into the 1920s, and was
supplanted by other named trails.
DIXIE OVERLAND
HIGHWAY
Meeting with much greater success than the Southern National Highway was the transcontinental southern route named the Dixie Overland Highway.
This route was first conceived by the Automobile Club of Savannah, Georgia, in July 1914. The Dixie Overland Highway Association was soon organized and eventually incorporated on 14 February 1917 with headquarters in Columbus, Georgia.
Its stated purpose was to foster the development of a highway from Savannah to Los Angeles, through the states of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.10 In May 1919 the western terminus was changed to San Diego. Other cities on the route included Columbus, Georgia; Montgomery, Alabama; Meridian, Jackson, and Vicksburg, Mississippi; Monroe and Shreveport, Louisiana; Dallas, Fort Worth, Abilene, Sweetwater, and El Paso, Texas; Roswell and Alamogordo, New Mexico; and Tucson, Phoenix and Yuma, Arizona.
Billed as America's Shortest and Only Year Round Ocean-to-Ocean Highway, the Dixie Overland Highway (DOH) was promoted on the basis of its all-season passability due to its southern latitude and comparatively low altitude. Road building authorities in each of the 75 counties on the route (including Kaufman County) were urged to enter into a formal agreement with the association to guarantee construction and maintenance within their boundaries.
There is no record of Kaufman County or any of its precincts concluding any such agreement with the Dixie Overland Highway Association, but as a result of the road bond elections of February 1914 some $1,125,000 was invested in the improvement of roads and bridges in the county.
It is known that the Forney precinct used at least a portion of its $225,000 bond issue to gravel and curb the portions of Bois d'Arc and Trinity streets that would become part of the DOH route through town.
It should be noted that nowhere in Kaufman County Commissioners Court records does the name Dixie Overland Highway appear and the name was rarely, if ever, used in the Terrell newspaper (there are no surviving Forney newspapers from this period). Where its name did appear in print, it usually was called simply “the Dixie Highway” (albeit inappropriately so, since there was another route officially named the Dixie Highway connecting Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, and Miami, Florida).
The route of the DOH through Terrell followed the present alignment of Moore Avenue, and between Terrell and Forney it approximated that of present U.S. 80. Its route within Forney itself, however, was quite different from today's U.S. 80. Approaching from Terrell, the DOH entered Forney on Kaufman Street east of Mustang Creek, crossed the creek and proceeded westward on Kaufman Street to Cedar Street, thence south on Cedar Street to Buffalo Street, thence west on Buffalo Street to N. Bois d' Arc Street, thence south on Bois d'Arc Street through downtown to Trinity Street, thence west on Trinity to the western city limit overlooking the floodplain of the East Fork of the Trinity River, thence through the river bottoms into Dallas County.
An idea of the traffic over the Dixie Overland Highway in its heyday can be drawn from statistics compiled by the county in 1919 for a federal grant application indicating 375 autos, 55 trucks, and 40 horse-drawn vehicles daily.
After the Forney segment of the Dixie Overland Highway was abandoned about 1931 with the completion of the new route of U. S. Highway 80 , businesses either relocated to the new highway or closed. Now Trinity Street, once a busy transcontinental thoroughfare, is a dead-end residential street.
Improvement of the DOH in Kaufman County was piecemeal, as it most likely was everywhere on its route, since the work was done at the discretion of the commissioner precincts. It was not until 1917 that a Texas Highway Department was established and not until 1921 that federal legislation compelled the state to assume the responsibility of construction and maintenance of highways receiving federal funds.
It was only in 1921 that land for widening the right-of-way of the DOH between Terrell and Forney was obtained by donation and the route established as a “first class” road. The paved surface of the highway in Forney stopped at the city limits. On the west side of town this was the point where the highway began its descent into the East Fork floodplain.
From there almost to the East Fork bridge the highway was a slippery black mud slope during wet weather, and the farmer at the top of the slope made a nice income with his mule team towing autos out of the borrow ditches alongside the highway. The river bottom itself was frequently flooded and the highway submerged. And for many days after the floodwaters receded the stretch through the bottoms (known locally as Reagin's Lane) was an impassable mire.
As one might expect, Reagin's Lane and the Forney slope became infamous, as indicated in the Garland News of 21 March 1924:
“Since the completion of the road connecting Rockwall and Terrell by way of Chisholm (i.e., Highway 205) traffic on the Dixie Highway will be diverted through Garland (i.e., on the Bankhead Highway), especially in rainy weather, when the stretch of that highway between Terrell and Mesquite is impassable.
Hardly any less a problem for travelers on the DOH through Forney was the East Fork bridge. This was a long, narrow affair only wide enough for one vehicle at a time to cross. It had a pull-off area near the middle to allow one vehicle to pass another but, of course, there was no way of determining which driver should be the one to yield right-of-way, and as a result many a round of fisticuffs were fought on that bridge. Nor was it unknown for one vehicle to crowd another off the edge into the river bed.
This series of obstacles on the route of the DOH in the river bottoms west of town, together with its zig-zag course through town, came to be known as The Forney Gap.
On the west side of the East Fork bottoms the Dixie Overland Highway continued to Mesquite over a stretch with many a twist and turn, crossing the Texas & Pacific railroad tracks at two different points (the sites of several fatal locomotive and automobile crashes).
In October 1926, the Dixie Overland Highway was the route for a record-breaking transcontinental auto trip between San Diego and Savannah. The event was sponsored by the San Diego Chamber of Commerce, and the driver was Ed Fletcher, president of the Dixie Overland Highway Association. Fletcher in his memoirs reported that at the time only about 5 percent of the route was paved, and San Diego was fighting for it to become the first entirely paved coast-to-coast highway.
Fletcher received permission from every authority on the route to exceed the speed limits, his Cadillac with his four other passengers averaged between 50 and 55 m.p.h. over much of the course. On the Texas leg, Fort Worth officials came out to meet them but the driver never slowed under 55 as they sped by. They arrived in Dallas early in the evening and were met by a police escort which conducted them to a garage for refueling. Fletcher estimated that they were greeted at Dallas by a crowd of 2,500. After a 46-minute rest they continued on to Shreveport. Remarkably, there was no notice of this event in the Terrell newspaper, so presumably either the people of the city had not been informed of it or else they were not interested enough to come out after dark to witness it. (There is no surviving Forney newspaper from this time.) Under skies threatening heavy rain, which on the dirt roads of Georgia would have aborted the race, Fletcher and his crew arrived at Savannah, finishing the course in 71 hours 15 minutes, beating the national record by 11 hours 56 minutes.
U. S. HIGHWAY 80
Within two months after Fletcher's record-setting transcontinental excursion over the Dixie Overland Highway the name of the DOH was officially changed to U.S. Highway 80. In fact, as of November 1926 the American Association of State Highway Officials, at the insistence of U.S. Bureau of Public Roads, adopted a plan abandoning the entire confusing system of named interstate highways in favor of a U.S. numbered highway system.
The official route of U.S. Highway 80 as it was initially defined differed only slightly from that of the Dixie Overland Highway. About 1927 the Bureau of Public Roads issued a release describing Route 80 as being 2,671 miles long, of which about 30 percent had a dust-free paved surface. Another 50 percent were surfaced with gravel, sand-clay, or soil, some of which was oiled to reduce dust. It included only 86 miles of totally unimproved roadway.
By the late-1920s U.S. 80 (often referred to in Kaufman County records as Texas Highway 15) was in need of major improvements due to the ever-increasing volume of auto traffic. In February 1928 the Forney Good Roads Committee, whose promotional slogan was Bring Forney Precinct Out of the Mud Hole, led a successful campaign to pass $40,000 in road bonds to match with federal and state funds in rerouting the highway past the Forney Gap.
The new concrete bridge over East Fork (referred to in the letter above) was completed at a cost of $115,000, making it one of the most expensive projects undertaken by the state Highway Commission. Finally, in September 1931, it was announced that the Forney Gap was at last closed, and a giant celebration at Forney was to be staged jointly by Terrell and Forney, with speakers of statewide prominence and an expected crowd of over 5,000. The new link was 11.6 miles long, five miles of which were in Kaufman County, the remainder in Dallas County. The new route was a major improvement over the old Dixie Overland Highway in that all the right-angle turns and two hazardous grade crossings were eliminated, it had an all-weather surface, it shortened the distance between Forney and Dallas by 1.3 miles, and it was at least $100,000 less expensive than renovating the old route.
During World War II U.S. 80 was a major artery for the movement of armaments and troops.
In an informal get-together of several long-time Forney residents in 1995 they were asked what event during their lifetimes had had the greatest positive impact on Forney. Most agreed that it was the opening of the new route of U.S. 80 over Broad Street in 1931.
The other side of that coin was that one of the greatest negative impacts resulted from the eventual rerouting of the highway to bypass the city. Planning of this bypass was announced in late 1947,27 and was completed in the early 1950s, when the section of U.S. 80 between Terrell and Dallas was transferred to the route of the new Interstate Highway 20, a four-lane divided freeway that roughly paralleled U.S. 80 but bypassed the cores of the cities along its route.
At Forney it ran just outside the northern city limit and consequently diverted the traffic on U.S. 80 away from the businesses in town which had so heavily depended upon it. This was a final blow to the already declining economy of Forney, and the town sank into a slump from which it has begun to recover only in the last 20 or so years.
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