What is now New York State saw multitudes of American settlers moving inland from the Atlantic seaboard, especially those “locusts of the east” from New England. Traveling long distances overland before the 20th century was however, difficult to say the least.
In the 1600s their movement was constrained by typography, and settlements were limited to areas in the Hudson and Mohawk valleys previously inhabited or improved by Indigenous People. Some Indigenous portage trails were described by the earliest settlers as wide paths that a capable ox team and wagon could manage.
Military Roads & Settlers
During the conflicts between King William’s War (1689 to 1697) and the French and Indian War (1754 to 1763), when water routes were not available or the most direct, munitions and supplies were hauled to fortified places by teamsters on what were mostly indigenous trails, sometimes improved by military orders.
The British improved the prehistoric indigenous trail (known as the Mohawk Trail or the Iroquois Trail) from Albany on the Hudson River to a trading post built in 1722 on Lake Ontario at the mouth of Oswego River (later Fort Oswego). This trail also branched toward what became Fort Niagara, resettled by the French in 1726.
During the French and Indian War the British improved the indigenous trails they controlled, such as the routes to Fort William Henry (at Lake George) and Fort Schuyler (now Utica), among others.
The earliest inland settlers, many of them former military, would take these same routes. In 1773 settlers and traders convinced Troyn County, an area “from the Mohawk River to the Canada line, at a point near the old village of St. Regis and passing south to the Mohawk between Schenectady and Albany,” to use its excise tax for road improvements.
Because these roads were used by soldiers and suppliers during the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) and the War of 1812 (1812 to 1815), some are still recalled on modern maps with the name “Military Road” (although others are misnamed with this cognomen).
William and James Wadsworth, early settlers who established homes by 1790 in today’s Livingston County, south of Rochester, called for improvement of the road from Albany to the Genesee Valley, in order to facilitate the settlement of the Military Tract, which had been awarded to Revolutionary War veterans.
The State Legislature appropriated funds in 1794 and a 1797 lottery raised $45,000 for the route from Fort Schuyler (Utica) and Canawaugus, once a large Seneca village at what is now Avon in Livingston County, which eventually became the Seneca Turnpike or the Great Genesee Road.
Slowly, as new communities, towns and counties were established, better roads stood out as a major issue and a significant cost to these municipalities. Dirt, stone and gravel roads required yearly labor from local landowners to maintain and repair.
Water was the mortal enemy of early roads so ditching and waterbars were essential, although these were sometimes hazardous in their own right. Routes in wet areas were corduroyed, by placing logs across the road – a rough ride.
Logs or heavy timbers were used to span wet areas and small streams when fording was to be avoided. Early accounts relate that the corduroy’s greatest asset was to “convert a wretched impassable byway in to a wretched passable one.”
“Into the waning decade of the 1700s,” writes early New York timber bridge historians Ronald G. Knapp and Terry E. Miller, “only fords, ferries, or makeshift timber bridges, all highly vulnerable to frequent destruction by ice and flood, were used to cross streams.”
The Plank Road Movement
By the 1830s the plank road movement was underway in the New York. Plank roads (puncheon) replaced the small logs used in corduroy roads with split logs or heavy sawn wood planks (to make the roadbed flat). In wet areas or well-funded routes, they might also include beams, small piers, and sometimes even curbs and “running planks” down the center of the road.
The State Legislature passed a law in April 1844 allowing private stock companies to build plank roads and collect tolls. The Salina to Central Square Plank Road, north from Syracuse, claims to be the first of these.
Within four years of the new law 182 companies had been organized in New York. Nearly 30 firms were authorized in Oneida County alone, mostly using the routes already established by Indigenous people, military operations, and early pioneer efforts.
(The Carthage to Lake Champlain Road was cut about 135 miles across Northern New York to Crown Point between 1844 and 1850.)
A State law enacted on May 7, 1847 provided that any five persons could incorporate to construct and own a plank road, could accept subscriptions to finance it, and collect tolls to maintain it.
A favored wood for these wide (up to 18 feet) roads was hemlock, for it was plentiful and resisted rot; although oak (strong and hard) was considered the best, elm, beech, and maple were also used.
Toll gates could be no closer than three miles apart, and tolls were not to exceed 1½ cents per mile for a vehicle and two horses with each additional horse a half cent per mile, a score of sheep or swine was likewise ½ cents per mile.
Exemptions were granted to people going to or from court as jurors or witnesses, religious services, attending militia training, funerals, farmers living one mile of a gate when going to or from work on their farm, military troops in service, or those going to or from a town meeting or election.
Many communities in Upstate New York still have “Toll Gate” place names. “Shunpike” is also popular, indicating the road used to avoid the tolls.
The plank road boom in New York State was short, lasting only into the 1850s. By then, canals and railroads were replacing the longest of these routes, although they continued to be used as local roads into late-19th century, and in more remote places such as the Adirondacks into the 20th century.
You can see a list of New York’s major plank roads here.
Read more about New York’s transportation history.
John Warren contributed to this essay.
Illustrations, from above: Map of the major routes west and connecting migration routes (Military Tract is in blue) from Handybook for Genealogists: United States of America, 10th ed., 2002; Diagram showing the construction of a corduroy road (US Forest Service); Iroquois Cantons In New York, a map of 17th-18th century Mohawk Valley indigenous trails and settler, Jesuit, and native communities from near Schenectady to Rome, the Great Carry to Oneida Lake (Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, v. 51, 1899) based on research of William M. Beauchamp of Baldwinville; Map of the Great Genesee Road from Utica to Buffalo and connecting migration routes from Handybook for Genealogists: United States of America, 10th ed., 2002); A rough plank road in Michigan (Manitowac County Historical Society); and an Albany to Schoharie “Old Plank Road” historical sign, 1932, located on Route 146 st Schoharie Plank Road East in Altamont (photo by Howard C. Ohlhous, 2011, courtesy Historical Marker Database).
