Paving Tobacco Road: a Century of Progress by the North Carolina Department of Transportation.

Paving Tobacco Road: A Century of Progress by the North Carolina Department of Transportation. By Walter R. Turner. (Raleigh: North Carolina Office of Archives and History, c. 2003. Pp. xvi, 181. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 0-86526-305-1.)

The era of mass-motorization began one hundred years ago, and a number of state transportation departments are approaching their centennials. These agencies are vital partners in the nation's highway program because federal legislation required the sharing of responsibility for roads between state and federal officials. So, as state highway departments are marking their first century of activity, we may see a number of books like Paving Tobacco Road by Walter R. Turner.

North Carolina was not the first state to create a highway agency, although it formed one of the first in the South. Several distinguished individuals discussed in this book, notably Joseph Hyde Pratt, Frank Page, and Harriett Berry, played significant roles in the national good roads movement after 1900. Yet the agency they created did not pioneer in road construction activities, design, finance, or administration. Instead, the book's primary value lies in tracing the process that almost every state went through in developing a road system and a highway agency to serve the demands of motorists and truck drivers.

Paving Tobacco Road is a narrative chronicle of the state road agency. The organization is chronological and built around the men who headed the highway--later transportation--department. The basic events covered here include forming a new state bureaucracy, learning to work with federal officials on the federal-aid highway system after 1921, expanding the state road system during the 1930s, coping with the demands for massive highway construction after World War II, and transforming the agency into a full-blown transportation department after 1973. The book contains significant detail about the organization and its leadership. Turner appropriately focuses on political matters more than on technical developments--although there is more to say about highway politics than presented here. Even so, the interplay of highway engineers with governors and legislators can be glimpsed, along with concerns about highway funding. Readers can also observe national patterns playing out in North Carolina, especially with reference to the ability of highway engineers to shape political choices related to roads from the 1920s through the 1960s.

The research is solid, and the marvelous illustrations from the state archives are a notable feature of the project. Overall, the intentions of Turner and the book's sponsors are well met. My only disappointment is that Turner restricted the focus of the study to events in North Carolina. While the national context is generally evident, missing are serious comparisons to events or state organizations elsewhere. In the end, this is a study of a single state's road-building agency, through which observers can trace the basic steps in the evolution and development of the nation's road system.

Michigan Technological University 

BRUCE E. SEELY