History
The state of Illinois was founded in 1818. One of its first governmental tasks was the construction of primitive dirt roads between the three pioneer villages of Cahokia, Kaskaskia, and Shawneetown. Illinois Route 13 is a distant descendant of most of the Cahokia-Shawneetown route, and has a claim to be one of the oldest state highways in Illinois.
Illinois Route 13 did not take its current physical form, though, until after the enactment of the Good Roads Movement paving program in 1918. The statewide plan standardized the alignment of this road and numbered it Illinois 13.
Except for a few alignment changes, Illinois 13 has remained the same since its inception in 1918. In 1937 it was rerouted around Sparta (now Illinois Route 4 and Illinois Route 154), replacing Illinois Route 152 in the process.
The other reroute took place between 1944 and 1947, when Illinois 13 took over a new highway (then called U.S. Route 460) in and around Belleville. The old route became Alternate Illinois 13. In 1947 it was moved back to Bond Avenue. Later, U.S. 460 would be dropped and replaced with Illinois Route 15.
Read more about this topic: Illinois Route 13
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“Humankind has understood history as a series of battles because, to this day, it regards conflict as the central facet of life.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)