Auto Trail
The system of auto trails was an informal network of marked routes that existed in the United States and Canada in the early part of the 20th century. Marked with colored bands on telephone poles, the trails were intended to help travellers in the early days of the automobile.
Auto trails were usually marked and sometimes maintained by organizations of private individuals. Some, such as the Lincoln Highway, maintained by the Lincoln Highway Association, were well-known and well-organized, while others were the work of fly-by-night promoters, to the point that anyone with enough paint and the will to do so could set up a trail; trails were not usually linked to road improvements, though counties and states often prioritized road improvements because they were on trails.
In the mid-to-late 1920s, the auto trails were essentially replaced in the United States with the system of numbered U.S. Highways. Similar numbering schemes had begun to be implemented in the Canadian provinces as well.
Read more about Auto Trail: List of Auto Trails
Famous quotes containing the word trail:
“And Change with hurried hand has swept these scenes:
The woods have fallen, across the meadow-lot
The hunter’s trail and trap-path is forgot,
And fire has drunk the swamps of evergreens;
Yet for a moment let my fancy plant
These autumn hills again: the wild dove’s haunt,
The wild deer’s walk: in golden umbrage shut,”
—Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (1821–1873)