Plank Road Boom
In the late 1840s plank roads led to an investment boom and subsequent bust. The first plank road in the US was built in North Syracuse, New York in order to transport salt and other goods; it appears to have copied earlier roads in Canada that copied Russian ones. The plank road boom was like many early technologies, promising to transform the way people lived and worked, and led to permissive changes in legislation seeking to spur development, speculative investment by private individuals, etc. Ultimately the technology failed to live up to its promise and millions of dollars in investments evaporated almost overnight.
Three plank roads, the Hackensack, the Paterson and the Newark, were major arteries in northern New Jersey, which connected the Hudson River waterfront to the cities after which they are named on the other side of the Hackensack Meadows.
Kingston Road (Toronto) (Governor's Road), Danforth Avenue in Toronto were plank roads built by the Don and Danforth Plank Road Company in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries. Highway 2 (Ontario) from Toronto eastwards was once plank roads in the 19th Century and later paved.
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Famous quotes containing the words plank, road and/or boom:
“If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The only road to the highest stations in this country is that of the law.”
—William Jones (1746–1794)
“The cohort that made up the population boom is now grown up; many are in fact middle- aged. They are one reason for the enormous current interest in such topics as child rearing and families. The articulate and highly educated children of the baby boom form a huge, literate market for books on various issues in parenting and child rearing, and, as time goes on, adult development, divorce, midlife crisis, old age, and of course, death.”
—Joseph Featherstone (20th century)