History
The South Carolina Department of Transportation is still familiarly known as the Highway Department, which is what the agency was called until May 13, 1977 when an act of the South Carolina General Assembly reformed the agency as the Department of Highways and Public Transportation (SCDHPT).
The current name, the Department of Transportation, was established in the State Government Restructuring Act of 1993. This act split functions of the SCDHPT to establish the SCDOT and the Department of Public Safety.
The roots of the state agency trace back to the establishment of a five member highway commission in 1917. Prior to 1917, county governments were entirely responsible for building and maintaining roads. The Federal Aid Road Act of 1916 and the promise of federal money to build highways served as the impetus for the creation of the commission. However, the commission lacked "the authority to designate roads to be improved with federal funds and the power to supervise directly the work being done."
Read more about this topic: South Carolina Department Of Transportation
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“The view of Jerusalem is the history of the world; it is more, it is the history of earth and of heaven.”
—Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)