Wyoming Department of Transportation - 1930s: Paving Work Accelerated

1930s: Paving Work Accelerated

While during the 1920s, the focus was mainly on “getting out of the mud;” with improvements consisting of improving drainage and topping roads with gravel. By the 1930s the Highway Department had raised its sights to providing durable all-weather surfacing.

An excerpt from the department’s 1930 annual report read, “The construction of … low-style surfaces such as gravel shale and crushed stone ... has only provided a temporary solution to the problems of providing adequate highways. Increasing traffic … has made it impossible to satisfactorily maintain the traffic-bound gravel road ... There is a continuing loss of surfacing material which is expensive and often difficult to replace.”

Initially, the remedy was ‘oiling,’ whereby heavy asphaltic oil was sprayed atop a layer of gravel or other base material; a process was also referred to as ‘inverted penetration.” Oiling was soon supplanted by paving with bituminous mix (asphalt),a process still in wide use. Paving with concrete was also performed, albeit on a limited basis initially. (Concrete is now used more commonly, primarily in urban or high traffic rural settings.) By 1939, more than 90 percent of the state highway system had been paved.