From Farm to Market
The uniquely Texas road system may be the best vehicle for experiencing the state.
“When you get just outside of town, take the first farm-to-market road on the right.” While directions like that might make complete sense to a Texan, out-of-staters accustomed to “interstate,” “freeway” or “boulevard” are often left scratching their heads.
Texas is the only state in the union with designated, state-operated “Farm to Market” (FM) roads. The first such road was completed in January 1937 during the Great Depression and connected Mount Enterprise with the former East Texas community of Shiloh in Rusk County. The route was 5.8 miles long and was constructed at a cost of $48,015.12.
The Good Roads movements of the 1920s had paved the way for several thoroughfares to cross the state, connecting major and smaller cities via border-to-border routes. But a decade later, isolated Texas farmers during the Great Depression could see that the lack of passable roads in distant rural areas was hurting their efforts to sell their crops. “Get the farmer out of the mud” became a popular political slogan that persuaded state leaders to champion the concept of farm-to-market roads.
The first highway officially designated as FM 1, authorized in 1941, brought loggers rather than farmers to market, connecting US 96 near Pineland to a sawmill belonging to the Temple Lumber Company.
The FM road system took off in the 1940s after World War II. In 1945, the state highway commission authorized a three-year pilot pro- gram for the construction of 7,205 miles of FM roadways, with costs to be shared equally by the state and federal governments.
A young representative from Uvalde, Dolph Briscoe, who would later become governor, co-sponsored the defining FM road legislation in 1949 with State Sen. E. Neveille Colson. The Colson-Briscoe Act appropriated funding for the creation of an extensive system of secondary roads to provide access to rural areas and to allow farmers and ranchers to bring their goods to market, reserving a flat $15 million per year — plus one cent per gallon of gasoline sold in the state — for local highway construction.
In 1962, the Texas legislature adjusted this amount to $23 million annually, through fed- eral fund matching, and expanded the FM system from 35,000 to 50,000 miles. FM roads now account for more than half of the mileage in the Texas Department of Transportation system.
The FM roads that serve Texas’ more than 3,200 far-flung cities and towns are as diverse as the state itself. Even though the roads are part of a uniform system, no two are alike. They aren’t even all called by the same designation: some are known as Ranch to Market roads, a concession to ranchers who bristled at the idea they might be miscast. These are signed RM, or Ranch Road. However, TxDOT will tell you the official name of all such roadways is Farm to Market Road, with only one allowed exception — Ranch Road 1, which runs near the home of former Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson in Stonewall (in the Texas Hill Country Trail Region).
The longest farm-to-market road in the state is FM 168 in the Texas Plains Trail Region in West Texas, running 139.421 miles from the crossroads of Hart Camp (Terry County) through Olton (Lamb County) to Hart and Nazareth (Castro County) through the Buffalo Lake Wildlife Refuge in Umbarger (Randall County) and almost as far north as Route 66. The route has been extended southwest to US 84 near Anton.
The shortest is also in the Texas Plains Trail Region. FM 122 covers a mere 0.130 miles from an intersection with State Highway 207 in Ralls (Crosby County). The route travels east along Tilford Avenue. The FM 122 designation and state maintenance end at an intersection with Avenue G, where the roadway turns from pavement to brick.
The farm-to-market road system’s colorful history hasn’t been free from controversy. In 1995, as the state’s cities continued to sprawl, an effort was made to rename affected FM roads “Urban Roads,” but Texans balked at the initiative, arguing that removing the “Farm” and “Ranch” from the designations changed the state’s cultural heritage and that the cost of changing signage wasn’t justified.
Other than a few route markers, such as FM 1315 near Victoria, most signs weren’t changed, and TxDOT abandoned the idea to do so.
(Speaking of TxDOT, the agency itself has undergone various changes to its name and responsibilities over the decades. First established as the Texas Highway Department in 1917, by 1925 the agency had been given full control of the design, engineering, construction and maintenance of the state’s highways, including the right to acquire land and rights of way for highway construction through eminent domain. Its present-day iteration was born in 1991, when the Highway Department became TxDOT, incorporating the previous State Department of Highways and Public Transportation, Department of Aviation, and Texas Motor Vehicle Commission.)
Not only do Texans love the heritage of their roads — they just flat-out love their roads. In 2013, the Legislature appropriated $225 mil- lion in extra funding for the repair and maintenance of county roads and bridges affected by the shale energy boom, and another $225 million for other county transportation projects.
In November 2014, 80 percent of Texas voters approved Proposition 1, an amendment to the Texas Constitution directing more funds to transportation. The state’s Economic Stabilization Fund (its “Rainy Day Fund”) receives 75 percent of the state’s oil and gas production tax revenue in excess of fiscal 1987 revenues. Proposition 1 now redirects up to half of this amount for highways, based on the decisions of the committee of legislators that guide the ESF.
Another boost for state transportation projects came in November 2015, when voters approved another constitutional amendment, Proposition 7, which could constitute the largest increase in transportation funding in Texas history.
Farm-to-market roads make it easy for Texans to love them. They allow travelers to drive across the landscape and through towns, seeing and feeling the contours, landmarks and distinctions in close proximity rather than bypassing them in an 75-mile-per-hour expressway blur.
You can take time to savor the sights on a farm-to-market road, but if you’re in a hurry, the likelihood is that the Texan driving in front of you will pull over and brush the ditch so you can rush on by.
But if you’re the one driving at a crawl in a slow-moving rural area, there’s a good chance you’ll meet a friendly local who’ll welcome you with the index-finger “hi” sign from the steering wheel.
That kind of friendliness might be unique to Texas, too.
