On April 4, 2017, the Texas Department of Transportation — TxDOT, as most of us know it — kicked off a commemoration of its centennial year. Roger Polson, coauthor of Miles and Miles of Texas: 100 Years of the Texas Highway Department, tells how the remarkable history of this remarkable organization came about.
Excerpted from Miles and Miles of Texas: 100 Years of the Texas Highway Department by Carol Dawson with Roger Allen Polson; Geoff Appold, photo editor; fore- word by Willie Nelson (Texas A&M University Press, 2016).
FROM CHAPTER 1, “TRAILS, TRUCKS, MUD, AND MONEY”
At the precise moment on April 4, 1917, when Governor James Ferguson touched his pen to paper to sign the law creating the Texas Highway Department, he ignited a battle between the forces for the
public good and the evil of greed. The worst offender was Jim Ferguson himself. Second was his wife, Miriam, who also became the first woman in America elected to a state governor’s seat in a general election and who acted as the Ferguson figurehead after her husband was impeached and banned forever from holding a Texas office. Others included their cronies and hangers-on, who, like the Fergusons, saw the brand-new Texas Highway Department as a field fresh and ready plowed for their personal plunder.
The combat would last fifteen years. Its war- riors would practice their strategies of advance and retreat, attack and defend, each side struggling to maintain power and control over the prize: the largest, wealthiest department or agency ever devised for any state in the United States. And when it finally ended, that same department would leap forward and grow to become, at least until the new millennium, one of the country’s cleanest, most innovative, most efficient instruments of progress.
This is the story of how the war raged and how its outcome has affected the state of Texas, the nation, and the world.
Left This photo from the TXDOT archives, is identified only as “Couple in Mud.” Right Historic photo titled “Muddy Road.”
There are the opening paragraphs of the book Miles and Miles of Texas: 100 Years of the Texas Highway Department, penned by Texas author Carol Dawson. The words set the stage for an epic tale about a big state agency and a very big state that transformed in the past 100 years from a largely agricultural population to one that contains three of the nation’s 10 largest cities and a booming, diverse population of more than 25 million people.
The story of the book began for me in 1989 when I was hired as a public information officer for the State Department of Highways and Public Transportation (the successor agency for the Texas Highway Department and predeces- sor for the Texas Department of Transportation [TxDOT]). I was assigned the job of organizing and executing a statewide celebration of the department’s 75th anniversary that was coming up in 1992. Those plans were changed with the creation of TxDOT in 1991. I said to myself, “Well, it’s a great story, and the 100th anniversary will be coming along soon enough.”
I spent a lot of time traveling around the state, interviewing and writing about employees at all levels of the organization. Often accom- panied by the photographer and audiovisual manager, Geoff Appold, we saw firsthand the innovation, dedication and enthusiasm dis- played by personnel, from a dump truck driver in Vernon to a billionaire transportation com- missioner in Dallas. This story needed to be told, and in January 2012 when I retired from TxDOT, I took on a personal project to tell it.
Appold and I would meet for coffee and discuss the possibilities of such a book as Miles and Miles of Texas. I began meeting with transportation leaders, laying out my plans to develop this book using sponsorships from engineering and construction firms who had, in fact, built much of the infrastructure through contracts. When we presented the concept of the book to Shannon Davies at Texas A&M University Press, she was so enthusiastic, we’d basically made the deal before the initial meeting ended.
Each step of the way, the doors opened, and I embarked on an ini- tial fundraising effort, determined not to use state dollars. Doug Pitcock of Williams Brothers in Houston stepped forward immedi- ately and put us on the road. David Zachry of San Antonio’s Zachry Construction followed shortly thereafter. At this point I knew the project was a go, and realized that if this book was going to be any good, I needed to find someone who’d actually written a book. Fortunately, I knew just the right person for the job. Carol Dawson and I were acquainted through our work with the Texas Book Festival. I enjoyed reading her fiction works and knew she’d just written a non- fiction book detailing the history of Luby’s Cafeteria, a fabled family- owned Texas company.
I approached Carol about the plan. “I want you to write a book about the history of the Texas Highway Department,” I said. Her initial reaction was sort of like, “Why would I want to do that?” But within minutes, as we discussed how this story presented a unique look at Texas history, never before documented, the light bulb went on and the project took off. Appold agreed to be the photo editor. Texas icon Willie Nelson agreed to write the book’s foreword.
Carol brought her penchant for vigorous research and talent of telling a good story to the book, and we were off. Miles and Miles of Texas was on the road with a scheduled release just prior to the department’s 100th birthday on April 4, 2017. Just five months since publication, the first printing has sold out and a second is in the works.
Carol’s research breathed life into this com- plex story, and she found inspiration in the dedication and leadership of the department’s career class. One of the early visionaries was Gibb Gilchrist, who came along and worked to right some of Ferguson’s wrongs.
FROM CHAPTER 4, “THE ROCK CORE OF INTEGRITY”
Gibb Gilchrist’s knack for making and keeping friends through the openness of his character also had a direct effect on the culture of the Highway Department. During these years, the Highway department ‘family’ was born. A cohesive attitude of pride between employees and departments began to develop—with perhaps the exception of the Maintenance Division’s complaints that they often had to come in and fix the mistakes that the Engineering Division made —and the completion, in 1933, of the new eight story art deco State Highway Department building across the street from the Capitol in Austin created a control center, the beating heart of the operations, and helped to foster a sense of sturdiness and collaboration that spread out from the headquarters’ “rock core of integrity” to all the far-flung division offices across the state.
The next few years saw phenomenal advances in the Texas Highway Department. . . . The atmosphere of the new headquarters buzzed with plans for genuine, forward- thinking innovations . . . brand-new safety modifications, colossal bridges made with groundbreaking technologies, radical changes in philosophies of land use, and enough cash to carry out the work.
Gilchrist changed basic design principles and ushered in safer, wider rights of way. He also began the department’s longstanding policy of highway beauty incorporated into the design. Gilchrist began by conscripting members of the Highway Motor Patrol to scatter wildflower seeds and cordon off existing trees during high way maintenance and construction. Women’s clubs across the state had already been hard at work crusading for prettier roads and even planting trees, flowers, and shrubs in some places. The aesthetic boon to drivers everywhere was obvious, a true boost for tourism and recreational use. The advantages to safety and erosion pur- poses were less obvious, but far more crucial.
The second visionary was Dewitt C. Greer, who was mentored by Gilchrist. Greer was appointed engineer director in 1940, and the looming World War II presented critical challenges as manpower and resources were diverted away from infrastructure and into the war effort.
FROM CHAPTER 5, “WAR AND PEACE”
“[During the war] the only step Greer could take toward the future was to invest all state-generated
revenues from registrations, drivers’ licenses, and the gas tax in short-term government securities so they could be protected from other political attempts to nab their use, and earn an increase during the shielding. . . . The remaining staff Greer instructed to start preparing detailed plans for conducting the enormous highway expansion, once peace was restored, that he had already envisioned.
[When] the war was over, Dewitt Greer plunged all of Texas into full-steam-ahead mode for highway construction. Having saved up the resources toward implementing his visionary plans to help create what he called “a civilization geared to motor vehicles,” Thus, in 1947, less than one- and-a-half years following the war’s conclusion, Texas accounted for twenty-five percent of the entire nation’s road construction. ‘The highway system of 1946 was a casualty of World War II. The roads in place were deemed expendable to the war effort,’ he said, as he set about rectifying that situation.
Greer ushered in the Texas-centric Farm to Market Road program and oversaw the state’s contribution to the nation’s largest infrastructure program, the Interstate Highway System. He was engineer director until 1966, and then was appointed to the powerful Highway Commission. The mark that Gilchrist and Greer left on the Texas Highway Department is visible in the policies, practices and enduring highway family today.
Left Traveling Route 66 between Jericho and Alanreed, 1958 Right Constructing the new high bridge over the Pecos River, completed in 1957.
These stories illuminate the narrative of Miles and Miles of Texas. With a comprehensive 80,000 words and almost 400 photographs, the story is told as never before.
Dawson concludes her narrative with these words:
Just as roads have always changed human ways of life, economies, and our contact with the worlds that lie waiting beyond our own village borders, so they also inflect our minds and spirits. Roads help civilizations prosper; this fact remains indisputable. . . . What we may not notice is how a good, “fast” road erases that same natural world from our eyes now. Our ever-increasing speed eclipses the clouds overhead, the meadows and deserts and mountains and forests, into a glimpsed blur that instantly dissolves. . . .
History is the diary of a journey, of how we have arrived at where we stand now, at this milestone moment. It carries within it the meaning of the past and the shape of the future—mutable, adjusting to the topography as its pavers go forward.
So as you hit the trails, take your time to truly look at Texas on your way.
