Happy 75th to historic highway

Add the highway to Pennsylvania's contributions to American history. The Pennsylvania Turnpike, America's first four-lane limited-access highway, celebrates its 75th anniversary this week.

The push for intercity roads in Pennsylvania is as old as the commonwealth itself.

"Great roads from city to city . . . shall be first laid out and declared to be for highways," according to a 1681 agreement between William Penn and his initial "purchasers." Over the next 250 years, log-surfaced roads, canals, and an aborted railroad attempted to link Pennsylvania's eastern and western halves.

By the 1930s, Americans' revved-up interest in automobiles had driven home the sorry state of the tangled and often unsafe roads linking their cities. Pennsylvania was no exception; the Appalachian Mountains saw to that. To straighten this out, the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission was created in 1937.

Eager to employ Americans knocked over by the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt financed the nearly $70 million Pennsylvania Turnpike project through several New Deal programs. More than 1,100 engineers and 15,000 workers from 18 states labored in Pennsylvania's mountains and valleys. At their peak, crews were creating more than three miles of roadway per day. In less than two years, seven tunnels, 11 interchanges, and 300 structures had been completed.

Opening to the public on Oct. 1, 1940, the turnpike originally stretched more than 160 miles, from Middlesex to Irwin. Almost 70 percent of the original turnpike was straight, with gentle curves thrown in to break up the monotony. Nearly 27,000 autos crowded the highway on its first weekend, drawn by the lack of stop signs, intersections, and - initially - speed limits.

"Every effort has been directed toward securing uniform and consistent operating conditions for the motorist," relayed engineer Charles Noble in a July 1940 issue of Civil Engineering. The turnpike influenced the design of the national highway system, which did not appear for nearly two more decades.

Today, the well-traveled turnpike stretches more than 550 miles, with the latest addition, the Northeast Extension, stretching to Scranton. Country-music songwriter Vaughn Horton perhaps summed it up best with his 1970s hit "Pennsylvania Turnpike, I Love You So."