When springtime comes to northern Illinois (OK, so sometimes it is sort of hard to tell when winter ends and spring begins), thoughts often turn to potholes.
The almost daily freeze/thaw cycle around these parts seems to create canyons where the day before were nice, smooth stretches of pavement. And that’s not only annoying, it can also be expensive, requiring front-end alignments and even sometimes new tires and/or wheels.
But just imagine for a moment if there was no pavement at all. That’s the condition area residents had to deal with until the relatively recent past.
After hearing the song “Jingle Bells” on the radio one winter day back when I was a teenager, I asked my grandmother whether she had ever gone for any sleigh rides when she was a youngster. My grandmother was the kindest, gentlest person I have ever known, but she gave me a look that suggested she thought I needed to get with the program in a major way.
“That’s the only way we could go anywhere when it snowed,” she said, her tone suggesting, in a nice way, that any idiot should have known that.
But for me, at that age, it was a revelation of sorts. I hadn’t really thought about it before, but cars were then, some 60 years ago now, relatively new. My grandfather said he remembered when what he believed was the first automobile drove through Aurora. He was in grade school and they let the kids out of class to see the modern marvel as it chugged past the school.
And, in fact, when my grandparents were dating (they were married in 1909), most travel still was by horse and buggy, bicycle or by rail, although there were a few primitive autos sputtering around. My grandfather lived on the east side of Aurora on Hinman Street in the “Dutchtown” neighborhood. Although at the very edge of town then – they kept a cow and a horse down the street in the wetland that’s now along Ashland Avenue – the house he grew up in is today in a very urban neighborhood.
On the other hand, my grandmother lived on the family farm on Route 59 about where the upscale Royal Mews Circle is nowadays, just south of 103rd Street. To visit his girl, grandfather either cycled (the most usual way) or drove his parents’ horse and buggy out what is today New York Street and then through the country roads to grandmother’s farm.
Today, that route is four-lane roads, sometimes five, all the way from Aurora’s old east side to the middle of some pretty intense urban development, with lots of traffic signals and busy intersections. It’s also well-lighted with sodium and mercury vapor lights that make it as bright as day even on the darkest, foggiest night.
On one of my grandparents’ dates, grandfather picked up grandmother with his horse and buggy on a Sunday afternoon and took her to his parents’ house in Aurora. That night, he took her home again. It was an evening, grandmother recalled, when the moon was dark and clouds covered the stars. The road’s surface was black Illinois dirt – gravel on most country roads wouldn’t become common for a few decades – and there were no farms with bright yard lights like you see these days. It was dark, dark in a way that we today, used to so much background light all around us even on the darkest nights, cannot quite come to grips with.
If that wasn’t bad enough, a light fog settled as the sun set, blocking what tiny amount of light from the stars that may have existed. Although the pair had traveled the route many times, both were worried about finding their way. In order to get to my grandmother’s parents’ farm, grandfather got off the buggy and led the horse along the route, guided by keeping one hand on the fences running alongside the road.
Only the largest towns of that era had paved streets, and paved streets usually stopped at the border of the city center. Small towns such as Yorkville, Montgomery and Oswego had dirt streets well into the 20th century. One of my favorite photos in the collections of the Little White School Museum in Oswego shows what appears to be a Model T Ford roaring north on Main Street through the village’s business district about 1918 throwing up a cloud of dust on the dirt street.
In the spring and during winter thaws, those dirt roads and streets turned into seemingly bottomless pits of black, sticky mud and transportation virtually halted. In order to get to town, farmers would hook their heaviest team of draft horses to their lightest buggy. The giant Clydesdales or powerful Percherons would literally drag their buggies through the mud.
And that’s why interurban streetcars and passenger trains were so important until after the first quarter of the 20th century. Unless going by rail, travel in the early spring was incredibly difficult, and hauling any farm produce to market was virtually impossible.
Eventually, major roads were graveled. A few, such as today’s Route 25 between Aurora and Oswego were paved as demonstrations before World War I, but not until 1918 did Gov. Henry Horner champion the “Hard Road Project” that provided concrete, all weather roads throughout the state.
Paving country roads was a much slower process. In the spring, many gravel roads sank right into the prairie mud. I remember in the spring of 1958 that my dad’s pickup truck sank in our road – North Adams Street in Oswego – right up to the axles and had to be towed out. Plainfield Road, now a major county thoroughfare, wasn’t paved until 1962, and it wasn’t all that long ago that the last gravel township road in Oswego Township was blacktopped. Most of the rest of the county’s townships all maintain gravel roads because of the high cost of putting down a hard surface, although maintenance costs are cut significantly.
Potholes definitely can be a bother, but I always figure the good news is that potholes indicate there’s a hard surface in which the holes appear.
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