Dollarway Road: The Dollar a Foot Highway
Arkansas
In nineteen thirteen, the roads of Arkansas were a problem everyone acknowledged and nobody had solved. Outside a handful of towns, they were dirt tracks that turned to grease in the rain and to powder in the summer. Moving cotton, livestock, or anything else across the Delta meant either a dry spell or defeat.
The answer came out of Jefferson County, south of Little Rock near Pine Bluff, in the form of a road improvement district, a locally controlled mechanism the state legislature had authorized in nineteen oh seven. Jefferson County Judge C. M. Philpot organized one in the summer of nineteen thirteen, hired the Little Rock contractor firm of Shelby and Bateman, and broke ground in November of that year.
What they built became known as the Dollarway Road, because the original estimate was exactly one dollar per linear foot of concrete. The final cost came in closer to a dollar and thirty-six cents per foot, but the name had already stuck. The road ran roughly twenty-three miles from the outskirts of Pine Bluff northward to the Jefferson County line, where it connected to the wagon road toward Little Rock.
When construction finished in October nineteen fourteen, the Dollarway was the longest continuous stretch of concrete pavement in the United States. Nothing else in the country matched it. The concrete was poured nine feet wide in a mix of one part cement, two and a half parts sand, and five parts aggregate, then sealed with a thin coat of coal tar. Bridges along the route used reinforced concrete, a first for Arkansas.
The engineering mattered, but so did the timing. The good roads movement was sweeping the country, fueled by the bicycle lobby, the early automobile industry, and farmers who understood that better roads meant better prices. Dollarway was Arkansas's proof of concept. It demonstrated that locally funded road districts could build infrastructure that lasted.
The road was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-four. A surviving section near Redfield still carries traffic today, more than a century after those concrete slabs were poured into the Jefferson County mud.
