Plank Roads and the Longleaf Economy

Long before Interstate Ninety-Five, long before the railroad, Fayetteville was the hub of a transportation experiment that the whole state was betting on.

In the late eighteen forties, North Carolina had a roads problem. Poor roads were a long-standing complaint. The answer, it was thought, was plank roads: wooden boards laid over dirt trails to create all-weather surfaces that wagons and horses could actually use reliably.

Fayetteville became the center of the system. Several plank roads were planned around the city in the early eighteen fifties. The longest was the Fayetteville and Western Plank Road, which stretched one hundred twenty-nine miles all the way to Salem, in what is now Winston-Salem. A trip that had taken about four days by wagon could now be done by stagecoach in about eighteen hours.

The roads brought goods into town from the interior and sent naval stores, the tar, pitch, and turpentine produced from the longleaf pines of the Sandhills, down to Wilmington and onto markets up and down the coast.

It worked, for a while. The plank roads turned a profit in their early years. By around eighteen sixty the tolls no longer covered maintenance, and the Civil War left the road neglected.

But for a brief window in the eighteen fifties, Fayetteville was a leading commercial center of inland North Carolina, the place five roads pointed toward, and the city that handled what the pines produced.