This article investigates the use of wood paving blocks around the world as industrial societies grappled with the high noise levels in growing cities during the decades before pneumatic rubber tires eased the ride and reduced the clatter of steel-wheeled vehicles and iron-shod horses.

Trees for the construction of the road had been felled in 148 BC. ¹

Since the introduction of Gas, no subject of domestic comfort, or of public utility, has been brought under consideration, of equal importance to that of Wood Paving [London, 1841]. ²

Railways, with all their value, and they are of priceless worth to man, are yet the thoroughfare for the citizen away from his home — for the journey, the travel, the tour; but the plank road is for the home use — for the transit which is begun and ended in a day, or its fraction — which gives to him who uses it a double value or occupation for the hours of the day — which increases the happiness and the comfort and profit of the farm, that foundation of all the institutions of society [1851].³

From 1847 to 1853 New Yorkers built more than 3,500 miles of wooden roads.⁴

James G. McBean, a wood block paving contractor, has offered to pave half of Washington Street, between LaSalle and Clark streets, in Chicago, with cedar blocks [1892].⁵

A trial is being made in Paris of a new system of wood-paving [1892].⁶

[Wood paving] is used in the busiest sections of the streets of Melbourne and Sydney [1894].⁷

Tokio [sic], Japan, is using Douglas fir blocks, creosoted locally, for paving [1923].⁸

The human quest for an ideal pavement is nearly as old as the search for the perfect god. Leaving in their trees, primates travelled by water when possible and struggled with land travel otherwise. Nature is rarely kind to adenturers: bogs, rivers, mountains, mud, and dust hazard people, their animals, and their machines — even late-twentieth century high technology could not rescue American hostages from Iranian militants when common sand throttled the sophisticated engines propelling some of the world's most advanced military helicopters. Flying, that wonderful alternative to water and land travel, available for a century, has not alleviated the need for dependable all–weather surface routes, mankind's millennia-long pursuit.

Evidence of early stone roads proves the durability of hard surfaces: streets laid in Mesopotamian cities thousands of years ago testify to the endurance of stone paving. But stone is difficult to move and may provide a rough, if resistant, surface. Where rock and quarry stone were scarce or builders had no capacity for moving it and turned to other materials, wood was a favorite choice. Ancient stone-streets are extant, but wood decays, leaving little trace. There remains, nevertheless, artificial evidence of early wooden roads . Archaeologist Barry Raftery of University College, Dublin, has excavated the remains of a wooden road at Corlea Bog, County Longford, Ireland. The road, dated to 148 BC, facilitated travel over a bog from one point of high ground to another. "In prehistoric times [the boglands] were dangerous, menacing worlds of reeds and rushes with stagnant pools and quaking mosses laying in wait to engulf the unwary traveller. The Irish bogs were vast wet areas, impassable obstacles to travel for much of the year. In winter they must have been grim and foreboding places."⁹

"The road consisted of two parallel 'runners' extending along its length. Upon these a series of closely-spaced transverse 'sleepers' was laid... The runners were long, straight, specially-selected timbers of stout dimensions... The surface of the road was composed of split oak logs 3-3.50 m in average length ... The majority appear to be half tree-trunks, usually placed on the runners with their flat surfaces upwards ... closely spaced to form a compact, though uneven, surface."

The timbers were held together with mortises and pegs. Beneath the road lies yet another trackway, older and likely dating to the Bronze Age.¹⁰ Both roadways were "swallowed by the rapidly growing bog, which embalmed the timbers in a covering of living peat. In the anaerobic conditions thus created the prehistory wood survived in a state of almost total preservation until revealed again to human eyes after an interval of some twenty-one centuries."¹¹

Wooden roads are not restricted to ancient history, but played a role in road and street construction into the first half of the twentieth century when ever-larger motorized vehicles forced them into obscurity. Few alive today recall the wooden rails laid over swamps¹² or the cedar blocks that cushioned in-town roads, for steel-reinforced concrete and asphalt have become the premier town and country paving materials. The search that led to concrete and asphalt left little untried as anything in abundant supply that could somehow harden and strengthen a road was tested. Americans, rich in forests, accustomed to using wood in building homes, barns, fences, furniture, and anything else the elastic material could be crafted into were naturally drawn to putting wood on their roads and streets.

In 1851 Hunt's Merchant Magazine and Commercial Review reported that plank roads had originated in Russia; Lord Sydenham introduced them in Canada, and New Yorkers of Onondaga County, impressed by the Canadian experiment, brought them to the United States. The roads were promoted enthusiastically in communities left behind by railroad and canal construction.¹³ Where trees were plentiful, a plank road could be built for about $1,900 a mile; macadam would have cost $3,500 per mile. Under the most favorable circumstances both the right-of-way and timber were donated to the road company, leaving the clearing, leveling, cutting, sawing, and plank-laying to be financed by investors. Toll houses were built and collectors paid to man them. Steam-powered saw mills were the only high-technology equipment available for plank road construction. The simple but heavy labor was carried out with hand tools and horse-drawn wagons and sledges. Promoters often championed their projects with estimates of $800 to $1,000 per mile construction costs, unlikely figures under the best of circumstances. Investors were assured of life expectancies of eight to ten years when in fact the surfaces usually had to be replaced after four or five years. Once the planks began to rot and disintegrate, they became more a danger to travellers than an assistance. A joint stock charter for a plank road often required that owners either keep the surface in repair or return it to a dirt road. Plank roads were usually covered with several inches of sand or dirt to ease the wear on the wood. As planks disappeared, less and less of the road had a plank subsurface, something not obvious until wet weather.¹⁴

Although a transportation success, the plank road was an economic failure. Wood surfacing improved the speed and dependability of transportation, but plank road companies were unable to capture sufficient returns from their enterprises to make them as profitable as alternative investments. John Majewski, Christopher Baer, and Daniel B. Klein estimate just 40 percent of New York's's 1855 plank roads were in operation in 1860 and "only 32 of the original 350 companies submitted new articles at the end of 30 years."¹⁵ Wooden streets in cities did not suffer the same setback as plank roads and because they were built and paid for with taxes and did not have to satisfy investors for their continuation. Rural Americans wanted passable roads, but they refused to pay taxes for them. Instead they paid what came to be recognized as a mud tax, a loss of revenue during the wet months when mud made roads impassable. Inaugurated wit the introduction of the modern bicycle in the years immediately following the Civil War, the good roads movement came to fruition when the internal combustion engine available in an automobile affordable by rural residents stimulated a sustained drive for hard-surfaced roads and persuaded taxpayers to underwrite road construction and maintenance.

As rural folk were building plank roads, their urban counterparts were laying wood-block avenues and streets. J. Lee Stevens, a promoter of wood for city streets, published a pamphlet in 1841 to publicize the wood block pavements on the streets of London. Steel-tired wagons and carriages pulled by iron-shod horses amplified a deafening clatter against granite, cobblestones, and brick laid to guarantee all-weather boulevards, the mark of a modern city. The metal shoes and wheels wore away paving in less than a decade, so repaving became an essential municipal function. Stevens and other advocated of replacing harder surfaces with wood blocks championed the sound-absorbing quality of organic over mineral paving while insisting that wood outlasted stone and was less expensive to install and replace: Stevens estimated twenty-year savings of 10 to 30 percent where wood blocks were substituted for granite. "A structure of Wood instead of resisting the pressure or percussion of passing vehicles, like such an incompressible substance as granite, yields to it sufficiently to counteract friction, from it's inherent property of elasticity." Advocates of wood block paving, like Stevens, were committed to their product: "Since the introduction of Gas, no subject of domestic comfort, or of public utility, has been brought under consideration, of equal importance to that of Wood Paving."¹⁶

Cleanliness was a consideration given city streets in the days of four-legged house-power fueled by hay and oats that appears quaint in a motorized society dependent on fossil fuels. George Frederick Deacon, writing about macadam pavement noted that: