The 1879 survey of south Bingham County shows only a couple roads existing at that time. The Blackfoot to American Falls Road roughly followed the Snake, running southwesterly from Blackfoot, until it hit McTucker Island. It then took a "v" northwesterly for a couple miles to swing around the bottoms before again following the bluff on a southwest path to American Falls. A stage trail, lesser used, ran west from Springfield from near one leg of the aforementioned "v" to the other leg (Highway 39 still follows this route for about three miles) to shorten the Blackfoot-American Falls trip for those not crossing the river to Fort Hall or traveling to the Tilden bottoms. From Springfield, there was a road to Lost River which the stage used but would soon abandon for a shorter route betweem Blackfoot and Arco, that created near where Highway 26 now runs.
Springfield Taber Road in 1935, from the highway looking north, with the left being the CCC's new version, the right the old road:
When Idaho became a state a decade later in 1890, there was as yet no cohesive road system. In the east part of the state, Idaho Falls to American Falls and American Falls to Lost River were the only real "routes". But by 1904, public roads had expanded to over eighteen thousand miles in the state. Just 200 miles of that total, however, were graveled. The legislature passed a bill to create "good road districts" in 1905, but little funding came of it. 1913 brought the creation of the State Highway Commission, which became, in 1919, the Bureau of Highways.
Thirty years after the initial government survey, not much had changed. The County had carved some "roads", mostly on section lines and nothing more than a matter of leveling high and low spots and clearing brush. Homesteaders, still few in number, provided maintenance when they had time, using a drag to fill in bog holes, bringing in gravel when it was nearby, and removing rocks as they emerged from the roadbed. The county reimbursed them for their services when they submitted their claims.
The road to Aberdeen, in 1908, was described as running through "bottomless alkali", chasing in and out of rockpiles, getting lost in newly built irrigation ditches and running into barbed wire fences. There was an "uncertain dam" at Springfield to cross and sandy areas that proved difficult to traverse. Though all section lines of Townships 4, 5, and 6 were declared roadways, few roads along those lines had yet been built. And with cars appearing on the landscape, requiring a smoother and more solid road base than horses and teams, the populace clamored for bridges to be built and roadways to be improved. The effort to do so would go on for another twenty years, and of course continues today.
Bingham County was not alone in its road problem. The rest of the nation, too, suffered similar circumstances which catalyzed the "Good Roads Movement". It began in 1880 when bicycle enthusiasts sought paths along existent roadways for their activities. The bicyclist cause slowly gained traction, but when Rural Free Delivery started up in 1893 those in outlying areas had a more solid reason to build and maintain better roads--they were required in order to receive their mail and packages. The mail service connected the isolated ruralite with the rest of the world, and for a time producers could even ship their products--eggs, cream, etc.--with the mail carrier to anywhere in the nation.
The first car in the nation appeared shortly after RFD, in 1895 (the first auto owned in Bingham County showed up a decade later), and by 1913 a cross-country road was in the works--the Lincoln Highway. "Good Roads" no longer had anything to do with bicycles. Three years later, Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Aid Road Act, and the compaction industry, led by the Buffalo-Springfield Company and its fleet of steam rollers, enabled the efficient construction of more solid roads.
Locally, the sandy area past Aberdeen remained treacherous enough for travelers to call for a ferry across the Snake to avoid it, though their pleas went unmet. Other problems came up: residents wanted the Tilden road, which led across the new bridge to Pocatello in 1909, fenced so traveling sheep and cattle herds wouldn't ruin their crops; irrigators flooded low spots during the growing season, making roads impassable, and canal systems sometimes let their spill inundate the roads.
In 1911, officials noted some progress had been made, and the route from Blackfoot to Pingree was nearly finished, with hill tops cut down and low spots filled in. The road was to be the backbone for a new system of county roads, with crossroad and side road work coming next. Still, Alice Beach, County school superintendent, went for a school inspection in November of 1911 and found the road nearly impassable, so difficult that a horse died on the way. The Ross Fork road macadamization between Fort Hall and Blackfoot, the first stretch of paved road in Idaho, was underway then and would finish the following summer.
In 1913, a road holiday was declared, in hopes of county residents banding together and helping with road improvements. Twenty carloads of volunteers went out from Blackfoot to rake gravel, remove large stones, and fix bridge approaches and exposed culverts. Eight Fresnos were in operation on the Porterville to Firth route, another party went 32 miles to fix fifteen bridges along the way, and Neil Boyle pulled lava rock with his crew from the Pingree road, removing 37 large boulders that required fill work once they were gone. 36 teams were at work in the Presto area.
The secretary of the Utah State Automobile Association wrote in 1919 that he was glad that Bingham County was finally making improvements, having logged the trip there forty times and never been on the same road twice in succession--the road shifting due to potholes and whim. An idea was floated to make a "broadway" along the railroad line to Aberdeen to eliminate the ninety degree corner, an idea that would not take place until fifty years later. A half a million dollars was appropriated, through a bond election, for roadwork that year, but only half had been spent by November.
Expenses included $59,000 for machinery, $4200 to freight it, and $12,000 for culverts. $177,000 went to grading, bridges, and gravel surfacing with Charlie Stone working the six and a half miles from Power County to Aberdeen, Adolph Klassen working the next eleven and a half miles to Sterling and beyond. He was also working on the "Pingree hill", a rock cut requiring seven feet of blasting with the bottom of the hill needing to be built up twelve feet. Klassen's area also included the most difficult mile on the entire Aberdeen-Blackfoot road, that crossing the Springfield Lake's northern inlet. That mile cost the county over six thousand dollars, five of it for grading and fill--in contrast, mile three, west of that stretch, cost just $743.
Montgomery, Stephens, Josephson and Naillon were working the area both sides of Pingree, Brown and Harward took the stretch to Thomas, with the seven miles to Blackfoot already done--including three miles of graveling. Two miles of road toward Riverside had been covered with black sand to solidify the road bed. Wheeler, Adams and Belnap worked the road from Riverside to Moreland and out as far as the Aberdeen-Springfield canal. There were crusher plants at Aberdeen and Moreland, and one near the Riverside-Thomas cemetery handling two hundred tons of gravel and sand a day, with the Goshen plant right behind at 150 tons a day. Three bridge gangs worked the roads, at Shelley, Moreland and Aberdeen, with three small (and inadequate) cement mixers. Bingham County's work was touted as a model for others, who were coming to witness the work, and the supervisor said the machinery could be sold at value should residents wish to relinquish ownership.
By February 1920, all the 104 miles of planned roads had been all but finished. An eight horse team was pulling a grader to give proper drainage slope to the Sterling byway. A three horse team was at work near Thomas, and another eight-horse team at Gibson. The public was asked to distribute their driving across the entirety of roadways so ruts didn't form.
Twenty iron bridges were next on the list, those needed to cross canals. Nearly 350 culverts had been laid. Twelve pipes to cross the roads for irrigation purposes had been put in near Pingree, with eight siphons between there and Thomas in the works. Fifteen freight cars were carrying gravel from Moreland to Aberdeen. The roads in Blackfoot to the Sugar Factory, to the bridge and to the Blackfoot River would soon be paved.
Complaints soon came in from automobile drivers that haywagons were hogging the road, and they were advised they could make citizens' arrests against the offenders. But, they were told, they should remember that the road sides were sometimes soft, precluding wagon drivers from moving too close to the edge where they risked getting mired.
Just a year after the new roads were completed, the report came in that the Blackfoot-Aberdeen road was in great shape, looking like "a boulevard" from town to Thomas, where the public had dragged the road to make it level. However, it got progressively worse toward Pingree and impassable after that. Residents there had shown some resistance to the road bond passed earlier, claiming it a waste of money and that their road, being distant from town, would be ignored, and they were chastised for not helping out more on the new road to make it smooth--as those closer to Blackfoot, who hadn't opposed the bond, had done. One driver reported it took one and a half hours to go four miles through the Springfield-Pingree area, through the various impediments which included gates and muck.
The macadamized Ross Fork Highway, the six mile segment through the sand of the Yellowstone Highway south of Blackfoot, was already showing wear after a decade, with deep potholes keeping drivers wary and damaging the cars of those who drove incautiously. Paving, thought to be a maintenance-free technique, proved to have a finite shelf life. Authorities also got a nasty surprise when the federal monies they expected to halve the costs of certain road building wouldn't be coming, as their application had been "misplaced" by the highway director from Bonneville County (whose application for federal funds hadn't been misplaced). Angry, the commissioners voted to abolish the State Highway Commission--though of course they had no power to do so.
In 1931, the oiling of the Blackfoot-Aberdeen road, now called the Roosevelt Highway and the precursor to today's Highway 39, began, but progress on it bogged down for years once work neared Springfield and Sterling, where boggy ground made roadbuilding difficult and, perhaps more importantly, where voters numbered fewer. Aberdeen area sought to secede from Bingham County and attach themselves to Power County, miffed at the lack of progress, and the State legislature voted unanimously to allow residents to have a referendum to do so. The threat must have worked, as paving started in the mid-thirties and was done by 1940. Most residents, by then, might not admit to having "good roads" but did at least have better ones than those existing prior.
Ralph Thurston is the author of the recently published volume, The Shanghi Plain: Bingham County's Early History. Purchase the book locally at Kesler's Market, The Idaho Potato Museum, or online at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CCCS7XLR?ref_=pe_3052080_397514860
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