Miles and Miles of Texas: 100 Years of the Texas Highway Department

Carol Dawson · Roger Allen Polson

sept 2016 · Texas A&M University Press

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On the eve of its centennial, Carol Dawson and Roger Allen Polson present almost 100 years of history and never-before-seen photographs that track the development of the Texas Highway Department. An agency originally created “to get the farmer out of the mud,” it has gone on to build the vast network of roads that now connects every corner of the state.

When the Texas Highway Department (now called the Texas Department of Transportation or TxDOT) was created in 1917, there were only about 200,000 cars in Texas traveling on fewer than a thousand miles of paved roads. Today, after 100 years of the Texas Highway Department, the state boasts over 80,000 miles of paved, state-maintained roads that accommodate more than 25 million vehicles.

Sure to interest history enthusiasts and casual readers alike, decades of progress and turmoil, development and disaster, and politics and corruption come together once more in these pages, which tell the remarkable story of an infrastructure 100 years in the making.

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CAROL DAWSON is an Austin-based writer and artist. She is the author of four novels and one book of non-fiction. She teaches writing workshops, was writer-in-residence at the College of Santa Fe, and is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. ROGER ALLEN POLSON is former executive assistant to the deputy executive director of the Texas Department of Transportation. He is recognized by the American Association of State Highways and Transportation Officials, the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, and United Press International for his writing, video, and radio productions.