Miracle Miles: From Roadbuilding to American Highway Engineering, 1893-1933

This dissertation argues that modern highway engineering first emerged as all levels of government, in collaboration with industry and academia, faced the challenge

of rural road improvement. Initially important for connecting communities to cities and vital markets, rural roads were not typically considered engineering marvels. Often built

haphazardly or primitively, country roads seem incomparable to interurban superhighways. Beyond interpreting the Bureau of Public Roads (BPR) as a centralizing technocratic authority, I engage with educational and environmental history to illustrate how the BPR coordinated local, state, and national cooperation around materials science,

maintenance, and professionalization. Using federal, state, interest group, and university archives, corporate and political correspondence, and personal papers and diaries, my research positions the BPR within a decentralized, nationwide, program of distributive expertise and community development. I demonstrate how BPR experts worked

alongside corporate executives, land-grant and research university faculty, scientists and machinists, state and county administrators, and residents to ensure “scientific localism”

in roadbuilding. This approach emphasized location-based variability, including geography, labor, materials, and finances. Interdisciplinary construction projects capitalized on local knowledge, materials, and resources. Throughout the good roads movement, railroad and machinery companies provided transportation, equipment, and

technology. As the demand for trained engineers increased after World War I, agriculture and engineering faculty offered certification programs and partnered with the BPR to

develop a standardized highway curriculum that included engineering courses, testing and experimentation, and maintenance and inspection. The rise of the automobile and

long-distance transportation altered needs of the nation’s infrastructure and resulted in public works projects that prioritized transcontinental routes, interstate travel, tourism,

and scenic and park drives. During the 1920s, the BPR turned toward beautification, adding botany and landscape architecture as components of scientific roadbuilding.

Showcasing the BPR’s cooperative network of expertise provides a more accurate portrayal of the agency’s institutional history and points to the significance of both an

expansive and inclusive view of the rural origins of modern highway engineering.