Hope to draw attention, tourism to historic road
Tammy Ingram talks with John Fowler at the Creative Arts Guild Saturday about the Dixie Highway exhibit.
Posted: Sunday, April 12, 2015 9:23 pm
daltondailycitizen.com
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Posted on Apr 12, 2015
There is a chance if you’ve driven on Georgia’s byways that at some point in your travels you’ve seen a sign demarcating the Dixie Highway, now knows as U.S. Highway 41.
More than 1,300 miles of the century-old route, which winds its way through more than two dozen towns, can be found in the Peach State.
The circa-1915 road is nationally significant as the first highway to link the rural American South to the urban North.
The Dixie Highway is made up of more than 6,000 miles of interconnecting roads, forming a loop from Lake Michigan to Miami Beach. It was born out of a grassroots movement in the early 20th century, the GoodRoads Movement, to modernize the South and improve rural roads as Americans began to put greater value on individual mobility.
“It was a sophisticated web of routes that helped to end rail isolation, that provided farmers with access to new markets and new crops, that opened the South to new business opportunities and that transformed how Southerners traveled and communicated with each other,” said Tammy Ingram, an author and assistant professor of history at South Carolina’s College of Charleston.
Still, today, the historic road — part of which runs through Dalton — is largely forgotten.
But as the highway is celebrated this year by historians for its centennial anniversary, John Fowler, the director for Dalton State College’s Bandy Heritage Center, hopes the tide can begin to turn.
“This highway is important when remembering the history and culture of northwest Georgia and the state as a whole,” Fowler said. “And it could be important for Georgia and its tourism.”
To honor the Dixie Highway, and place it in the forefront of people’s minds, the Bandy Heritage Center Saturday hosted a Dixie Highway Symposium at Dalton’s Creative Arts Guild. The event was titled “Gateway to the South: A Centennial Commemoration of the Dixie Highway.”
The day-long event featured the opening of a new exhibition, which includes a collection of historic photographs and postcards exploring the Dixie Highway and the various communities, business and activities that existed along the route, as well as six speakers who discussed topics that ranged from the history of the road to its impact on the South and present-day tourism initiatives.
“We thought our role in hosting this event could be getting all of these folks — representatives for tourism initiatives, the Georgia Department of Transportation and historians — all together, and draw attention to the highway,” Fowler said.
Ingram, who has written a book about the Dixie Highway’s history, delivered the keynote address.
She told a crowd — about 20 people — that she sees plenty of similarities between people who were reluctant to pay for such a major endeavor in 1915 with those who don’t want to pay taxes to fund road improvements today.
“I think examining the story of the Dixie Highway can teach us about our modern transportation issues,” she said. “Roads became a central political issue in the South at the turn of the 20th century. Everyone could agree that we needed more and better roads. The question was how to do this. We’re still grappling with the same kinds of questions today. What we’ve learned from our experience with the Dixie Highway is that we have to pay for infrastructure. And that is a hard pill to swallow. But we can’t have roads and not pay for them.”
Ingram also said she believes people can draw inspiration from the road’s planners who had the vision to know what transportation would look like years later.
“Maybe we need to re-envision what transportation will look like in the future. There are many more cars on the road today than ever before. Certainly when our roads were built,” she said. “We could use some of that same imagination.”
Charlotte Rentz, one of the many who attended some portion of Friday’s event, said she enjoyed herself.
“I think the event was just wonderful,” she said.
Rentz drove from the southside of Atlanta to attend the symposium.
She directs a transportation museum in Hapeville, another town featured along the Dixie Highway.
“I’d like to bring the exhibit to our town,” she said.
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