Roads were once much different

There are two stories of me navigating that live in our family's lore. The first — clutched with a Rand McNally atlas in one hand and a AAA travel book in the other, I was navigating a family trip that was taking us through the Great Midwest. As we traveled the highways of Iowa, I was getting a little bored and was looking for excitement. Reading the Hawkeye State's AAA book, I couldn't believe that we would soon be just minutes from Dyersville, where the real-life house and ball diamond was used as the set of "Field of Dreams," one of our family's favorite movies. I sweet-talked my parents into stopping, and soon enough, I was "having a catch" with my dad and brother with the famous corn stalks billowing in the outfield. The second story — I was traveling with Betsy and her parents on the way home from Florida where we visited her brother's family. Signs along I-75 in Kentucky revealed the bridge crossing the Ohio River into Cincinnati was jammed up because of construction and an accident. In this time before navigation apps, I again opened my atlas and plotted a route through the Kentucky suburbs, weaving through a couple of downtowns before we found another bridge, which we crossed and eventually made our way back heading the right direction on the highway. My father-in-law still likes to bring up this story when talking about my love of travel. Maps and geography are among my somewhat eclectic interests, so I was more excited than I should be at 8:30 a.m. on a Monday morning when one of my colleagues spread out a find that he purchased over the weekend. It was a two-sided Ohio map, produced for our state's 150th birthday in 1953. On one side was a territorial map of this area in 1803, well before many of the places we've all grown accustomed to were around. The other side featured a road map of this state as of 1953. The nerd that I am, I was fascinated by this, as the highways connecting Ohio's vast network of cities and towns were clearly different than they are today. In the northern part of the state, there was a dotted line. The key revealed it to be the "Proposed Ohio Turnpike." In other parts of the state, there are many two-lane roads where four-lane highways now exist, such as U.S. 25 and U.S. 68 in the Findlay area and State Route 2 in the Sandusky area. Another interesting thing was the growth of Columbus since that point was undeniable. On this map, U.S. 40 was the only 4-lane highway going into the Columbus area. Also, places like Dublin, Westerville and Pickerington looked like outposts on the map, seemingly miles away from the urban sprawl of the city, which is depicted in yellow on maps like these. Now, these places are just an extension of the fast-growing city, with even further-out locations like Delaware now seeing the breakneck growth of sprawl. President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 changed everything, laying the groundwork of a nation-wide infrastructure program better connecting our states through the construction of interstate highways. Where this area was once a rail "crossroads of America," and still is in some ways, much of the logistics-based traffic was transferred to the roads at this critical American juncture. These roads are as important in Ohio as anywhere, with the Buckeye State's middle American geography coupled with its flat terrain and vast manufacturing and industrial sector. All day, every day, trucks buzz down this state's highways, carrying goods here, there and everywhere. Our business benefits from this, as we are among those companies trucking goods (in this case, newspapers) across the western half of Ohio nearly every night. I wonder what this task would have looked like in 1953, where the highway system would have made a trip to Sandusky, Washington Court House or Delaware (all places we deliver to) a much longer proposition. I think of all the places we are within a few hours drive of and am thankful for our network of roads. These days, I don't hold a map very often. I reluctantly switched to Google maps at some point as the accuracy of this geography-loving man was no match for the app. Looking at the map provided a sense of nostalgia for me, and harkened back to long, anticipated summer road trips as a kid. I'll be the first to admit in search of the fastest-possible route, we've lost some of the flavor of travel. Holding a 70-year-old map made me stop and consider the history of roads around here, bringing with it a realization that things change slowly but also steadily. Jeremy Speer is the publisher of The Courier, Findlay, the Sandusky Register, The Advertiser-Tribune, Tiffin, the Norwalk Reflector and Review Times, Fostoria. He can be reached at jeremyspeer@thecourier.com.