I94



Prairie Public

 

 

Changes to Communities Along the Route

Development of the nation’s interstate highways resulted in numerous changes to the towns along their routes, but it would be a mistake to view them as either abrupt or cataclysmic.  In many ways they represented a continuation, or the next logical step, in a process of change that had begun with the introduction of the automobile and our love affair with it.  An obvious example is the evolution of highway routing.  In the initial years of the state’s highway system development, highways were routed along the main streets of towns large and small.  There were a variety of reasons for this.  Main streets were the center of a community’s commerce and the logical destination for travelers.  Main streets tended to be the location of established hotels and eateries and livery barns and stables serving rail travelers.  And the vast majority of overnight travel before the advent of the automobile, unless it was purely local travel, was done by rail.

A primary reason for the development of a highway system was to connect centers of population, both large and small, and at the hearts of those population centers were their main streets.  It was only logical that highways were routed onto and through the main streets of the towns they connected.  And even if North Dakota’s early day highway designers had given consideration to by-passing the commercial centers of the towns they were trying to connect, the hue and cry that would likely have been raised by main street merchants, bankers, and businessmen would have quickly dissuaded them from doing so. 

As the automobile gained popularity a variety of physical changes occurred within our communities.  Livery stables were converted into “auto liveries,” blacksmiths sometimes became mechanics and their shops the garages where they then did auto repair. The purchase of gasoline in small quantities from the local hardware or dry-goods store gave way to the advent of the bulk oil station, often in or near the center of a town on railroad right-of-way for ease of off-loading the product from railroad tank cars in multi-thousand gallon tanks to await transfer by truck to the local filling station.  Bulk oil stations were found in all of the larger towns along the route of U.S. Highway 10 and in at least some of the smaller towns, such as Sanborn, Taylor, Windsor, Steele, Medina and Buffalo. As the nation’s thirst for petroleum grew, these early bulk oil facilities, supplied by rail, became obsolete as a pipeline distribution system (a part of which is the Magellan Pipeline Company Terminal at West Fargo, built in 1948 by the Williams Pipeline Company and located adjacent to old U.S. Highway 10).  Many of these early bulk oil facilities would disappear from the railroad rights-of- way adjacent to our commercial districts.  Some have been dismantled, some stand unused, and at least one (the Standard Oil Company Bulk Plant in Bismarck) has been rehabilitated to house a variety of business offices and a popular restaurant. 

Auto dealerships sprang up, and it is the rare North Dakota community that did not at one time or another early in the automobile age have one such business, complete with repair services, located on its main street.  Indeed, the long–time home of the Bank of North Dakota in Bismarck has been in a building that originally housed the Missouri Valley Motor Company, auto dealership/assembly plant.  

The filling station itself usually occupied a prominent corner location on a well-traveled route and frequently at a main street intersection.  As towns were by-passed, travel associated businesses tended to locate or relocate along them, frequently resulting in a change in the nature of the businesses traditionally located on Main Street.  With the coming of the interstate highway system such tendencies were exacerbated.  Interchanges became prime locations for traveler services – first filling stations, motels, and restaurants and then malls (both large and small) competed with the more traditional business centers in our towns.

But the by-passing of towns was a highway design process that pre-dated the nation’s interstate highway system.  In North Dakota by-passing was inspired by the growth, beginning in the 1930s, of the over-the-road trucking industry (itself made possible by the improvement of the state’s highway system that had occurred over the preceding two decades).  Trucking industry growth in the state was related to the price of livestock and the cost of freighting it by rail during the Depression.  Livestock prices dropped to such lows that the farmer could not pay the cost of rail freight rates to ship their livestock to the packing plants and still remain in business.  Livestock could be shipped more cheaply by truck.  The effectiveness and popularity of shipping by truck was so quickly established that by 1940 most of the livestock – 63% of the cattle, 96% of the hogs, and 65% of the sheep – shipped to West Fargo’s Armour Plant, for example, was by truck. As much as Main Street merchants liked to see travel along the street in front of their stores, when that travel included increasing numbers of noisy trucks carrying livestock that insulted both the auditory and olfactory senses of their customers, highway by passes of the central business districts of towns large and small began to be constructed. 

These were not the only reasons, of course, for by pass construction.  An increase in the number of automobiles and the amount of through traffic, the desire to eliminate traffic bottlenecks for the through traveler, the desire to increase pedestrian safety, the desire to shorten travel distances and to eliminate stopping points and hard turning movements for the through motorist inspired the transition to by pass construction in many of the towns along Highway 10 long before construction of Interstate Highway 94 was contemplated.  Among the towns in the I-94 corridor whose central business districts were bypassed by highway routing changes altogether or by the construction of bypasses to skirt the edge of a town were Belfield, Hebron, Glen Ullin, New Salem, Menoken, Sterling, Driscoll, Steele, Dawson, Sanborn, and Berea.  It is quite possible, in fact, that route changes for which we have found no evidence were also made to the highway at various points in its history that resulted in the bypassing of others towns as well. 

As for the larger communities – Fargo, Valley City, Jamestown, Bismarck, Mandan, and Dickinson – it was not until the coming of interstate construction that the highway was routed away from their central business districts.  We suspect there were three reasons:

It is tempting to credit interstate construction with too great a role in encouraging the growth of the state’s larger towns and diminishing the population in its smaller ones, but that role should be neither exaggerated nor overemphasized.  Unquestionably its construction has made travel to communities with more “amenities” and greater shopping opportunities faster, easier, and safer.  And, it has also contributed undoubtedly to the decline of business vitality in those smaller communities whose citizens are more inclined, because of the interstate’s existence, to travel out of their communities to shop and play.  But such tendencies and trends have been going on throughout the state’s history with every advance and improvement in our ability as a society to travel more easily.