Bankhead Highway in Garland

🏛️The era

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the automobile was rewriting the map of American life. Cars were multiplying faster than the dirt roads beneath them could bear, and a nation that had built its long-distance travel around railroads suddenly needed something new: a connected web of hard-surfaced highways a driver could actually rely on from one state to the next.

The federal government answered in 1916 with the Federal Aid Road Act, which dangled matching money in front of the states — but only if each one set up a proper highway department to spend it. Texas responded the next year by creating the Texas Highway Department in 1917, the agency that would shape the state's roads for the century to come.

Into that moment came the Bankhead Highway, plotted as the nation's second transcontinental route, reaching from Washington, D.C., all the way to San Diego. Its path across Texas strung together the big names — Texarkana, Dallas, Fort Worth, El Paso — and, between them, smaller places like Garland that suddenly found a coast-to-coast highway running down their main street.

👥People & events

The road carried the name of John H. Bankhead, an Alabama senator whose sponsorship of the 1916 road act made him a father of the federal highway idea. His name traveled far beyond his home state, all the way onto the pavement of a Texas town he likely never saw.

Garland, though, earned its own small place in the story. In 1919, Arthur P. Dyer, secretary of the Texas Bankhead Highway Association, singled the town out: of all the communities along the Texas route, Garland was the one that had organized itself and gone to work without waiting for anyone else to help. That was more than a compliment — it was a description of civic hustle.

The people of Garland understood what a transcontinental highway could mean. They paved and curbed Main Street where the route ran through, and lined it with the businesses a motoring age required: auto repair shops, service stations, and restaurants for travelers who needed fuel, food, and a fix for a road-weary engine.

The road's official identity shifted over the years. Designated Texas Highway 1 in 1917, it held onto the Bankhead name until 1926, when it was folded into U.S. Highway 67. Yet along the Garland stretch the old name lingered into the early 1950s, a local memory that outlasted the official paperwork.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

The Bankhead Highway belongs to the founding era of the modern American road network — the moment the country decided that moving people by automobile across long distances was a public responsibility worth federal dollars. The named transcontinental routes of that period were the ancestors of the numbered highways and, eventually, the Interstates.

Garland's experience is the American highway story in miniature. Before the Interstates, a named route could put a small town squarely on the national map, and towns competed hard to be on the line and to make the most of it. Commerce followed the pavement; a stretch of Main Street became a doorway to the rest of the continent.

The ending is national, too. Beginning in the 1950s, the wider, faster, safer Interstate system pulled traffic away from roads like the Bankhead, and the old highways slipped into quieter second lives. What they left behind is a layer of history — the first draft of how Americans learned to drive across their own country.

🧭If you visit

Stand where the marker sits and picture Main Street not as a local road but as a ribbon of a coast-to-coast highway, one that began at the nation's capital and ended at the Pacific. The scale of that idea is the thing to feel here.

As you move through Garland, look for the bones of the auto age — the older commercial buildings and street pattern along the historic route, the kind of frontage that once meant a garage or a filling station catching passing trade. Reading a downtown as a former highway corridor is half the fun.

This marker rewards a road-trip mindset. It pairs naturally with any exploration of the old Bankhead or U.S. 67 corridor across North Texas, where town after town tells a version of the same story. Come here to trace how a single named highway, nearly a century ago, briefly connected a Dallas County town to both oceans.