Plank Road
Carthage, Moore County, North Carolina
Marker Inscription
Plank Road. This street is the route of the Fayetteville-to-Salem plank road, a toll road 129 miles long, built 1849-54.
Erected by North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources
The Story
In the years before the Civil War, North Carolina invested heavily in "plank roads" — highways surfaced with sawn timber to lift wagons out of the Piedmont mud. The Fayetteville-to-Salem line ran some 129 miles and was the longest of its kind in the state, a toll road built between 1849 and 1854 to move farm goods and manufactured wares between the Cape Fear market and the Moravian towns of the interior.
Why it matters
Plank roads were a brief but telling chapter in America's transportation revolution, a stopgap between dirt tracks and railroads that shaped how a young inland economy reached the coast.
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Related events
- · Fayetteville and Western Plank Road
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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