Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail by Ben Montgomery

“Highways and Horizons” exhibits opened at the New York World’s Fair, the American public was salivating over high-speed roadways.
    “Since the beginning of civilization, transportation has been the key to man’s progress—his prosperity—his happiness,” said a narrator at the GM exhibit, which was said to feature the new and improved American city of 1960, with tangles of expressways lined with sleek cars and trucks. “With the fast, safely designed highways of 1960 … thrilling scenic feasts of great and beautiful country may now be explored.”
    When Dwight D. Eisenhower took office in 1953, one of his first items of business was to see about building better highways. “Our cities still conform too rigidly to the patterns, customs, andpractices of fifty years ago,” he wrote. “Each year we add hundreds of thousands of new automobiles to our vehicular population, but our road systems do not keep pace with the need.”
    Eisenhower thought the American road system was decent but had been designed based on “terrain, existing Indian trails, cattle trails, and arbitrary section lines,” and that it “has never been completely overhauled or planned to satisfy the needs of ten years ahead.” On Eisenhower’s behalf, at a meeting in the Adirondacks of the governors of the forty-eight states, Vice President Richard Nixon despaired over the nearly 40,000 people killed and 1.3 million injured on roads annually, the “billions of hours lost” to traffic jams and detours, and the traffic-related civil suits clogging courts. Then he shocked the room. He called for a $50 billion federal highway program spread over ten years.
    On October 23 of the same year, in Emma Gatewood’s home state of Ohio, the first concrete was poured for a new $336 million cross-state turnpike. The state had acquired fifty-six hundred parcels of land it needed for right-of-way and went to work building a highway divided by a fifty-six-foot depressed median. It would feature paved shoulders, fifteen well-lit traffic interchanges, sixteen service plazas, tollbooths, and an ambulance service. “You really will be able to see where you’re going as the minimum sight distance is 900 feet,” gushed the
Columbus Dispatch.
“There are no steep hills, because the maximum upgrade is 2 percent and the maximum downgrade 3.2 percent. You won’t have to slow down from maximum speed limits—65 miles an hour for cars and 55 for trucks—when you drive around curves, they’re that gentle.”
    Two years later, the ribbons of road stretched from Pennsylvania in the east to Indiana in the west, over rivers and streams, across swampland and rolling hills. Joined with the Penn Turnpike, the road totaled 611 miles from Philadelphia to Indianapolis. Soexciting was the new highway that the people of Ohio began to gather on overpasses to watch the speeding cars wend their way along the smooth pavement.
    The future of America had arrived, and it was riding on a 322-cubic-inch V-8 with an automatic transmission. By 1955, Americans owned sixty-two million vehicles. By June, when Emma Gatewood was a month into her hike, the auto industry was on pace for a banner year behind presidents such as Tex Colbert and Henry Ford II. Chevrolet had set a six-month record, registering 756,317 new cars. The national magazines were filled with color pictures of the new ’56 models, the Studebaker, the Chrysler, the Cadillac, the Buick Dynaflow, with the sweep-ahead styling and the sizzle to match, which “gets going from a standing start like a lark leaving the nest, with not a hint of hesitation between take-hold and take-off.” Every car off the line in Detroit was bigger than the last. Fins grew, and engines added horses. The number of two-car families was expected to jump by three million within five years, to a total of 7.5 million, which was attributed to the trend of suburban living. Some sixteen million “one-car wives” remained marooned in the suburbs, but