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Article: Toll Bridges and Roads
- Article from:
- Dictionary of American History
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TOLL BRIDGES AND ROADS
TOLL BRIDGES AND ROADS,
a system that developed as a means of transportation improvement in the face of limited public funding. Local, colonial, and state governments, burdened by debt, chartered private turnpike and bridge companies with the authority to build, improve, and charge tolls. While toll bridges appeared in New England by 1704, the first toll roads of the turnpike era were in Virginia, which authorized tolls on an existing public road in 1785, and Pennsylvania, which chartered the sixty-two-mile Philadelphia and Lancaster Turnpike in 1792.
From 1790 to 1850, private toll roads were the nation's primary land-based venue of transportation. More ...