On The Grand

In your daily travels, have you ever considered how often you drive on or cross over Grand River Avenue -- once? twice? a hundred times?

Discounting a few potholes along the way, it is usually a fairly smooth ride. But it wasn't always that way. Before asphalt or concrete, there were wood planks. This plank road must have greated a rhythmic pattern of thrumming as the tires would beat on the wood. And before that it was a dusty, dirt trail. But my curiosity got the better of me on how a plank road looked.

This is a bit of what I found while reading some facts on http://www.michiganhighways.org/:

As with other Indian trails, the Grand River Trail was used by the European settlers arriving in Michigan in the 1830s and 40s, fanning out from Detroit across the southern Lower Peninsula. The original footpath was gradually widened, straightened and improved until, around 1850, two plank roads were constructed linking the state's largest city with its capitol. The Detroit and Howell Plank Road coupled with the Howell and Lansing Plank Road allowed travellers to (more) easily make the trip between Detroit and Lansing via Howell. The plank road companies charged a toll to use the road and toll gates were generally erected every five miles.
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The picture in this post is from a stretch of plank road near Belleville, St. Clair County -- in Illinois -- but somehow this seems it could have been similar looking anywhere between Lansing and Detroit. Wide open fields bordered by trees.

As one final bit of historical information, the following link (http://books.google.com/books?id=RpxlL7WvJiQC&pg=PA51&lpg=PA51&dq=grand+river+planks+found&source=web&ots=Tsy0XHK3q5&sig=EnCYV-62SSVkvJteLFTQOmXcNfM&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=7&ct=result) gives an interesting account of the development of the plank road that would someday become Grand River Avenue.
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So, it makes me wonder. When our tires bounce into a pothole or our vehicles are jarred by the expansion joints going across the lanes, how did our ancestors feel about the bouncing and jostling the experience on their way across mid-Michigan? Or were they just happy to have the ability to travel?