Plank road

A plank road is a dirt path or road covered with a series of wooden planks. Plank roads were very popular in Ontario, the U.S. Northeast and U.S. Midwest in the first half of the 19th century. They were often built by turnpike companies.

Plank road boom

In the late 1840s plank roads led to an investment boom and subsequent bust. The first plank road in the US was built in North Syracuse, New York in order to transport salt and other goods; it appears to have copied earlier roads in Canada that copied Russian ones. The plank road boom was like many early technologies, promising to transform the way people lived and worked, and led to permissive changes in legislation seeking to spur development, speculative investment by private individuals, etc. Ultimately the technology failed to live up to its promise and millions of dollars in investments evaporated almost overnight.

Three plank roads, the Hackensack, the Paterson, and the Newark, were major arteries in northern New Jersey. The roads travelled over the New Jersey Meadowlands, connecting the cities for which they were named to the Hudson River waterfront.