Why do Southerners name all their highways?

Factual Questions
1

I did a lot (560 miles’ worth in a day and a half) of driving on a recent trip to Tennessee and North Carolina, and was struck by the fact that y’all seem to name every freakin’ mile of your state highways (plus US highways, plus some sections of the Interstate) – changing names seemingly randomly every couple of miles. Some of the honorees were people I’d heard of; many were not.

Specfic questions:

  1. Is this an old tradition? How far back does it go?

  2. Is there a standard length of highway (2 miles, 10 miles, whatever) devoted to each honoree? If it’s not a standard length, does the length reflect the importance of the person so honored?

  3. Is it more prestigious to get an interstate named for you than a US route, and more prestigous to get a US route than a state route?

  4. Is this common in other states in the South? Elsewhere in the country? I know (at least part of) I-476 here in the Philly area is the Vietnam Veterans Highway, but I’m not aware of any other highways around here named for a specific person. (Rest stops on the Jersey Turnpike, yes, the Turnpike itself, no. :smiley: )

  5. How do people get nominated? What’s the approval process like?

  6. If someone new came along who deserved honoring, and they were out of highways, would they just take a section away from someone else?

2

It’s very common in California. The interchanges are named, stretches of highway are named, rest stops are named…the list goes on and on. Stretches of road seem to be named for fallen CHP officers, I’ve noticed.

3

That’s a change since when I lived out there (in the '70s; I moved East again in '78). When did they start doing it? Was there any public discussion of it or did “they” (and who the hell are “they”?) just start doing it?

4

My guesses: (California) a strong and influential law enforcement community with which government wishes to curry favor; (The South) a carryover from the feudal system, where one regularly had to honor and pay tribute to important men.

5

It’s very common in Georgia, and I have absolutely no idea who some of the people so honored are or what they did to get a road named after them. I do know there is a stretch named for the late author Lewis Grizzard.

6

In the immediate Boston area (especially it seems Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville) virtually every intersection is a “square” named for someone, often a deceased serviceman. Some of these names are commonly known and used, some aren’t.

7

It’s common in NH as well with Rt 10 up north being the “Dartmouth College Highway” and Rt 118 is the “Moosilauke Highway”, and Rt 25 is the “Baker River Highway”. These names came in the past 10 years or so. Many other state highways now have names.

8

We do it with the various roads, for reasons known only to Og. It’s a royal PITA trying to navigate someone from out of town around, when the roads change names every couple of blocks (and the names by which you might know the roads are probably not the ones on the maps).

9

You can see some of the names and designations here.

10

In Atlanta sections of roads will be deadicated to people so that you don’t have to change the name of the street. Although we change those too. The governing athourity of a road or street are the ones who name them, usualy to curry favor with some group or other. Also this is done to honor people like former political leaders or civil rights activeist.

11

They do it down here occasionally in Texas. I know that FM 1604 in San Antonio is the Anderson Loop, and State Highway 6 is known as the Earl Rudder Freeway around College Station (James Earl Rudder, of course, was the commander of the 2nd Ranger Battalion at D-Day, later was a President of Texas A&M University. Most importantly, he allowed women to attend Texas A&M, a deed for which many male Aggies thank him to this day)

12

Umm, no. Are you just confused and this a real question or are you trying to slam Southerners for some reason?

13

“Umm, no” what? Are you saying I didn’t do this driving? Or that I didn’t see all the signs naming stretches of highway after particular individuals? Or that I recognized those names, despite my protestations to the contrary? All of these are true facts.

Yesterday morning I drove from Boone, NC (gorgeous country thereabouts, BTW – the drive from Johnson City TN the night before was stunning) to Fayetteville, a distance of a tad over 200 miles, and noticed at least 8 or 10 signs for “The So and So Highway.” There might have been more than this; I don’t think there were fewer, though I wasn’t specifically counting them. I had also noticed many of these the day before driving from Knoxville to Johnson City. There were fewer of them on 95 going from Fayetteville to Raleigh, but I did notice the stretch of I-40 headed to the airport was named.

This is a convention that I’m not familiar with in the Philadelphia area, and one that hasn’t struck me particularly on my ramblings about Pennsylvania and New Jersey (with drives to Connecticut and Baltimore within the last six months).

And Telemark, I’m talking specifically about naming these stretches for specific people, not institutions or places or general groups.

14

1) Is this an old tradition? How far back does it go?
Near as I can tell, a spate of highways and state roads started being named for important statesmen during the New Deal and the Works Progress Administration did all that highway construction. So, 1930s – maybe older in some places.

2) Is there a standard length of highway (2 miles, 10 miles, whatever) devoted to each honoree? If it’s not a standard length, does the length reflect the importance of the person so honored?
My observation is that it varies from region to region and yes, longer stretches of highway do tend to be named for people with more “importance” attached to their noteriety and/or reputation. Memorial Drive is a state highway named for the Confederate dead and stretches from downtown Atlanta all the way out to Stone Mountain, where I live. A resolution was presented for Rep. Cynthia McKinney to have a stretch named after her, it was voted on and passed, and so there’s a small stretch of road named for her on Memorial Drive – we’re talking a mile or two at the most. But maaa-aan, some (conservative) folks around here were/are pretty damned livid about that.

3) Is it more prestigious to get an interstate named for you than a US route, and more prestigous to get a US route than a state route?
It’s a pretty smoking hot honor to get any state or federally maintained infrastructure named after you, but generally speaking, in the American mindset of such things, the bigger the better, the higher up it went, the more prestigious. A U.S. Route named for you meant you got federal approval somewhere down the line.

4) Is this common in other states in the South? Elsewhere in the country? I know (at least part of) I-476 here in the Philly area is the Vietnam Veterans Highway, but I’m not aware of any other highways around here named for a specific person. (Rest stops on the Jersey Turnpike, yes, the Turnpike itself, no.) I think there’s a stretch of highway in Ohio named for golfer Jack Nickalas. Not sure about “common” but I’ve seen it in Tennessee, Georgia, Florida and South Carolina. Heck, there’s a stretch of 301 (or is it 601? I forget, they intersect downtown) in Orangeburg, SC named for the 7th Vice President of the United States, John C. Calhoun.

5) How do people get nominated? What’s the approval process like? Varies somewhat. On the state level here in Georgia, someone submits a resolution and the state senate votes on it. Here’s one for a parkway on a state road named for Trisha Yearwood.

6) If someone new came along who deserved honoring, and they were out of highways, would they just take a section away from someone else? We got a loOOOooot of highway in this country, twickster. Renaming attempts go on all the time (Cynthia McKinney, for example), but it’s pretty rare to see that happen. If someone disgraced themselves after something had been named for them, I can see the honor being stripped away before it being arbitrarily handed off to someone else.

15

I think you mean “squayuh”. I noticed, too.

It’d be interesting to get a breakout of names by ethnic origins. I’ll bet 95% are Irish/Italian.

16

Excellent – thanks a million, Askia, for your very detailed answers to my questions.

17

I don’t know how old it is, but it appears to me that it is getting dramatically more common. It seems that every quarter mile of generic suburbian divided highway is named after some obscure politician.

I think it comes from a variety of sources rooted in good-old-boy politics -

  1. The civil projects equivalent of “remember the alamo” or “support our troops”… it is a way to put a political badge on a visible public landmark
  2. Honoring the politician who made the highway possible
  3. Perhaps politicians are getting more and more shameless about where they’ll let their names be exposed
18

It was a rare question that I knew something about and piqued my interest to research more about it. Glad I could help.

19

The government folks in Indiana looked kinda foolish over one of these honorary namings. Reggie Miller, the much-loved number 31 on the Indiana Pacers, retired. Some state officials announced they were going to name a stretch of Rte. 31 after Reggie. A day or two before it was supposed to happen, a veterans group pointed out the piece of road was already named The Veterans Memorial Highway. :smack: Everyone walked away red-faced, and I don’t think they finally got a Reggie Highway.

20

The Chicago area’s got a slew of them. We generally refer to our interstates by name. Off the top of my head, there’s the Stevenson (I-55), the Kennedy (I-90/94 north of downtown), the Dan Ryan (I-94 south of downtown), the Bishop Ford Freeway (I-94 south after the I-57 split), the Edens (I-94 north of the I-90 split), the Eisenhower (I-290), Ronald Reagan Memorial Tollway (I’ve never heard it referred to as such; it’s still the East-West Tollway for most people I know, I-88), Kingery Expressway (I-80/-94), Kingery Highway (Rte 83)…