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1850s · THE PLANK-ROAD PASSAGE, AT ITS DOCUMENTED SIZE
The plank-road era touched the bend briefly, and Howard dismissed it in a sentence: Indiana's plank-road boom of the late 1840s and 1850s — toll roads surfaced with timber planks, chartered by the score across the state — reached St. Joseph County only lightly, and the county's own historian is the measure of how lightly: "Plank roads were for a time resorted to on some lines, as on the Michigan road between South Bend and Plymouth; but these were all wisely abandoned and gravel roads substituted." That is the whole of the documented plank record for this city in the sources reached: one line, the Michigan Road's first stretch south toward Plymouth, planked for a time and then graveled like the rest. What followed the gravel era on the same line was the state highway system itself: the road south from South Bend was State Road 1 and the road west State Road 25 in the first designations, and their renumberings are told in the entries on US 31 and US 20 below.
Sources:
- Timothy Edward Howard, History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), roads chapter — the plank road on the Michigan Road between South Bend and Plymouth, and the substitution of gravel, quoted whole.