The Brick Road

The Brick Road. The Historic National Road in Ohio. America's entry into World War I quickly demonstrated the need for a national network of roads. To reduce the burden on overloaded railroads, the Council for National Defense recommended that military trucks travel overland to the East Coast. Despite its poor condition, the National Road was selected as a strategic route for transport of war material. To ready it for the heavily loaded trucks, the State of Ohio used prison labor to pave more than 75 miles with brick, which was manufactured in Massillon and Zanesville. At the time, it was longest continuous stretch of brick pavement in America. Remnants of the original brick-paved National Road can still be seen adjacent to present-day U.S. Route 40 in eastern Ohio. , The brick-paving industry derived in Ohio for 50 years, from the 1880s to the 1930s. Ohio has rich deposits of shale and fireclays, the basic materials needed for brick production. By 1893, 44 different companies were producing paving bricks. The annual output, of about 292 million bricks, was enough to pave approximately 600 miles of road (it took about 500,000 bricks to pave a single mile of roadway 25 feet in width). , A typical paving brick, which measured 9 inches by 4 inches and weighed about 10 pounds, was larger than the conventional brick used in building construction. The larger size helped keep the brick from being dislodged by weather or traffic. The brick also had to be resistant to wear. In 1910, Steubenville city officials noted that their brick-paved streets had cost them less than $1.00 in repairs since they were laid in 1884.