Two states protect their quiet byways from progress.

Story by Elizabeth Brennan / Oct. 24, 2001

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A rural road in Nebraska's Stevens Creek valley

"I yearn for one of those old, meandering, dry, uninhabited roads which lead away from towns ... where you may forget in what country you are traveling ... by which you may go to the outermost parts of the earth." ­Henry David Thoreau

Keith Seward lives in southwest Wisconsin on the Illinois border on Marty Road, a newly designated Wisconsin Rustic Road. The small country road in Green County isn't a tourist destination. Few travel down it , and even fewer know where it is.

Rustic Road 81 curves about three miles through the agricultural landscape. Tree canopies shade the road, which once linked local dairy farmers to a cheese factory. From some of Marty Road's higher ridges a driver can see more than 15 miles of autumn's changing leaves, Seward says.

But, he says, the road could have fallen victim to progress.

"People come along and in the name of so-called progress widen and straighten roads and cut down trees," Seward says. "Some things just shouldn't be changed. Now that the road is designated, it has a better chance of surviving."

Wisconsin's Rustic Roads Program is unique. Though other states have their own historic-roads system, no other has a program so complete. It began in 1970, when Racine County highway commissioner Earl Skagen decided the back roads on which he commuted to work should be preserved intact for decades to come.

Skagen's idea was signed into state law just a few years later, in December 1973. Since then, a Wisconsin Department of Transportation board has administered and designated the roads. There are now 93 in 50 counties, some 490 miles worth.

"We like to say these roads are a ‘positive step backwards,'" says Jane Carrola, rustic roads coordinator for the state of Wisconsin. "They are the quintessential country road, and they are a marker of our heritage."

Although the rustic-road designation comes from the state level, it must first be recommended by a local government or resident and approved by the town or county. After the designation, the road is marked with brown-and-yellow signs and given a maximum speed limit of 45 miles per hour. The roads are maintained—but not changed or improved—by residents who use them.

"Roads, like people, change over time," Carrola says. "Designation is a good first step, but how it will be used and kept up comes from the local level."

Curtis Schmidt, chairman of the town of Luck, Wisc., describes the three-mile-long rustic road in his town of about 900 residents as "primitive but beautiful." He wanted to preserve it because the road takes travelers past the Chippewa Trail and back to nature. "I'm an older Wisconsin resident, and you just don't find roads like this," Schmidt says. "The younger generation needs to know what the roads used to be like."

Rustic-road candidates in Wisconsin must have "outstanding natural terrain, native vegetation and wildlife or other cultural and historic qualities. It should also be a low-volume, low-function road, connect with major highways to form a loop and should not be scheduled for improvements when proposed."

Montgomery County, Md., is one of the few other regions in the country with a rustic-roads designation. The program began in the late 1980s when a couple of roads were scheduled to be improved.

"The citizens didn't want the roads changed," says Maria Martin, community planner for the county's Rural Team. "The roads weren't getting the volume, so they asked, ‘Why do we need big roads?'"

So the residents formed the Rural Rustic Roads Task Force, which suggested various levels of road designation. The county chose two: rustic road and exceptional rustic road. Both must be public and include natural, historic or agricultural features and must be narrow for local use and low volume. Today, Montgomery County has 72 rustic roads and 12 exceptional ones.

"We're realizing that we don't need full-blown improvements," Martin says. "Yes, the roads need to be maintained, but they don't need to be changed. This is a way of preserving the rural agricultural heritage of the county. It's part of the past."

The rustic roads in Montgomery County are like those in Wisconsin—a beautiful peek into the past. "We've got plenty of superhighways," Seward says. "We don't need any more."

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