History is simply a collection of decisions we’ve made over the years. We know the roads we took to get here. Oftentimes, though, it’s easy to forget the roads we didn’t take. This is the second of a five-part series that looks at projects proposed in Virginia from the 1940s into the 1990s that were never built but which would have changed things if they had been. Monday: A proposal in the 1940s to locate the United Nations headquarters in Albemarle County. Today: the 1950s and ’60s.
Farmville and Lynchburg could have had an interstate highway.
If you think the absence of one across that part of Virginia is a bad thing, blame President John Kennedy.
The general outlines of the story remain well-known — in a bitter kind of way — in Lynchburg today, even if some of the details have faded from memory. Those details are, like many tales, more complicated than the retellings often have them.
President Dwight Eisenhower is popularly credited with creating the interstate highway system that now bears his name, and it’s true that he championed the roads, a consequence of his pre-war experience in trying to move an Army convoy cross-country. However, the interstate system did not spring full-blown from him. The origin dates to 1916, when Congress passed the first federal highway legislation, and 1918, when the editor of the Engineering News-Record proposed a network of 10 major roads (five east-west, five north-south) that would criss-cross the country. The 1920s saw a road-building boom across the country, and there was increased chatter of tying all those roads together. In 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt gave his Bureau of Public Roads a map on which he had drawn eight major highways. One of those roughly matches today’s Interstate 95; another looks like Interstate 66 in Northern Virginia — except that instead of terminating near Strasburg like I-66 does now, it would have continued on to San Francisco.
Planning continued during World War II for an “interregional system of highways.” In 1943, the federal government published proposed routes for an “interregional highway system.” There were four in Virginia which look much like today’s interstates 64, 66, 81 and 95. Of note: That very early proposal for what we recognize today as I-64 went from Hampton Roads to Richmond to Charlottesville to Staunton, just as it does today.
In September 1945, the Virginia Highway Commission voted to approve six routes in Virginia for this system. It liked those four, but insisted on two more: one that matches today’s Interstate 85 and one that never happened. That one would have been on the Eastern Shore from Cape Charles up into Maryland and Delaware. The main difference between the other five routes and the ones we have today is that the proposed route for I-66 (it didn’t have a name then) would have gone from Washington to New Market rather than Washington to Strasburg like I-66 does today. Relevant to our discussion here today:
Charlottesville didn’t “steal” I-64 from Lynchburg. The original route was always past Charlotteville; it was Lynchburg that, in Charlotteville’s view, tried to steal it away — and temporarily did.
That Richmond-to-Charlottesville-to-Staunton route was published in 1947 as part of the National System of Interstate Highways, and again in 1955 in the first plans for the renamed National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. The word “defense” was added to make the federal spending more politically palatable to those who worried about such things.
Then things changed. State Sen. Mosby Perrow of Lynchburg led an energetic campaign to have the “northern route” through Charlottesville and Staunton moved to a “southern route” through Farmville, Lynchburg and Bedford. Perrow was a major figure in Virginia politics in the 1950s and later played a role in moving the state away from its “massive resistance” to integration. That led to him being ostracized by U.S. Sen. Harry Byrd Sr. and a primary challenge that cost him his seat. All that was in the future, though, when Perrow led a group called the Water Level Route Association, ostensibly because the “southern route” would more or less go along the James River. The “southern route” advocates had what seemed like two powerful arguments: Their route would serve more people and cost less.
Gov. Lindsay Almond, who was from Roanoke, backed the southern route. So did the state’s highway commission, which, in 1957, voted 5-3 for that alignment. That should have been the end of things. Technically, the federal government had the final say, but the feds had promised to listen to the states.
For four years, that southern route appeared to be the winner. But the feds still hadn’t signed off on that southern route. Construction on other interstates had already started — the first dirt for the future I-81 was moved near Buchanan in 1957, but I-64 lingered in the bureaucracy. Virginia had delays in routing the road between Richmond and Short Pump, which would have been necessary regardless of which route was chosen. That gave the northern route advocates time to organize opposition.
In 1960, John Kennedy was elected president. One of the fellow sailors in his Naval squadron — and one who had taken part in the rescue of Kennedy and his torpedo boat crew who were marooned in the Solomon Islands — was Bill Battle. Battle’s father was the former governor of Virginia. The Battles were from Charlottesville. The younger Battle lobbied for the interstate to go through his hometown, not Lynchburg.
In 1961, Kennedy’s secretary of commerce, Luther Hodges, overruled Virginia’s preferred southern route and ordered the northern route. Southern route advocates were furious. “The last vestige of state’s rights has been eliminated,” Perrow fumed. Watkins Abbit Sr., then the congressman from Appomattox, grumbled to The Farmville Herald that “this is a great demonstration of what actually happens when we have federal aid … Federal aid is followed by federal control, just as night follows day.”
Battle, in his later days, says he never spoke with Kennedy about the matter. “There was nothing behind the scenes,” he told the Richmond Times-Dispatch. “I never talked to [Kennedy] about it. I just went up there with a delegation from here and made our case. … I guess we made a better case.”
Maybe that’s so, or maybe Hodges knew the politics: If Kennedy’s former squad member was coming to talk to him, maybe he’d better agree. In any case, the deal was done (although just to show its pique, the state highway commission declined the formality of ratifying the federal decision).
Contrary to public myth, Lynchburg is not the largest city in the country without an interstate. That would be Fresno, California, population 550,000. Lynchburg, though, is the largest city in Virginia without one.
How would Lynchburg (and Farmville and Bedford, too, for that matter) have developed if they had an interstate highway? We can only speculate. At the time, southern route advocates foresaw great riches for Farmville. One of them told that town’s newspaper: “The southern route would have released more funds during construction within 30 miles of Farmville than the tobacco market distributes in 20 years.” University of Virginia demographer Hamilton Lombard supplies this map, which shows that income levels rose faster in the counties that I-64 went through than the ones it didn’t.
What we know for certain is that Kennedy later appointed Battle as ambassador to Australia and in 1969, Battle was the Democratic candidate for governor. He lost to Linwood Holton, the first time a Democrat had lost a governor’s race in Virginia since the 1880s. Whether related to the I-64 routing decision or something else, Battle took just 36.3% of the vote in Lynchburg, a city that previous Democratic candidates had won with two-thirds or more of the vote. It was one of his weakest showings in the state. With the distance of years, we can surmise that Lynchburg voters that year told Battle to hit the road — just not on I-64.
Coming Wednesday: A proposed project that lingered through the 1960s and 1970s that would have drastically altered one county in Southwest Virginia.
And now, back to today’s politics
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