11-28-2014, 09:16 AM
A brief, and largely unsubstantiated, history of Wisconsin's County Trunk Highway system.
Prior to 1926, if you wanted to ride your Harley or Indian from state to state in the US, you would follow a series of individual lengths of roads in each town, county, and state through which you were traveling. Often these routes were called "highways", as in "Lincoln Highway" and "Dixie Highway", but they were laid out and marked by auto clubs, private organizations, and entrepreneurs and were generally referred to as "auto trails". These trails were often laid out to bring travelers through communities of economic interest to the controlling organization. Towns and businesses would provide funding for the maintenance of the route and sometimes the route would be changed if they failed to do so. These trails had no real signage. Instead, telephone poles, fence posts, and sometimes large rocks were painted with a route-specific color scheme. One had to keep a sharp eye in order to stay on track.
As automobile traffic increased throughout the U.S., the federal government began to recognize the flaws in this method of road marking and, in 1925, began the process of identifying routes to establish a uniform naming and marking system. By 1926, the United States had created the world's first national system of numbered highways. Since that time, almost every developed country has created their own numbered highway system.
Wisconsin established their own numbered system, the "State Trunk Highway" system, in 1917; the very first of its kind anywhere in the US (and likely in the world).
That's all great, but how does this relate to explaining why a map of Wisconsin's county highways looks like a bowl of alphabet soup? Well, when the Wisconsin State Legislature established the statewide numbering system, they also required counties to begin to map a system of roads within each county. All of this was done because of the confusing spiderweb of auto trails already crisscrossing the state. The counties chose mostly existing roads to make up the "County Trunk Highway" (CTH) system. Since many of these roads began as foot or horse trails, they generally followed the contour of the land beneath them. These county roads now represent a large portion, if not a majority, of the best motorcycling roads in the region. While many county roads in Wisconisn are flat and straight, many others wind along rivers, cut through forests, and flow up hills and down into valleys. Some counties chose to keep the original road names for their new county highways. Other counties used numbers. And some used letters.
By 1925, with some counties numbering their roads and with the US Highway system of numbered roads on the horizon, the state legislature passed a bill that stated that the state's numbering system would not duplicate any numbers used on US Highways within the state. They also directed the counties to establish a naming and marking system that was uniform across the state. Using numbers for the county roads would lead to confusion between US, State, and County roads, it was agreed on (although I was unable to determine how this process worked) that county trunks would be named with letter designations.
There does not appear to be any standard for which roads within a particular county was designated with a particular letter. Some seem to think that CTH A would be located in or adjacent to the county seat, B a little further out from there, and so on. Others seem to feel that they are lettered from border to border, with CTH A being on one side, B a mile or so, say, west, etc. These may have been protocols in some counties, but there is no consistancy between counties on this front. Adjacent counties did put some effort into avoiding having the same name for two different roads in close proximity, but located within each county.
It does appear that some counties agreed to use the same letter designation for particular roads which traversed both counties. It also is true that most counties gave roads a letter representation of their original name, so Washington Rd. may have been renamed CTH W. Some of the two-letter roads are so named because of the towns or counties through which they pass (CTH ID runs through Iowa and Dane counties; CTH PB connects the towns of Paoli and Belleville), but CTH BW near Madison is named after Broadway, the prior road name, and Waukesau County's CTH LO is named for a former county official, Lloyd Owens. There are also three-letter roads which seem to have similar reasons behind there names.
As you travel around the state, you will find that a road named ZN may or may not connect CTH Z to CTH N and that sometimes, but not all the time, a road named CTH BB will start from and circle back to CTH B. Also, long continuous roads that that cross more than one county sometimes retain the same letter designation for their entire length in those counties...but not always. On a recent trip, we rode on three different CTH As in the space of 150 miles or so.
Information on why a road was assigned it's letter or letters is very difficult to obtain. Many of the CTH designations were created by highway officials within the county and not by a vote of the county board. The State of Wisconsin was not involved in the naming process, so any information is available only at the county itself and since many of these roads we named 75+ years ago, the county records are not necessarily as detailed as they would be today.
Even though every state has since developed some form of differentiating federal, state, and county highways, only one other state, Missouri, uses the letter-only method of naming county highways originated in the Dairy State nearly 100 years ago.
![[Image: 6c0556df01cf60f405fd3f07ab83132c.jpg]](https://cb1100forum.net/forum/uploads/imp/201411/6c0556df01cf60f405fd3f07ab83132c.jpg)
So, the next time you find yourself lost in Wisconsin at the intersection of F and U, you can speculate that you may be near the towns of Franklin or Union; or that you are at the junction of roads with past names of Freemont or Utica; or maybe, just maybe, there was a highway commissioner years ago who knew that folks would get lost there and wanted to send a little message. No matter what the reasons behind the letters, though, remember that there are very few better places to get lost on your motorcycle than on the "Alphabet Roads" of Wisconsin.
Prior to 1926, if you wanted to ride your Harley or Indian from state to state in the US, you would follow a series of individual lengths of roads in each town, county, and state through which you were traveling. Often these routes were called "highways", as in "Lincoln Highway" and "Dixie Highway", but they were laid out and marked by auto clubs, private organizations, and entrepreneurs and were generally referred to as "auto trails". These trails were often laid out to bring travelers through communities of economic interest to the controlling organization. Towns and businesses would provide funding for the maintenance of the route and sometimes the route would be changed if they failed to do so. These trails had no real signage. Instead, telephone poles, fence posts, and sometimes large rocks were painted with a route-specific color scheme. One had to keep a sharp eye in order to stay on track.
As automobile traffic increased throughout the U.S., the federal government began to recognize the flaws in this method of road marking and, in 1925, began the process of identifying routes to establish a uniform naming and marking system. By 1926, the United States had created the world's first national system of numbered highways. Since that time, almost every developed country has created their own numbered highway system.
Wisconsin established their own numbered system, the "State Trunk Highway" system, in 1917; the very first of its kind anywhere in the US (and likely in the world).
That's all great, but how does this relate to explaining why a map of Wisconsin's county highways looks like a bowl of alphabet soup? Well, when the Wisconsin State Legislature established the statewide numbering system, they also required counties to begin to map a system of roads within each county. All of this was done because of the confusing spiderweb of auto trails already crisscrossing the state. The counties chose mostly existing roads to make up the "County Trunk Highway" (CTH) system. Since many of these roads began as foot or horse trails, they generally followed the contour of the land beneath them. These county roads now represent a large portion, if not a majority, of the best motorcycling roads in the region. While many county roads in Wisconisn are flat and straight, many others wind along rivers, cut through forests, and flow up hills and down into valleys. Some counties chose to keep the original road names for their new county highways. Other counties used numbers. And some used letters.
By 1925, with some counties numbering their roads and with the US Highway system of numbered roads on the horizon, the state legislature passed a bill that stated that the state's numbering system would not duplicate any numbers used on US Highways within the state. They also directed the counties to establish a naming and marking system that was uniform across the state. Using numbers for the county roads would lead to confusion between US, State, and County roads, it was agreed on (although I was unable to determine how this process worked) that county trunks would be named with letter designations.
There does not appear to be any standard for which roads within a particular county was designated with a particular letter. Some seem to think that CTH A would be located in or adjacent to the county seat, B a little further out from there, and so on. Others seem to feel that they are lettered from border to border, with CTH A being on one side, B a mile or so, say, west, etc. These may have been protocols in some counties, but there is no consistancy between counties on this front. Adjacent counties did put some effort into avoiding having the same name for two different roads in close proximity, but located within each county.
It does appear that some counties agreed to use the same letter designation for particular roads which traversed both counties. It also is true that most counties gave roads a letter representation of their original name, so Washington Rd. may have been renamed CTH W. Some of the two-letter roads are so named because of the towns or counties through which they pass (CTH ID runs through Iowa and Dane counties; CTH PB connects the towns of Paoli and Belleville), but CTH BW near Madison is named after Broadway, the prior road name, and Waukesau County's CTH LO is named for a former county official, Lloyd Owens. There are also three-letter roads which seem to have similar reasons behind there names.
As you travel around the state, you will find that a road named ZN may or may not connect CTH Z to CTH N and that sometimes, but not all the time, a road named CTH BB will start from and circle back to CTH B. Also, long continuous roads that that cross more than one county sometimes retain the same letter designation for their entire length in those counties...but not always. On a recent trip, we rode on three different CTH As in the space of 150 miles or so.
Information on why a road was assigned it's letter or letters is very difficult to obtain. Many of the CTH designations were created by highway officials within the county and not by a vote of the county board. The State of Wisconsin was not involved in the naming process, so any information is available only at the county itself and since many of these roads we named 75+ years ago, the county records are not necessarily as detailed as they would be today.
Even though every state has since developed some form of differentiating federal, state, and county highways, only one other state, Missouri, uses the letter-only method of naming county highways originated in the Dairy State nearly 100 years ago.
So, the next time you find yourself lost in Wisconsin at the intersection of F and U, you can speculate that you may be near the towns of Franklin or Union; or that you are at the junction of roads with past names of Freemont or Utica; or maybe, just maybe, there was a highway commissioner years ago who knew that folks would get lost there and wanted to send a little message. No matter what the reasons behind the letters, though, remember that there are very few better places to get lost on your motorcycle than on the "Alphabet Roads" of Wisconsin.
