The Pennsylvania Turnpike, From Tollbooths to Tunnels: Rediscovering America’s First Superhighway at 75

The chance to travel on America’s first superhighway attracted many tourists and pleasure travelers during the 1940s and ’50s. Sunday afternoons were an especially popular time for motorists to take leisurely drives. Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission

Few Pennsylvania-born celebrities have made the kind of splash that the Pennsylvania Turnpike did when it first arrived on the scene in October 1940.

Its 160 miles of limited-access, four-lane paved highway across the Alleghenies were hailed as America’s answer to the Autobahn, Germany’s highly regarded network of high-speed “super roads.” After the war, as the United States’ population expanded and automobile ownership soared, precipitating a postwar “highway crisis,” federal planners turned to the Pennsylvania Turnpike as the model for a modern interstate highway system.

Throughout the 1940s journalists breathlessly referred to it as a “dream highway” and the nation’s first “superhighway,” both with much justification. There had been other paved roadways that shared similar qualities of design and construction, most notably Connecticut’s Merritt Parkway. But there was nothing that compared to the scale and scope of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Its impact on long-distance automobile travel – cutting time between Pittsburgh and Harrisburg in half – spoke for itself. In the words of Fortune magazine, it was “the first American highway that’s better than the American car.”

The original section between Irwin and Carlisle (in red) covered 160 rugged miles across the Alleghenies. Four subsequent “extensions,” completed by 1957, brought the total number of miles to 470 and allowed motorists to travel from one end of the state to the other. White points on the map indicate locations of interchanges. The State Museum of Pennsylvania

The Pennsylvania Turnpike was all the things that other roadways were not. It was uniform, with consistent road surfaces and standardized shoulder widths and medians across its entire length. Motorists could drive at relatively high speeds safely, thanks to long, sweeping curves and almost unnoticeable dips and rises. In the early years there was no posted speed limit.

It was also blissfully free of the obstacles motorists typically encountered when traveling long distances. By design the Pennsylvania Turnpike’s route steered clear of small towns and big cities alike. Access was limited to interchanges located at varying intervals. Once on the road, drivers could motor the entire length without coming across a single intersection, railroad crossing or traffic signal. Hundreds of bridges and overpasses were specially built to carry local traffic above or below its roadbed. The only designated stopping points were conveniently located rest stops, where travelers could get fuel and food without having to exit the highway.

Ironically, the very features that originally made the Pennsylvania Turnpike so remarkable make it easy to take for granted today. Over the past 75 years its basic elements have been so widely copied, most notably across the country’s increasingly vanilla system of interstate highways, that they are barely noticeable. The diamond anniversary of the Pennsylvania Turnpike in 2015 provides an opportunity to revisit the place where it all began – those first 160 miles – and take a closer look at the features that revolutionized modern highway travel.

South Penn Bridge Piers

It is unclear precisely when and how the idea for a tolled superhighway across the rugged mountains of central and western Pennsylvania first got traction, but the most widely circulated creation story credits a conversation prompted by a set of abandoned bridge piers in the Susquehanna River.

In early 1935 Victor Lecoq of the State Planning Board and William Sutherland of the Pennsylvania Motor Truck Association met with Cliff Patterson, a newly elected state representative, following a late-night legislative session in Harrisburg. The three men shared an interest in reviving the state’s Depression-ravaged economy and believed that improved roads were vital to that goal. During the course of the conversation, one of the men is said to have pointed to several bridge piers visible across the river. The stone structures were remnants of an unbuilt bridge for an ambitious but never-completed east-west railroad route across southern Pennsylvania. The discussion quickly progressed from the feasibility of a tolled bridge for cars and trucks to a tolled highway across the entire abandoned route. Patterson was likely easy to persuade: His home district in Monongahela, Washington County, was an eight-to-nine-hour drive from the state capital, along twisting and turning two-lane roads.

Andrew Carnegie, one of the investors in William Vanderbilt’s proposed South Penn Railroad, poses in front of the excavation for Rays Hill, one of nine tunnels partially bored during the mid-1880s for Vanderbilt’s proposed competitor line to the Pennsylvania Railroad.
Pennsylvania State Archives/MG-214

William Vanderbilt, owner of the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad, conceived the idea for the South Pennsylvania Railroad in the early 1880s. His motivation was financial, not civic, and in direct response to efforts by the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) to weaken his rail monopoly across upstate New York. If Vanderbilt could successfully lay out a route across southern Pennsylvania between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh, he could seriously undercut the profitability of the PRR’s Main Line, because his South Penn would offer a more direct, and therefore cheaper, east-west link across the state. Much of this rested on Vanderbilt’s willingness to finance construction of a series of tunnels that would allow the new line to go through, rather than over and around, the mountains that typically obstructed travel.

Vanderbilt had little difficulty attracting investors – among them Andrew Carnegie – or, in the days of cheap labor, the manpower necessary to excavate the roadbed, blast and bore the tunnels, and construct the culverts. After two years of intensive labor, about half the job had been completed, including partial bores for nine tunnels. Expectations were that the South Penn would be up and running by the summer of 1886. But in July 1885 financier J.P. Morgan, fearing a potentially disastrous railroad war, stepped in and negotiated a truce between New York Central and PRR. Vanderbilt agreed to stop work in return for PRR’s immediate withdrawal from New York Central’s sphere of influence. By September, with about 60 percent of the road graded, work crews put down their tools and for the next 50 years the right of way (recast as “Vanderbilt’s folly”) laid fallow.

In April 1935, a few months after the first late-night brainstorming session, Patterson introduced legislation on the floor of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives requesting a feasibility study for a tolled four-lane highway over the South Penn’s abandoned route. The bill generated lots of buzz, no doubt in part because of the project’s public works potential. In July 1937 Governor George Earle signed the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission (PTC) into law to oversee construction and operation. By the following year the Roosevelt administration had agreed to finance the project through the Public Works Administration and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. The only stipulation was that it was to be completed quickly. It took private contractors and work crews only 23 months, from field surveys to final paving, to open the Pennsylvania Turnpike to motor traffic – an impressive feat, given the logistical, technical and bureaucratic hurdles.

Curiously, the superhighway that sprang from Patterson’s bill never used the bridge piers that were said to have inspired it. When the Pennsylvania Turnpike finally crossed the Susquehanna as part of the first of four postwar “extensions” that stretched the tolled highway across the rest of the state (for a total of 470 miles when completed in 1957), it did so on a new set of piers located a few miles south of where eight South Penn piers still stand.

Tollbooth, Irwin Interchange

Any trip along the Pennsylvania Turnpike, then or now, begins and ends by passing through a toll plaza. On the first section, between Carlisle and Irwin, toll plazas were located at the entrance to each of the original 11 interchanges. Depending on the size of the interchange, a plaza had as many as four tollbooths and as few as one.

Cars lined up for hours for the chance to be among the first motorists on the new superhighway, which opened on midnight, October 1, 1940. Here, a group crowds alongside one of the first cars to pass through the tollbooth plaza at Irwin, the western terminus of the original stretch. Pennsylvania State Archives/RG-29

By the early 1980s most of the original metal booths had been removed and replaced by new structures. Today, PTC continues to maintain cash lanes at all of its toll plazas, although the majority of fares are collected and recorded electronically through E-ZPass transponders. Motorists merely need to slow down their cars on approach. They barely notice the booths.

That was not the case when the Pennsylvania Turnpike first opened for passenger traffic in fall 1940. In anticipation of opening day, which actually occurred at midnight, motorists lined up in front of the tollbooths for hours for the chance of being among the first to drive on the dream highway. A reporter for the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, observing the series of tollbooths that stood sentry at the western terminus in Irwin, described them as “lighted like the entrance to a beautiful exposition.” A generation later, one PTC official, speaking with some expected hyperbole, described them as “the gateways to the eighth wonder of the world.”

The tollbooths installed along the original section were simple steel frames sheathed with stamped metal panels, painted in yellow and what became known as “turnpike blue.” Their distinctive hexagonal shape echoed the sleek streamlined design of the highway. Inside there was just enough room to accommodate two tollbooth operators, one positioned in the front to distribute fare cards and the other in the back to collect cards and fares from exiting motorists. Fares for passenger vehicles were initially set at about one cent a mile; a round trip cost $2.25.

The 1940 tollbooth from the Irwin interchange is now on exhibit at The State Museum of Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania State Archives/RG-29

Because the uniformed operators were often the only staff that motorists encountered, toll collectors came to be regarded as the highway’s “ambassadors” and the human face of a system that was maintained by an army of maintenance personnel, including a special patrol of the Pennsylvania State Police. “[A toll collector] must be ready to tell customers about the routes ahead, about the exact mileage to all interchanges as well as service stations, about the various rates and other informative items he has stored in his head for ready reference,” one early press release noted. A collections officer described the job more whimsically: “He guides the tourist on his way/Another begs the time of day./The next he backs out of the lane/And sends him back from whence he came.”

During the Pennsylvania Turnpike’s first few decades of operation, fares were distributed and collected by uniformed toll officers.
Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission

Electronic tolling was not introduced until 2000, but aspects of the fare collection system were mechanized from the beginning. From 1940 through the early 1950s operators used IBM validating countertop machines to stamp fare cards. Another piece of IBM equipment, first installed in 1955, allowed toll collectors to automatically classify vehicles by weight and axles. (Passenger vehicles all paid the same rates, but trucks and commercial vehicles were charged based on vehicle size and number of axles.) By the early 1970s mechanical dispensing machines – known colloquially as “ticket spitters” – issued fare cards at the push of a button, thus eliminating the need for an operator to give them out by hand.

In the early 1980s, in anticipation of computerized tolling, PTC decommissioned its first generation of tollbooths. Most were scrapped or sold for sheet metal, but a few were saved and transferred to museums and historical organizations. In 1983 the last operating tollbooth, which had still been in service at the Blue Mountain interchange, was dismantled and shipped off to the Smithsonian Institution. A few years ago, curators at The State Museum of Pennsylvania, in anticipation of a major upgrade to what is now the Industry and Transportation Gallery, began restoring a tollbooth that once stood at the Irwin interchange. The reassembled tollbooth will anchor the museum’s new Pennsylvania Turnpike exhibit.

Sideling Hill and Rays Hill Tunnels

No single feature better expressed the Pennsylvania Turnpike’s engineering élan than its tunnels. When the first section opened in October 1940, seven of them carried traffic, single file, through the ridges that traversed its path between Carlisle and Irwin. Six of the seven tunnels had been partially bored 50 years earlier. Two additional tunnels that had been surveyed and partially bored for Vanderbilt’s rail line at Negro and Quemahoning mountains in Somerset County were determined to be unnecessary and were bypassed by “cuts,” or large chisels, in the mountains.

Although the tunnels came to be appreciated for their form – handsome concrete portals with Art Moderne archways – their purpose was entirely utilitarian. The Appalachian Mountains that crossed the highway’s path had bedeviled east-west travel across Pennsylvania from Colonial times. Their ridges crossed the state on a diagonal from west to east. Roads that followed the natural gaps and valleys were forced to zigzag their way across the southern half of the state in anything but a straight line. The resulting routes were long and winding, with sharp switchbacks and often steep, grueling ascents that were downright treacherous in winter.

No feature captured the public’s imagination more than the series of seven tunnels that “pierced” the Allegheny Mountains between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh. Mitchell Dakelman Collection

The tunnels allowed motorists to go through at grade level rather than up, over or around this formidable terrain. Five of the seven original tunnels were distributed across the Ridge and Valley section; the remaining two were located along ridges in the higher elevation Allegheny Plateau. Vanderbilt’s engineers had cited the tunnels some 50 years earlier, typically positioning the portals at the ridge’s narrowest point, or “saddle.” Although most of the tunnels had been partially bored as well, each had to be dewatered, “holed through,” widened, reinforced, paved and ventilated to dissipate carbon monoxide from automobile exhaust. The tunnels, not surprisingly, were the last of the structures to be completed as the highway neared the end of its accelerated 23-month construction phase.

The tunnels offered the safest passage, especially during the winter months, when higher elevations were typically covered with snow and ice. That fact led some promoters to over optimistically describe the “all-tunnel highway” as an “all-weather” or even a “forget-the-weather” highway. (Vaughn Horton, a Pennsylvania-born country singer, would later croon about being “stuck in Somerset [where] the snow plow ain’t come yet.”) Countless motorists, especially during the first decades of operation, were thrilled by the sight of an approaching tunnel and snapped photographs, shot home movies and purchased themed souvenirs from the “tunnel highway.” The view was especially captivating at night, when the lit interiors appeared to glow against the surrounding mountain.

The one thing the original tunnels could not handle, over time, was increased traffic volume. Because they accommodated only two lanes, motorists traveling in both directions were forced to merge from two lanes to one as they approached tunnel entrances. By the 1950s tunnel-induced snarls were legendary, especially during the peak summer travel season. To relieve the bottleneck, PTC in the 1960s chose to either “twin” the tunnels (boring a second tube to accommodate two lanes of traffic in both directions) or bypass them altogether. Sideling Hill and Rays Hill tunnels were both left orphaned in 1968 after a new 13-mile bypass, complete with additional truck-climbing lanes, routed the roadway around them. Though no longer part of the Pennsylvania Turnpike system, the two abandoned tunnels have taken on a second life as tourist attractions for bicyclists and urban explorers.

South Midway Travel Plaza

Clean, conveniently located rest stops, where motorists pull in for gas and food without exiting the highway, have been a common feature of interstate travel for decades. But before the Pennsylvania Turnpike, integrated travel plazas were unheard of. On most prewar highways, services were procured from private operators of diners and filling stations scattered along the way.

South Midway was the largest of the 11 travel plazas that were built to accommodate the needs of motorists along the original section between Carlisle and Irwin. Today, South Midway is the only plaza that retains most of its original stone façade. The State Museum of Pennsylvania

The Pennsylvania Turnpike’s signature travel plazas, 11 of which were built along the original section between Carlisle and Irwin, were intended to provide motorists with essential, reliable services without forcing them to break their stride by exiting the highway. By design the Pennsylvania Turnpike bypassed towns and other population centers where motorists would normally go to get food and gas. To compensate, PTC imported the services and consolidated them to travel plazas located at regular intervals.

Rather than operate them directly, PTC handed over the gasoline and food concessions to private companies. The Standard Oil Company of Pennsylvania was awarded the lease to operate 10 Esso gasoline stations along the original section. (Pittsburgh-based Gulf Oil subsequently won the contract to operate the stations along the postwar extensions.) The New England-based Howard Johnson’s restaurant chain won the food-service contract and parlayed the national visibility into a very profitable business model of highway restaurants.

The typical service plaza featured a lunch counter and “dairy bar.” The concession at Midway featured a full service, sit-down restaurant, with enough seating for 200 customers.
Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission

Most of the early service plaza buildings that lined the original section were Colonial Revival in style and dressed in native fieldstone. They were each built with modern restrooms, a 50-seat lunch counter and a “dairy bar.” The service plazas located at the halfway point near Bedford across the highway from one another – the aptly named Midway Service Plazas – were more elaborate. The larger of the two, and the showpiece, was the eastbound plaza at South Midway. Its stately two-story stone building was set off by two large setback wings. It was large enough to accommodate two sit-down dining rooms for up to 200 customers, a dining terrace, two fireplaces and two lunch counters, one solely for the use of truck drivers. (For a time, South Midway also housed a truckers’ dormitory with overnight accommodations, showers, a mailroom, and a barber shop.) Westbound motorists who stopped at the smaller North Midway could cross over to South Midway by means of an underground pedestrian tunnel (closed sometime in the late 1950s).

Over the years, many of the original service plazas, both on the first section and the subsequent extensions, were closed, relocated or remodeled in response to changing consumer demand and travel patterns. When Howard Johnson’s exclusive contract expired in 1978, the food concessions were divvied up among fast-food chains. Over the past few years, the remaining original buildings were razed and replaced with larger, open-design travel plazas better capable of serving more customers. Today, South Midway Plaza is the only operating plaza that retains most of its original exterior. The lobby inside its remodeled interior now showcases archival photographs, films, memorabilia and other material from the Pennsylvania Turnpike’s storied past.

Breezewood

Of the 11 interchanges located along the original section, Breezewood is perhaps the best known, thanks in large part to the iconic neon sign that for years advertised the “Town of Motels” to approaching motorists. Travelers might also know Breezewood as the “Gateway to the South.” Here, motorists heading to Washington, D.C., and other points south exit and connect with Interstate 70. More traffic enters and exits here than at any other interchange between Carlisle and Irwin.

Breezewood, an unincorporated community with only a handful of permanent residents but with dozens of hotels and restaurants crammed into a one-quarter-mile strip, stands as a reminder of the consequences, both intended and unintended, of the interstate highway system that the Pennsylvania Turnpike precipitated. The initial selection of interchanges had been based largely on topography and preexisting traffic patterns. Interchanges were sited to avoid congestion while still promoting accessibility. Breezewood, in eastern Bedford County, was roughly equidistant to the town of Bedford to the west and Fort Littleton, Fulton County, to the east.

The community of Breezewood mushroomed with motels, restaurants and other businesses that catered to motorists, especially after the connection with Interstate 70 was completed in the late 1960s.
Brian Butko Collection

An early description of the Breezewood interchange touted its potential to “absorb and discharge a considerable volume of traffic along Rt. 126, which leads directly to Maryland and Virginia.” The route was just one of many “distributor roads” that were envisioned as “the veins that connect this great traffic artery to the entire highway system of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and that of other states.” The problem was that the connecting arteries at the time were clogged and constricted. Route 126 did lead to Maryland and Virginia, but it did so slowly and inefficiently. Even the largest highways connected to the Pennsylvania Turnpike were inferior in design, construction and engineering.

But that would soon change. As early as 1941 Walter Jones, the first chairman of PTC, predicted a national network of tolled highways stitching the nation together into one seamless whole. By the late 1940s, nine other states had followed Pennsylvania’s lead in constructing self-financed tolled highways across important border-to-border corridors. Jones, a Pittsburgh oil executive, almost got his wish: By the early 1950s, with the Pennsylvania Turnpike at the center, it was possible for a motorist to drive from Maine to Chicago on tolled state highways without encountering a single traffic light, intersection or railroad crossing.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s signing of the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act in 1956 put an end to the dream of a national tolled highway system. But it gave birth to another one: a free interstate highway system seamlessly linked. Eventually some 43,000 miles of limited-access highway, paid for by federal tax dollars, would form the national network. That’s where Breezewood’s second chapter begins. In the late 1950s highway planners began working on linking one of the newly funded interstates, I-70, with the Pennsylvania Turnpike (reclassified as I-76). It was decided that the link was to be at Breezewood, but by the time I-70 was completed in 1966, PTC and the federal government were unable to agree on who should pay for the connecting ramps. With neither side willing to pony up, motorists hoping to connect were forced off at Breezewood and briefly onto Route 30 to the entrances of the respective highways.

The motorists’ loss – in time wasted shuttling between the highways on a quarter-mile of the Lincoln Highway – was Breezewood’s gain. Local businesses, from motels and restaurants to truck stops, flourished. The popular Gateway Restaurant grew into a larger complex, which is still in existence as Gateway Travel Plaza. Howard Johnson’s notably located one of its first motels here in 1956, just off the Lincoln Highway.

St. John the Baptist Catholic Church

If Breezewood is an example of what the Pennsylvania Turnpike joined together, St. John the Baptist Catholic Church bears witness to what the interstate highway system broke apart. The church is located within sight of the highway in New Baltimore, Somerset County, a small village a few miles east of the Allegheny Tunnel. The church is at the foot of the relatively long and winding ascent up the eastern face of the Allegheny Front, the physiographic dividing line between the Ridge and Valley region and the Allegheny Plateau.

St. John the Baptist Catholic Church in New Baltimore, Somerset County, became one of the more unusual sites along the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Pennsylvania State Archives/MG-213

Motorists know they are at St. John the Baptist because they can still see the metal sign and, from the eastbound side, the concrete steps that lead from the shoulder of the highway to the church’s property. The wrought iron railing and crumbling concrete steps represent another anomaly, this one internal – the one place where a private-property owner has direct access to a highway that otherwise limits public access to designated interchanges.

Although the Pennsylvania Turnpike was laid out along the path of the South Penn Railway, PTC was still left with the task of acquiring private properties along or adjacent to the abandoned right of way. According to historian Dan Cupper, more than 700 properties, including dozens of old farmhouses, private dwellings and at least one coal mine, were acquired, many through eminent domain. Without eminent domain, Cupper reasons, the Pennsylvania Turnpike would have become entangled in protracted negotiations with the hundreds of individual property owners, keeping it from meeting its federal deadline.

Eastbound motorists have used these concrete stairs to reach St. John the Baptist directly from the highway. Pennsylvania State Archives/RG-29

St. John the Baptist was one of the hundreds of properties that lay in the path. What made its circumstance different was that the church also had a cemetery, and state law prohibited graveyards from being acquired by eminent domain. When property negotiators came knocking, Pastor Sebastian Urnauer found himself with a bargaining chip.

As part of an informal mitigation agreement, the church, which at the time included a Carmelite monastery, agreed to relocate the graves and allow passage in exchange for the congregation being physically connected to the roadway with pullovers and steps on both the eastbound and westbound sides. (Call it a souls-for-tolls deal.) In the 75 years since, St. John the Baptist has been a place of spiritual refuge and a curiosity: Travelers aiming to meet their mass obligations or just wanting to take a peek inside “The Church of the Turnpike,” with its Tiffany stained-glass windows, would pull over along what has since been judged a dangerous berm. The steps and pullovers are to be taken out to comply with new federal safety standards, thus ending the informal agreement and the anomaly.

Interestingly, not far from St. John the Baptist Catholic Church, the Pennsylvania Turnpike is trying to strike a similar balance between the demands of motorists and the needs of the people and places that line its path. The 20-year-old proposal to build a six-lane bypass around the Allegheny Tunnel encountered stiff resistance from environmental groups concerned about the potential disruption to the Allegheny Front’s ecosystem. If the circumstance at St. John the Baptist is any indication, a compromise will in time be reached, and the historic superhighway will continue to pave its way into the future.

Many families traveled the Pennsylvania Turnpike for leisure during the early years, sometimes picnicking along the side of the highway. Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission

This article spotlights a permanent exhibition on the Pennsylvania Turnpike that opens in the Industry and Transportation Gallery of The State Museum of Pennsylvania beginning October 1, 2015, 75 years to the date that the superhighway welcomed its first motorists.

The author acknowledges Andrea Lowery, PHMC preservation architect, and Christine Baker, of the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission, for their assistance with this article, and previously published histories by Dan Cupper (The Pennsylvania Turnpike: A History, 4th ed., Applied Arts, 2012) and Mitchell E. Dakelman and Neal A. Schorr (Images of America: The Pennsylvania Turnpike, Arcadia, 2004).

Curtis Miner, Ph.D., is senior history curator at The State Museum of Pennsylvania, where he most recently served as project director for the museum’s new exhibit on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.