Until recently, a motel along Ogden Avenue in Lyons was named Plank Road Inn – it is still there, but renamed. Scarcely a mile west on Ogden is the Plank Road Meadow Forest preserve. Eighteen miles to the west, a street named Plank Road branches off of Ogden, leading toward downtown Naperville. What is or was the Plank Road?
During the mid-1800s, present day Ogden Avenue was paved with wood! Opening up of land west of Chicago for settlement in the 1830s had resulted in conversion of prairie lands into agricultural crop production. The first settlers grew crops for household consumption and local barter. But within a decade, advances in agricultural technology and the rapid growth of Chicago as a consumption and trade center, meant farmers were bringing their crops to Chicago for sale.
The muddy and rutted condition of the roads, the Southwest Trail between Chicago and the Fox River being one of them, made transport difficult and time-consuming, limiting profitability of crop sale. Agricultural interests and Chicago business people alike clamored for means of raising transportation out of the mud.
One solution appeared to be plank roads – namely roadways made out of wooden planks. The concept originated in Russia early in the 19th century. Plank roads were introduced in Canada in 1833, then in upper New York State in the early 1840s. The roads were constructed by laying heavy stringers along each edge of the roadway, then laying thick crossway planks on the stringers, thus providing a mud-free, hard surface. The Southwest Plank Road, along with the connecting Naperville & Oswego Plank Road, was one of several plank roads that radiated out from Chicago.
Plank road operators were privately owned companies that charged tolls for use of the roadways. Leadership and investment capital was provided by local property owners who stood to benefit from increased land value (development of local communities) and increased business for local taverns, stores and services along the routes. Notable investors in the Southwestern Plank Road were Theodorus Doty, a Lyons tavern owner, with substantial landholdings in the vicinity, and Issac Cook, who sought to subdivide his landholdings along the plank road. Cook eventually attempted to establish a residential development named Cooksville in present-day Riverside and Lyons.
The westerly plank road project, the Naperville & Oswego Plank Road, was funded substantially by DuPage County businessmen, notably Joseph Naper (Naperville’s founder), Julius Warren (Warrenville’s founder) and Morris Sleight, who appears to have been the company president. DuPage County itself appropriated $5,000 for purchase of Naperville & Oswego Plank Road stock.
The Southwestern Plank Road was constructed during the spring and summer of 1848, between the Bulls Head Tavern at Madison Street and (present day) Ogden Avenue on Chicago's West Side, and Doty’s Tavern in Lyons. By 1850, the road was completed to Brush Hill (present day Hinsdale). The Naperville and Oswego Plank Road was incorporated in early 1850 to construct the DuPage County segment between Brush Hill and Naperville. That roadway was completed by 1851.
Toll gates were located at Bulls Head Tavern at the east end, and at Doty’s Tavern in Lyons. Barto Van Velzer collected tolls at Brush Hill, and the colorful Marc Beaubien operated a tavern, inn and tollhouse in Lisle.
Tolls for people and wagons between Naperville and Chicago:
Fee at 2024
Each toll gate equivalent
Wagon & 2 horses - 37 ½ cents $ 15.22
Post coach and 4 horses - 50 cents $ 20.00
1 horse - 10 cents $ 4.00
Head of cattle - 4 cents $ 1.60
1 hog or sheep - 3 cents $ 1.20
In comparison, 2024 toll rates for an equivalent journey on the nearby Illinois Tollway range from $1.50 for automobiles, to $7.70 for large trucks, with traffic passing only one toll gate instead of four.
At the beginning, the plank road was wildly successful. During peak times, 500 wagons per day traversed the route. On October, 9, 1848, 96 persons passed the Doty’s Tavern toll gate in Lyons in a single hour. A Naperville businessman observed farmers coming from miles around to use the plank route because it was the only good road into Chicago. He compared the never-ending line of teams to "a great pulley with sheaves at Chicago and Naperville." At harvest time "wagons had to keep their places exactly as a rope" because "if a kink got in the line anywhere, the whole machine stopped." Added to the wagons heavily loaded with produce were stage coaches and prairie schooners headed west with new settlers.
With those high toll rates and volume of traffic, the plank roads’ investors were initially handsomely rewarded for their investments. Annual income from tolls reached 40% of the original investment cost. Shareholders enjoyed 14% dividends.
Despite the expense of plank road tolls, farmers benefited immensely. Larger crop loads could be transported more quickly, with much less wear and tear on wagons and animals. Many one-way trips could be made in a single day. The plank road was an all-weather road, providing farmers with flexibility as to when to transport crops to market. New businesses established near the toll gates provided travelers with improved access to food, drink and rest. Many in the Chicago business community believed that operation of the plank roads ensured the future prosperity of the city.
The robust financial returns and benefits to users proved to be short-lived. Those 14% dividends issued to shareholders were possible in part because of faulty expectations of the durability of the wooden roadways. It would appear that no immediate accounting provision was made for maintenance and depreciation. Scarcely a year after construction, defects began to appear. Especially through the swampy areas east of Lyons, the roadway would flood. The planks, unattached to the stringers, began to slip, warp, rot, or float away. The wet underside of the planks putrefied and became a breeding ground for vermin and mold.
Missing or out-of-place planks invited horses’ legs to break through the wood surface or wagon axles to break. Fearing the possibility of injuries to animals or damage to wagons or carriages, farmers and other travelers were less inclined to pay the expensive tolls. Traffic and revenue declined at the same moment the maintenance expenses were soaring.
Then there was the matter of competition. 1848, the year in which the first plank road segment was opened, was also the year that the Galena & Chicago Union Rail Road (G&CU) and the Illinois & Michigan Canal opened, providing multiple options for shipping farm produce west of Chicago.
Community enthusiasm for the plank road waned. The plank road had been open to Naperville for less than a year when the DuPage County Observer newspaper, in its February 11,1852, opined that the plank road was "not quite the thing needed." Three weeks later, a March 3, 1852 Observer letter to the editor stated that "a very large proportion of the business has been stopped and drawn from this place by the Railroad" with the result that "many doors and windows in our village" were now barred. "Wherever railroads go, there go business centers." As the nearby (ten miles north at Wheaton) G&CU expanded, it could and did lower its freight rates, further starving the paralleling plank roads.
In early 1853, Chicago and Southwestern Plank Road owners, recognizing the ascendance of railroads and futility of future attempts at competition, arranged to have its charter amended to permit construction of the Chicago Western Railroad, proposed to run between Chicago and Aurora by way of Naperville. The Chicago Western was never built, and by 1857 the Chicago and Southwestern and the Naperville and Oswego plank roads had faded into obscurity and the roadway returned to mud. Seven years later, the plank road towns would get their railroad, namely the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy (the Q), and the towns along the plank road became the towns along the Q.