In November of 1856, along a stretch of Wells Street near the Chicago River, a city crew laid down a road made of white pine. Small wooden blocks, sawn from trees, stood on end side by side with tar and gravel poured into the cracks between them. Three years later, the blocks had worn down by only half an inch. What followed became one of the strangest building projects in American history.

Chicago kept laying wooden streets, and it was not alone. St. Louis, Cleveland, Dallas, Galveston, Philadelphia, and New York all did the same. By one count, in 1891, roughly 480 of Chicago’s 774 miles of paved streets were made of wood.

Horses, wagons, streetcars, and crowds moved daily across what had been forest only a few years before. Nearly all of it is gone today. The answer to why Americans paved their cities with trees starts with mud. In the mid-nineteenth century, most American city streets were unpaved dirt.

In dry weather they became dust; in wet weather they turned into deep mud that could swallow a wagon wheel to the hub. Chicago suffered more than most. The center of the city sat only a little above the level of Lake Michigan, and for two decades after its incorporation in 1837, large parts of it stood in water. Its streets were dirt or crude wooden planks that fell apart.

In 1856, the same year the blocks went down on Wells Street, the city adopted a plan to build sewers and raise its streets and buildings several feet out of the swamp. Stone was the traditional answer to mud. Cobblestones and granite blocks were hard and lasting, but they had three problems. Good paving stone was scarce around Chicago, hauling it in was expensive, and stone was loud.

Every iron-shod hoof and iron wagon tire rang on it day and night, and it was hard on the horses that pulled the city. Chicago, however, sat at the center of the greatest lumber market in the country, with the pine forests of Wisconsin and Michigan just across the lake. Wood paving cost about a third as much as stone. In 1859, Samuel Greeley wrote in the Chicago Press and Tribune that wooden pavement might hold great advantages in a city where suitable stone was scarce.

One early answer was the simplest: lay planks across the road like a barn floor. In the 1840s, plank roads spread across New York and the Midwest, with investors expecting them to last eight to ten years. Instead, they had to be replaced every four or five, and many fell apart within two. After 1854, no new plank roads were started in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, or Iowa.

The other answer was to cut the wood into blocks. Chicago was not the first to try. New York had laid hexagonal wooden blocks as early as 1835. Philadelphia repaved Chestnut Street with wood in 1838, and the blocks washed away.

In 1845, Edgar Allan Poe surveyed the city’s experiments with wooden blocks: they made little noise, were easy to keep clean, and saved horsepower. The insuperable difficulty, he wrote, had been decay. He suggested soaking the blocks in a solution of mercury sublimate for seventy-two hours. Wood rots, especially when laid on the ground, soaked by rain, and pounded by hooves and wheels.

Every early attempt failed for the same reason: nothing kept the water out. The man who claimed to have solved that problem was a Boston builder named Samuel Nicholson. In the summer of 1848, Nicholson paid out of his own pocket to lay a seventy-five-foot test strip of his pavement on the Mill Dam Road outside Boston, right beside the toll gate of the Boston and Roxbury Mill Corporation. Every wagon, carriage, and horse passing in and out of the city had to cross it.

For six years, Nicholson watched it. In 1854, convinced it worked, he took out a patent. His system came in layers. The ground was graded and covered with sand.

On top went boards laid flat, coated in hot tar to resist rot. On top of the boards went the blocks, square-sided pieces of wood a few inches wide and six to eight inches tall, cut to stand on end. They were set upright in rows with the grain running straight up so hooves and wheels struck the end of the wood rather than the side. Thin strips of board held the blocks apart, leaving narrow channels that were filled with gravel and hot coal tar.

When it cooled, the tar and gravel locked the blocks into a single surface. The result was a road made of the ends of thousands of trees standing shoulder to shoulder. Chicago became the first city in the West to adopt Nicholson’s system. The first blocks were white pine; white oak came next and became the favored wood for years, with cedar later entering wide use.

The idea spread both east and west. Nicholson pavement went down in New York, Newark, Detroit, and Cleveland. By 1870, Cleveland had eight and three-quarter miles of wooden block streets against ten and a half miles of stone. St.

Louis signed a contract for nearly sixty thousand square yards in 1860. Over the following decades, blocks were cut from almost every tree that grew in quantity: soft pine and cedar were most common, but cities also laid oak, cypress, redwood, mesquite, and osage orange. Nicholson’s patent proved valuable. In 1867, the American Nicholson Pavement Company obtained a court order against cities that laid the pavement without paying.

The case against Elizabeth, New Jersey went to the Supreme Court, which ruled for Nicholson in 1877, holding that his six-year public test at the tollgate had been a genuine experiment and he had never abandoned his intent to patent. The case remains cited in American patent law today, and it began with seventy-five feet of wooden blocks beside a tollgate. But Nicholson’s pavement had a weakness no patent could fix. The joints between the blocks were too wide.

Water got in, the blocks swelled, and the swelling pushed them out of line. The planks beneath, laid on bare earth, rotted from below. Streets sank, blocks tipped, and ruts and holes opened where traffic was heaviest. On busy streets, a Nicholson pavement held up for a decade at most, often far less.

One report gave it about two years in Washington. The answer was creosote, a thick, dark oil distilled from coal tar that railroads already used to keep wooden ties from rotting. New paving companies pressure-treated the blocks, forcing creosote deep into the wood. Galveston, Texas laid creosoted southern pine as early as 1873.

The following year, R. W. Trundy, owner of the Galveston Creosoting Works, won a bid to pave Market Street with creosote-treated yellow pine. Some aldermen doubted the process, but they approved it anyway, as wood remained gentler on horses and wagons and made far less noise than stone.

The way blocks were laid also changed. In St. Louis, starting in 1887, hard sweetgum from southern Illinois was pressure-treated with creosote and set in a bed of Portland cement instead of planks. The grain pointed straight up, and joints were held to no wider than an eighth of an inch.

A steamroller pressed the surface flat, sand was swept into the joints, and the whole street was coated with creosote oil. By 1893, St. Louis had nearly nine miles of it, and engineers believed they had finally beaten the rot. Chicago engineers expected pavements already ten years old to last another ten.

In Dallas, city engineer William M. Johnson patented his own process for cutting and treating wood blocks around 1881. A grocer named Tom Marsalis agreed to pave a ninety-five-foot strip of Elm Street in front of his store. In June 1883, the city accepted a bid to pave Elm Street at $2.

05 a yard. Dallas needed the pavement badly. In 1881 the Dallas Herald called the city’s streets and sidewalks the most wretched of any city its size in the country. The first Dallas blocks were twelve inches long and laid straight onto the dirt with no foundation; they sank unevenly.

The next ones were cut eight to ten inches long and set on six to eight inches of gravel with sand and coal tar in the joints. In November 1883, the mayor called the new pavement durable and far superior to anything the city had laid before. Dallas advertised its blocks as bois d’arc, osage orange, one of the hardest woods in America, and a city directory in 1886 boasted of three miles of the best bois d’arc pavement in the world. More than a century later, when archaeologists dug the old blocks up and tested them, they turned out to be creosoted pine and bald cypress.

Critics had long pointed out that Texas did not have enough bois d’arc to pave even three miles of street. A woman in nearby Waxahachie put it simply: they called them bois d’arc, but they were actually pine put together with asphalt. All across the country, crews were cutting forests into blocks a few inches long and laying them down by the million. Then, on October 8, 1871, Chicago learned what fire could do to a city built of wood.

The summer and fall had been dry, with only about an inch of rain between July 4 and October 9. More than two-thirds of the city’s buildings were made entirely of wood, many roofs were tar or shingle, and every sidewalk was wooden planks. The fire started on the southwest side that night, driven by a strong southwest wind toward the center of the city. It jumped the south branch of the river, where lumber yards and coal yards lined the banks, and then the main branch.

Whirls of fire lifted burning debris far ahead of the flames. When the waterworks caught fire, the mains went dry. By the end, about three hundred people were dead, only about one hundred twenty bodies ever recovered, and some seventeen thousand five hundred buildings were destroyed across more than two thousand acres. The fire burned more than seventy-three miles of streets, about one hundred twenty miles of wooden sidewalk, and some two thousand lamp posts.

At the time, by one count, thirty-seven of Chicago’s sixty-one miles of improved streets were paved with wood. Two stories have circulated ever since about what happened to those streets. One says the wooden streets fueled the flames, feeding the fire through the blocks, the tarred planks beneath them, and the tar in the joints. A historical marker in Chicago today repeats that claim.

The other story comes from a report written in 1872, which found that the wood block pavement withstood the fire much better than expected, and some historians of the city’s streets say the wood pavement largely survived because it was treated and did not burn easily. What happened next is not in dispute. Chicago rebuilt and went straight back to paving with wood. Cedar came into wide use after the fire, and the city kept laying blocks for another thirty years through the boom of the 1880s until wood was the most common pavement in the city.

Living with wooden streets was another matter. Their great gift was quiet. Wood was far less noisy than stone, brick, macadam, or even asphalt, which is why cities so often laid it outside churches, hospitals, schools, and clubs. But a city in the 1880s ran on horses.

Thousands of horses hauled wagons, carts, cabs, and streetcars over those streets every day, leaving manure and urine behind. On stone, the waste lay on top. On wood, it soaked in. The blocks absorbed it, and in hot weather the streets gave off a foul fluid and a matching smell.

As one Philadelphia preservationist later put it, they soaked up all the horse urine and became redolent in a bad way. Wood was slippery when wet and worse when fouled with mud. On a steep grade, a team pulling a heavy load could lose its footing entirely. In hot weather, tar and creosote softened and turned sticky.

When the blocks rotted, they crumbled, and a smooth new street could be full of holes within a year or two. And when water came, the wood floated. Philadelphia learned that on Chestnut Street in 1838; Paris learned it again in 1910, when the great flood of the Seine tore wooden paving blocks out of the streets and carried them off. Despite all of it, crews kept replacing and re-laying the blocks because for most of the century there was no cheaper way to keep a city out of the mud.

By the 1890s, that was changing. The cheap wood was going first. The forests of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota that had supplied Chicago were being cut out, and lumber prices rose. Competition came second.

Brick, granite block, and above all asphalt were getting cheaper and better, and they did not rot. The horse came third. When automobiles arrived, the quiet hoof was no longer worth paying for. Cleveland had already replaced its wooden streets with sandstone in the 1880s.

In St. Louis, every original Nicholson block had been torn up by 1888. In Dallas, Main Street and Elm Street were repaved with asphalt in 1899, and the wooden blocks laid on Elm Street fifteen years earlier were dug up and reused on San Jacinto Street. In Galveston, the creosoted blocks on Market Street were replaced with brick in the early 1900s.

By 1909, Chicago was paving only its alleys with wood. In 1912, the American Society of Municipal Improvements still wrote standards for wooden pavement, requiring contractors to use only one kind of wood per job. But by the 1930s, a wooden street cost more to lay than an asphalt one, and the age of wooden streets was over. Most of the old blocks were simply covered up.

Crews poured asphalt directly over the wood and drove on. In Waxahachie, Texas, the pavement around the Ellis County Courthouse was replaced with brick, and two wagon loads of the old wooden blocks were hauled away and used as a barn floor until the 1970s, when about ten thousand of them turned up again and went to the county historical museum. A few wooden streets survived. In Chicago, between Astor Street and State Street, an alley paved in late 1909 with creosoted cedar blocks, at a cost of $3,346.

96, remains on the National Register of Historic Places. The city restored it in 2011 with new blocks of black locust at a cost of $400,000; finding replacement blocks proved the hardest part, as no one was making wood blocks anymore. A second wooden alley on the north side was paved over with asphalt in 2018. In Pittsburgh, a short street in Shadyside called Roslyn Place, paved in 1914 with about twenty-six thousand oak blocks, was restored in 1985 and remains wood from end to end, once called the only street in the United States paved entirely in the Nicholson manner.

In Cleveland, Hessler Court still carries about nineteen thousand wooden blocks, most of them original. In Philadelphia, on Camac Street, wooden blocks laid in 1917 have been restored repeatedly, covered with asphalt in 2015, and stripped again in 2024 for rebuilding in wood once more. Elsewhere, crews digging in Chicago in 2017 and 2020 uncovered dark creosoted blocks under the pavement, still intact a century after they were laid. Nobody knows how many more remain under the asphalt of American cities.

It began on Wells Street in 1856 with a few blocks of white pine locked together with tar and gravel. For half a century after that, Americans drove their horses, wagons, and streetcars across the cut ends of whole forests and called it a road.