In November 1856, on a stretch of Wells Street near the Chicago River, a city crew laid down a new kind of road. The surface was built 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 was one of the strangest building projects in American history—and Chicago was not alone in it.

St. Louis, Cleveland, Dallas, Galveston, Philadelphia, and New York all laid wooden streets. By one count, in 1891, about 480 of Chicago’s 774 miles of paved streets were made of wood. Horses, wagons, streetcars, and whole crowds of people moved every day across what had been forest only a few years before.

Almost all of it is gone now. How did Americans end up paving their cities with trees, and what happened to all that wood? The answer begins with mud. In the middle of the nineteenth century, most American city streets were not paved at all.

They were dirt. In dry weather they were dust; in wet weather they turned into deep mud that could swallow a wagon wheel to the hub. Chicago had it worse than most. The center of the city sat only a little above the level of Lake Michigan, and for two decades after it was incorporated in 1837, large parts of it stood in water.

Its streets were dirt, or crude wooden planks that quickly 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. The traditional answer to mud was stone. Cobblestones and granite blocks were hard and lasting, but they had three problems.

Around Chicago, good paving stone was scarce, hauling it in was expensive, and stone was loud—every iron-shod hoof and iron wagon tire rang on it day and night. Stone was also hard on the horses that pulled the whole city. What Chicago had was wood. It sat at the center of the greatest lumber market in the country, with the pine forests of Wisconsin and Michigan just across the lake, and 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 have great advantages in a city where suitable stone was scarce. One answer was the simplest one: lay planks across the road side by side, like the floor of a barn. In the 1840s, plank roads spread across New York and the Midwest, and investors expected the planks to last eight or ten years. They had to be replaced every four or five, and many fell apart within two.

After 1854, nobody started a new plank road in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, or Iowa. The other answer was to cut the wood into blocks. Chicago was not the first to try that. 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, a New York writer named Edgar Allan Poe looked at the city’s experiments with wooden blocks and summed up both sides in a few lines. “Wooden pavements,” he wrote, “make little noise. They are easily kept clean, and they save a vast deal in horsepower.

But the insuperable difficulty had been decay. ” Poe had his own cure: dissolve a pound of mercury sublimate in sixteen gallons of water and soak the blocks in it for seventy-two hours. Wood rots. Lay it on the ground, soak it every time it rains, and pound it with hooves and wheels, and it comes apart.

Every early attempt had failed for the same reason. What was missing was a system that kept the water out. The man who claimed to have one was a Boston builder named Samuel Nicholson. In the summer of 1848, Nicholson paid out of his own pocket to lay a test strip of his pavement on the Mill Dam Road outside Boston, right beside the toll gate of the Boston and Roxbury Mill Corporation.

It was about seventy-five feet long. Every wagon, carriage, and horse going in and out of the city on that road had to cross it. For six years, Nicholson watched it. The toll collector later testified that he had heard Nicholson say many times that it was his first experiment with the pavement.

In 1854, convinced that it worked, Nicholson took out a patent. Boston had already given him a contract to pave a number of its streets. His system came in layers. First, the ground was graded and covered with sand to give the road an even bed.

On top of the sand went boards laid flat as a floor—in the standard version, planks about an inch thick, coated in hot tar so they would resist rot. On top of the boards went the blocks. Each one was a short, square-sided piece of wood, a few inches wide and roughly six to eight inches tall, cut so that it could stand on end. The blocks were set upright in rows across the street, grain running straight up, so that hooves and wheels struck the end of the wood instead of the side.

Between the rows, thin strips of board held the blocks a fixed distance apart, leaving narrow channels running across the road. Those channels were filled with gravel, and hot coal tar was poured in on top. When it cooled, the tar and gravel locked the blocks into a single surface. In some versions, a final layer of heated gravel and tar was spread over the whole street.

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 take up Nicholson’s system, and the city’s crews worked through the woods in a particular order. The first blocks were white pine. White oak came next and remained the favored wood for years.

Later, cedar came into wide use. The idea spread east and west at once. 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 in 1860 for nearly 60,000 square yards of it. Over the following decades, the blocks were cut from almost every tree that grew in quantity: soft pine and cedar were the most common, but cities also laid oak, cypress, redwood, mesquite, and osage orange. Nicholson’s patent turned out to be worth a great deal.

In 1867, the American Nicholson Pavement Company was granted a court order against cities that laid the pavement without paying for it. One of the cities it took to court was Elizabeth, New Jersey, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. The city argued that Nicholson had let the public use his invention for six years before he ever applied for a patent, on a road where, in the words of the case, most everybody went over it, rich and poor. In 1877, the court ruled for Nicholson.

He had kept the road under his own eyes, the justices wrote, as an experiment, and he had never given up the intent to patent it. That case is still cited in American patent law today—and it began with seventy-five feet of wooden blocks at a tollgate. But Nicholson’s pavement had a weakness the patent could not fix. The blocks were still wood, and the soft pine of the early streets drank water through the cracks.

The joints between the blocks were too wide. Water got in, the blocks swelled, and the swelling pushed them up out of line. The planks beneath them, laid on bare earth, rotted from below. Then the streets sank, the blocks tipped, and ruts and holes opened up where traffic was heaviest.

On busy streets, a Nicholson pavement was good for a decade at the very most; many lasted far less. In Washington, one report gave it about two years. The answer was creosote—a thick, dark oil distilled from coal tar. Railroads were already using it to keep wooden ties from rotting in the ground.

Instead of dipping the blocks in tar, the new paving companies pressure-treated them, forcing creosote deep into the wood. Galveston, Texas, laid creosoted southern pine as early as 1873. The next year, the Galveston aldermen took bids to pave Market Street, and a businessman named R. W.

Trundy, who owned the Galveston Creosoting Works, offered yellow pine blocks treated with creosote. Some of the aldermen doubted the new process would survive the traffic. They approved it anyway. Wood had one argument stone could never match: it was gentler on horses and wagons, and it made far less noise.

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

Once the blocks were down, a steamroller went over them to press 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. The engineers believed they had finally beaten the rot.

In Chicago, engineers expected pavements of this kind that were already ten years old to last another ten. In Dallas, the 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 from Jefferson to Sycamore at $2. 05 a yard. By one account, a single cutting machine could turn out as many as 240,000 paving blocks in a day. Dallas needed them.

In 1881, the Dallas Herald said the city had the most wretched streets and sidewalks of any city its size in the country. One man remembered watching four to six mules pull themselves into eleven sorts of shapes trying to drag a wagon out of the mud in East Dallas. The first Dallas blocks were twelve inches long and laid straight onto the dirt with no foundation, and 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 or pitch in the joints.

In November 1883, the mayor called the new pavement durable and far superior to any wood pavement the city had laid so far. Dallas told everyone its blocks were bois d’arc—the Osage orange, one of the hardest woods in America. A city directory in 1886 boasted of three miles of bois d’arc pavement, the best 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, who remembered the blocks on her own courthouse square, 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 in the streets by the million. Chicago was proud of its wooden streets.

Then, on the eighth of October 1871, the city learned what fire could do in a place built of wood. That summer and fall had been dry. Between the Fourth of July and the ninth of October, Chicago received only about an inch of rain. More than two-thirds of the city’s buildings were made entirely of wood.

Many roofs were tar or shingle, and every sidewalk in the city was made of wooden planks. The fire started on the southwest side on the night of the eighth. A strong wind from the southwest pushed it 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 and carried it far ahead of the flames. When the waterworks caught fire, the water mains went dry. By the time it was over, about 300 people were dead, and only about 120 bodies were ever recovered. About 17,500 buildings were destroyed across more than 2,000 acres.

The fire burned more than seventy-three miles of streets, about 120 miles of wooden sidewalk, and some 2,000 lamp posts. At the time of the fire, by one count, thirty-seven of Chicago’s sixty-one miles of improved streets were paved with wood. Ever since, there have been two stories about what happened to them. One says the wooden streets were part of the disaster—that the blocks, the tarred planks under them, and the tar in the joints fed the flames, and that in places the streets themselves were burning.

A historical marker in Chicago today says many of these streets provided fuel for the Great Fire. The other story comes from the years right after the fire. A report written in 1872 found that the wood block pavement had withstood the fire much better than expected, and some historians of the city’s streets say the wood pavement by and large survived because it was treated and did not burn easily. What happened next is not in dispute.

Chicago rebuilt, and it went straight back to paving with wood. Cedar came into wide use after the fire. 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. But living on it was another matter.

For the people who lived along them, the wooden streets had one great gift: they were quiet. Wood was far less noisy than stone, brick, macadam, or even asphalt, and that was why cities so often laid it outside churches, hospitals, schools, and clubs where the clatter of hooves mattered most. But a city in the 1880s ran on horses. Every day thousands of them hauled wagons, carts, cabs, and streetcars over those streets, and every one of them left 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 smell to match. Years later, a Philadelphia preservationist named Paul Stankey described the old wooden streets in one sentence: “They soaked up all the horse urine and became redolent in a bad way.

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Wood was slippery when it was wet, and worse when fouled with mud. On a steep grade, a team pulling a heavy load could lose its footing completely. In hot weather, the tar and creosote could soften and turn sticky. When the blocks rotted, they crumbled, and a street that had been smooth when laid could be full of holes within a year or two.

And when the water came, the wood floated. Philadelphia had 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. Through all of it, the 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 first thing to go was the cheap wood. The forests that had fed Chicago—in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota—were being cut out, and as they disappeared, the price of lumber rose. The second was the competition. Brick, granite block, and above all asphalt were getting cheaper and better, and they did not rot.

The third was the horse. 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, by 1888, every one of the original Nicholson blocks had been torn up. In Dallas, Main Street and Elm Street were repaved with asphalt in 1899; 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 the 1890s, many people in Chicago considered wooden pavement a failure.

By 1909, the city was paving only its alleys with wood—that year, eight of Chicago’s alleys were paved with creosoted cedar blocks, which sold for $4. 74 a square yard. In 1912, the American Society of Municipal Improvements was still writing rules for wooden pavement, setting standards for the quality of the blocks and requiring a contractor to use only one kind of wood per job. But by the 1930s, a wooden street in Chicago cost more to lay than an asphalt one, and the age of wooden streets was over.

Most of the 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 the floor of a barn until the 1970s. Years later, about 10,000 of them turned up again, and they went to the county historical museum.

But a few of the wooden streets survived. In Chicago, between Astor Street and State Street, there is still an alley paved in wood. It was laid between the twenty-ninth of October and the twenty-third of November 1909 by Alexander Todd with creosoted cedar blocks at a cost of $3,346. 96.

It is 530 feet long and 18 feet wide, with blocks four inches wide and four inches deep in lengths of six, eight, and ten inches, and it is on the National Register of Historic Places. In 2011, the city restored it with new blocks of black locust from Pennsylvania at a cost of $400,000. Finding the blocks was the hard part. Janet Tartarian, who worked on the restoration, described the problem in two sentences: “Where do I get wood blocks?

Well, nobody’s making wood blocks. ” 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 was paved in 1914 with about 26,000 oak blocks. It was restored in 1985 and is still wood from end to end, and it has been called the only street in the United States paved entirely in the Nicholson manner.

In Cleveland, a street called Hessler Court still carries about 19,000 wooden blocks, each about four and a half by nine inches, laid in a staggered pattern; in the 1970s, about 95 percent of them were still the original wood. In Philadelphia, on Camac Street between Walnut and Locust, the city laid wooden blocks in 1917. The street was restored in 1977, in 1997, and again in 2008. The blocks from 1977 fell apart quickly, and bad drainage rotted the ones from 2008.

Then, in 2015, the city covered them with asphalt before a visit by Pope Francis. In 2024, the asphalt came off and the city began rebuilding the street in wood once more, with blocks of black locust. Everywhere else, the wooden streets are still there in a way. In 2017 and again in 2020, crews digging out old vaulted sidewalks and alleys in Chicago turned up dark creosoted blocks under the pavement, still in one piece a century after they were laid.

Nobody knows how many more are still lying under the asphalt of American cities. It started on Wells Street in 1856, with a few blocks of white pine stood on end and locked together with tar and gravel. For half a century after that, Americans drove their horses, their wagons, and their streetcars across the cut ends of whole forests—and called it a road.