The New Explorations of a Geotechnician
American Psychogeography II: Benton MacKaye and the Townless Highway
[This long essay, a kind of psychohistorical drift, on Route 128 MA is to be published in three parts. The first came out on March 25. After this April 1st post it will conclude on April 8, 2026.]
BENTON MACKAYE, TRAIL MAKER AND GEOTECHNICIAN
As the twentieth century unrolled into its third decade, cities started to look for ways to route their increasing auto traffic around them as well as through them. Motoring was a luxury and motorists looked for beautiful locations to escape to on Sunday drives and other escapades, as a luxury. What had once been a mixture of haphazard and practical road building, now started to become the domain of engineers and urban planners. One of the notions that soon began to circulate was the idea of the circumferential highway, or beltway road. Route 128 outside of Boston has the distinction of not only being immortalized in the song “Roadrunner” by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, but also of being the first of these beltways.
In 1925 the BPR started their work on systematizing Americas highway system by assigning federal route numbers to the preexisting roads. Not long after the numbers started getting assigned, plans for what became Route 128 began, and it was officially designated in 1927. In its first iteration city planners nailed the road number to posts on existing roadways to create a somewhat messy linkage of different roads connected together. Why the number 128 was chosen seems to be lost in the mists of history. Maps from the time show Route 128 to be a sinuous line of convolution moving inland to the west with its movement snaking both north and south in a ragged arc. It was ad hoc, but it could get you to or from the South Shore and take you between the inner and outer burbs surrounding the denser urban core.
During the great depression of the thirties people weren’t buying as many cars or spending as much money on gas, but the traffic was still increasing enough for Route 128 to become jammed as people traveled Bostons boundary. A solution was needed to ease things up in the little communities such Newton, Danvers, Walton and Beverly that dotted its way. The engineers at the Massachusetts Department of Public Works thought it best to modernize Route 128 and relocate parts of the road.
The process of creating the route was just as convoluted as its path. In 1930 one possibility for a bypass around Boston that was to be a “townless highway” was proposed by Benton MacKaye, the forester and regional planner whose vision of the Appalachian Trail has changed the face of the nation and the lives of countless Americans. If his ideas had been implemented the land on either side or Route 128 would have also been much different, leaving behind a legacy of protected landscapes instead of snarled sprawl.
Mackaye had been born in Connecticut in 1879, the sixth of seven children. His father Steele Mackaye was an a playwright, actor and all around man of the theater given to Romantic ideals. His acting had taken him to Paris where he’d been a student of François Delsarte, and he taught the Delsarte method of oratory, singing and acting upon his return to America. Steele’s plays struck some popular accord with the American public, and he also got involved in establishing several theaters. His work in getting them off the ground however were always plagued by dodgy financial shenanigans going on in the background. In between these ventures he had periods of mental fatigue and instability that left the family wanting, even if on outward appearance, things were rosy. The kids grew up in their fathers artistic, literary and bohemian circles as a matter of course, and though they had for a time lived comfortably and at large due to the success their father had in the theater, they were never financially stable for long. As their fathers mental and physical health waned, and as his various ideas for making it in the big time fell through one after another, they had start pinching pennies, and moving from one place to another.
After Benton was born the family found themselves broke. Soon they were on the move around New England, with stints in Vermont, Connecticut, and Massachusetts towns before moving to New York City in 1885. In 1888 they found themselves in Shirley Center, Massachusetts, a town thirty miles west-northwest of Boston that would remain Benton Mackaye’s spiritual home for the rest of his life.
Shirley Center was a colonial village built around a common. A larger town surrounded the original village over time, but as the author Larry Anderson wrote, the place had an “almost organic ‘starfish symmetry’” and that its “tight-knit physical arrangement–town hall, church, schoolhouse, general store, homes–came to represent an idealized model of community life” for MacKaye. The place had been inhabited by a Shaker community, and some still lingered on when the MacKayes arrived. Not much further away was the site of Fruitlands, the utopia community that the transcendentalist Bronson Alcott had started in an attempt to live out his ideals.
Even though the family did not stay in Shirley Center year round, some stability came to the family when his older brother Will purchased a home that they called the “Cottage.” It would become a summer home for the family and a place they all returned to again and again. Not far from their Cottage, the same railroad line that passed by Thoreaus cabin, that he wrote about so avidly in Walden, passed through Shirley Center, where the family had a Walden of their own. It was along the hills and streams in Shirley Center that Benton’s love for the natural world started to unfurl like a seed pushing through the soil.
Lewis Mumford, who was to become one of his closest friends and advocates, later wrote, “As soon as he reached Shirley, he knew he was home; and from that time on this village has been the center of his life, despite many prolonged absences.” It was his omphalos, his center of the world.
One of the prolonged absences was when the MacKaye’s went to Washington D.C. Two of his brothers worked for the government, and MacKaye would follow in their footsteps. Though the capitol wasn’t his favorite place, it wasn’t as stifling to his spirit as the times he spent cooped up in New York City where they often spent the winters. In the capitol he found other ways to express his passion for nature. He spent a lot of time at the Smithsonian Institute where he continued his self-directed studies and practiced drawing many of the animals he saw on display. He became such a fixture at the Smithsonian that he started to volunteer to help with the work in the labs. One the curators, James Benedict, befriended him and became an early mentor. Benton also availed himself of speakers on the lecture circuit and went to talks given by famous explorers such as the Civil War hero, geologist and explorer of the west, John Wesley Powell, and the future explorer of the arctic, Robert Peary.
MacKaye’s real education was in the woods and fields. Back in Shirley Center he had started the Rambling Boys Club with some other kids. Their aim was to “give the members an education of the lay of the land in which they live, taking in the Geography, Geology, Zoology and Botany of them. Not only to know the Science of it but also the History and Progress of the different places.” MacKaye had also gotten in the habit of drawing maps and sketching the landscape. He wanted to document the rivers and roads, the hills and the heights, the flora, fauna, and architecture of Shirley Center.
He went on a number of hiking trips that had a major influence on him, and in turn on the legacy and imprint he left on the national character of America. His “Expedition 9” was one of these, as a was an extensive backpacking trip he took to the White Mountains.
“This direct, first-hand education through the senses and feelings, with its deliberate observation of nature in every guise—including the human animal—has nourished MacKaye all his life,” Mumford wrote of his friend.
He didn’t care so much about regular school. It was a stifling experience to be shut up indoors when the whole world beckoned to be explored. He had gone to high school in Cambridge, but dropped out early to follow his brothers James and Percy into Harvard where he studied geology, while they studied philosophy and engineering on the one hand, and poetry and drama, following in the footsteps of their father, on the other.
Certain gifts given by family and friends seem to have a way of leaving a mark on a person that endures through the decades ahead. While sticking it out at school James gave him a copy of book that would be another touchstone in his work, another seed that unfolded in time. In this case it was the book Physiography: An Introduction to the Study of Nature by Thomas Henry Huxley. Huxley’s book investigated the surface features of the earth, its rivers and streams, its forests and oceans, hills and the mountains and showed how they formed and evolved over time. The book would become a constant companion to him. His own book, the New Exploration, first published in 1928, contains numerous references to Huxley.
Before big ideas of “geotechnics” and the Appalachian Trail started emerging from his brain, he was enrolled in the new forestry school at Harvard. It proved to be a good match and he was the schools first student to graduate in 1905. The forestry work proved to be something he could return to over and over again in his otherwise peripatetic career. He got a job for the United States Forest Service, and also taught at the school. His earlier trip into the White Mountains proved to be influential in his research on the effects of deforestation and rainwater runoff. The conservation movement was still young and diverse at the time. There was a lot of debate around access to natural resources for the growth of industry and business, and saving them for recreation and the benefit of the earths creatures and humanity. MacKaye was able to show that when the forest was logged too heavily, it caused a disproportionate flow of water in the streams, leading to flooding. The evidence he was able to give in the matter lead to the protection of the forests and the creation of the White Mountain National Forest.
His work for the government took him back to Washington where he helped form another group in 1913. This one was the Hell Raisers. They were made up of a mix of fellow federal employees, journalists, and citizens interested in the labor movement, economic planning and other causes championed by the political left of the time. As a naturalist and conservationist MacKaye’s interest was how America would use its vast resources. Gifford Pinchot, the first head of the newly created Forest Service, had just gotten out of office. One of his mottos had been that the “natural resources belong to the people.” MacKaye and the Hell Raisers had taken Pinchot’s slogan to heart.
In 1915 he married the suffragist Jessie Bell Hardy Stubbs. There marriage would be a short one ending in tragedy when she took her life in 1921. MacKaye never remarried and the death haunted him for the remainder of his life, though he rarely spoke of it even with those closest to him. In the aftermath of this intense loss and in the midst of his bereavement, the idea for what became his greatest accomplishment came to him, a vision for the Appalachian Trail. He was 42 years old and his destiny stretched ahead of him. He was like a thru hiker, and even though he was down low in the valley, he had the will to keep going and see what was up ahead of him on the next crest after he passed through the valley.
He first proposed the Appalachian Trail in Journal of the American Institute of Architects as a project of regional planning. It was a bold critique of the direction headed by industrial capitalism. MacKaye saw the way communities and natural places were being unraveled by the boom of machinery, and the way political jurisdictions cut across the landscape without accounting for the natural markers of watershed and ridgeline. The trail would connect the rural to the urban in a mutually supportive way, rather than as a mere drain on the countryside by the city. Its creation would be of some benefit to the depressed conditions of small towns in the hills of Appalachia. Where the mountains passed through the eastern side of the country and into New England it would be a boon to nearby small cities. Walking the trail would be a way to escape the “hecticness” of life under the gun of money grubbing profiteers. As such their would public shelter camps along the way, maintained freely by the public, and operated without being relegated to bottom lines or profits.
MacKaye knew he was on to a big idea, one that could potentially have a lot of support from a wide range of people, but he had a lot of fear about the possibility of it being implemented, this vision of a trail that stretched across the mountains between Georgia and Maine. Some of the reasons he had for building the trail, were due to his family background, their bohemianism, and the related realm of radical politics he was steeped in. MacKaye had a lot of fear about his vision and how it would be implemented. There was always the problem of being labeled a dangerous socialist which might put the kibosh on his the creative plan kindled in both his heart and head.
Despite the fear, MacKaye utilized his considerable talents for organization, and he lived to see the completion of his massive project. He had unique skill in bringing people and ideas together, and the entire process mimicked his burgeoning philosophy of “geotechnics” using small parts and small groups to make larger positive changes in the landscape and across society. In sixteen years the 2,200 miles of trail was finished, but it was during the first opening salvo of that massive effort that MacKaye found himself involved with a group who would make practical inroads in their critique of the way roads were being built in America and of how those roads affected our communities.
NEW EXPLORATIONS AND THE TOWNLESS HIGHWAY
The Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA) was formed by Clarence Stein, who’d become an early adopter of MacKaye’s vision and helped boost the profile of the project. Stein was an architect and planner who’d been caught up in the vision of the garden cities movement promoted by Ebenzer Howard and inspired by Edward Bellamy. The RPAA would count MacKaye as member, as well as Lewis Mumford. Mumford had been making a name for himself as a writer with his 1922 book The Story of Utopias, which detailed their history in the imagination of the West following the line from Plato’s Republic, to Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, Tomasso Campanella’s City of the Sun, the utopian science fiction of H. G. Wells, and on up to Bellamy and the version of Boston he presented in Looking Backwards.
The Story of Utopias was originally published by Boni & Liverwright. It was the same year they published T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. World War I was only just behind, leaving its wasteland of bloodied trenches across Europe. In America the result was another psychic wasteland. 53,402 American soldiers died in battle, never to come home to their mothers, wives, children. Even more died indirectly through accidents and disease, a stunning 63,114 souls. Eliot approached the horrific shocks of the 21st century through a modernist mythopoesis. Mumford wanted to see what these imaginary utopias could teach us if people worked on a practical level to bring the ideals into reality. He argued that there were two kinds of utopia, one of escape and one of reconstruction. He wasn’t looking for the utopia where escape from our choices and humanity is somehow absolved. He wanted to use utopia as a vision that people could take action on and move towards. The world itself may be forever imperfect, and the people in it, but by humans and nature could both flourish and be mutually enhanced in the right environments and situations. These environments and situations could be created.
Mumford’s ideas resonated strongly with MacKaye’s, just as MacKaye’s did with Stein’s. Henry Wright was another architect and planner who went on to work with Stein on designing the Sunnyside Gardens neighborhood in the Queens borough of New York City. A lot of the funding for the project came from Alexander Bing. The project incorporated Howard’s garden city ideas over a 77 acre site of low-rise buildings oriented towards the pedestrian citizen. Green spaces were built right into the walkable neighborhood that had space for families to live and grow. The landscape architect Marjorie Sewell Cautley was also involved.
Stein, MacKaye, Wright and Bing formed the core of the RPAA and gathered around them the other people who would further its aims. This diverse group of friends made a critical examination of the city, collaborated on the development and dissemination of ideas, and got involved in the politics of building.
Stimulated by the success of his Appalachian Trail project and the association he had with these minds, and encouraged by Mumford, MacKaye began work on his own book The New Exploration: A Philosophy of Regional Planning that was published in 1928.
MacKaye rightly saw cars as one of the biggest threats to the protection of the countryside. As most cars belonged to city slickers, he devoted a chapter of his book to “Controlling the Metropolitan Invasion.” He looked at roads like they were waterways. “Rivers of Asphalt.” A stream of water from a dam that wasn’t being properly regulated would destroy the surrounding trees and wildlife. A flow of cars from the reservoirs of the cities, and the haphazard creation of roads, would destroy nature. His Appalachian Trail project was one to put a “dam across the metropolitan flood.” It was a way to limit development around the natural areas soon to be protected by the trail.
His work with the RPAA led to other papers and projects designed to put limits and controls on the metropolitan invasion and control the flow and movement of the population into America’s recreational areas. The first result was an article he wrote called “The Townless Highway” first published in The New Republic in March, 1930. It was in the main a critique of the way the car was going to change the landscape of the country if something wasn’t done to prevent it, and the main idea was to have roads that did not go through existing communities. When new communities were to be created, speedy motorways were not going to go through them. He had seen the way the railroads had gutted out the centers of cities with their expansive yards, and the way railroad towns popped up on spokes at various distances from the main hubs. He didn’t want the car to impact the urban or rural land in the same way.
This would set the precedent of abolishing “the motor slum, or roadtown, and develop the rural wayside environment.” In practice this looked like villages and small cities within a region, protected by the natural barriers of hills, mountains, rivers or wetlands and the like, connected by electricity and “open way” roads to the other areas. There might be farms or small cottage dwellings here and there along the “open ways” but there wouldn’t be any factories, offices, or any other kind of building that would be better suited to life in a village or small city. Regional planning done in this manner would prevent the cancerous urbanoid growth of “continuous tunnels of structures.” Access to nature would be enhanced by those living in the villages and small cities. Driving would be safer because of the lack of pedestrians near the road and turn off points to “motor slums” where drivers have to navigate the traffic of other vehicles. The small city and village life would also be enhanced by their density, walkability, and being built on the human scale, not built with cars foremost in mind.
MacKaye followed up this paper with a detailed study he did for the Massachusetts Trustees of Reservations. This was a private body dedicated to getting donations of land to use for the public good. MacKaye’s idea for the Bay Circuit was to connect up a system of parks beyond the metropolitan area of Boston in a circumferential road that would go around the city. With limited entryways and exits, and limited numbers of restaurants, service stations and other developments, it was to be a way of connecting the motorized citizen to the world of nature. The sacrifices on the part of nature would be minimal, and the rewards to humankind would be great.
The Bay Circuit would be, in the words of Lewis Mumford, “a metropolitan recreation belt with a northbound motor road forming an arc on the inner flank and a southbound road on the outer flank—the two roads separated by a wide band of usable parkland, with footpaths and bicycle paths for recreation. In reducing MacKaye’s conception to Route 128, without the greenbelt and without public control of the areas adjacent to the highway, the ‘experts’ shrank the multi-purpose Bay Circuit into the typical ‘successful’ expressway: so successful in attracting industry and business from the center of the city that it already ceases to perform even its own limited functions of fast transportation, except during hours of the day when ordinary highways would serve almost as well. This, in contrast to MacKaye’s scheme, is a classic example of how not to do it.”
MacKaye later lamented the fact that the his ideas were not used in this area, and what became Route 128 was “choked with development.”
Attract industry and business it certainly did. Route 128 exploded with technical industry in the booming years following WWII, becoming a highway of the modern world.
Anthony Flint, a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, called the area “Silicon Valley before there was a Silicon Valley.” The farmland that would have sat between the parks and public greenspaces envisioned by Mackaye ended up becoming industrial parks as the land was bought up by a variety of tech corporations ready to pursue postwar growth. Saruman had once again raided the Shire. In the wreckage he erects Satanic mills of industry. Concord became discord.
At least the people in the suburbs didn’t have to commute very far to get to their civilization wrecking centers of industry.
RE/SOURCES:
This article would have been much tougher to research and write without the book and website of Larry Anderson. In particular his biography, Benton MacKaye: Conservationist, Planner, and Creator of the Appalachian Trail published by John Hopkins University Press in 2002 and his website Peculiar Work which contains many articles about MacKaye, among other interesting topics.
MacKaye’s own book The New Exploration, while somewhat dated to the ear of today’s nonfiction reader, contains many insights and ideas that may prove useful to the psychohistorians and psychogeographers of today and tomorrow.
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In next weeks segment we will explore the M.ilitary I.ndustrial T.emplate and the way Route-128 excited the fertile imagination of Jonathan Richman as we move along the roadrunner not taken.
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Almost wish I didn't read this as it is heartbreaking on what could have been if the Bay Circuit had been implemented...