I notice road markers on Route 116 and on Branchville Road. They appear to be made of concrete and have three letters stamped on top, GHD. I believe I may have even seen one of these somewhere else around town. What are they?—L.D.
Those markers say CHD, as in Connecticut Highway Department, and mark the edge of the state highway right-of-way.
You can find theses monuments all over Ridgefield and Connecticut, along state routes, though many have been lost or destroyed. Most were installed in the 1920s and 30s when a lot of the main roads were being paved or straightened.
For nearly three centuries, creating roads was the job of towns. The problem was maintaining them after they were built. The system used in Connecticut relied on the people who owned land along the roads to take care of those roads. As might be expected, this led to problems; some people felt little or no obligation to maintain bordering roads.
This was especially troublesome as commerce began to increase, and with it, the need for reliable, intertown transportation. One answer in the 19th Century was to permit private companies to take over and maintain many existing intertown roads and to create new ones. These roads were called turnpikes and fees charged for their use — at toll stations that used turning poles or “pikes” to control passage.
In the first half of the 19th Century, Connecticut granted more than 120 turnpike franchises, including three in Ridgefield. However, turnpikes failed to make money, and by the Civil War, the system had collapsed. Maintenance again became haphazard.
In 1895, of 12,000 miles of roads in the state, only a few in cities were paved. Most people would be surprised to learn that it was not the automobile but the bicycle that inspired extensive paving. Some 2,000 “wheelmen” — as bicyclists were then called — led an 1890s crusade for highway improvements.
On July 3, 1895, the Good Roads Act was signed, and the State Highway Commission was born. The act, partly based on model legislation from the League of American Wheelmen, appointed three commissioners to oversee distribution of money to towns for road construction and ensure that proper construction techniques were employed.
Soon after, solid concrete and macadam paving came on the scene, but it wasn’t until the 1910s and 20s that such improvements reached Ridgefield, helped by the growing popularity of the automobile. The first paving, part of a state experiment, was done on the eastern end of Branchville Road around 1912. Main Street wasn’t paved until 1926.
That same year, the Connecticut Highway Department (now part of the Department of Transportation) started compiling boundary maps for major roads that were becoming state highways. CHD monuments started being installed, especially where roads were being straightened, rerouted or otherwise changed in path so folks would know where state-controlled land began.—J.S.
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