[PRCo]

[Schneider Fred]

HOW ABOUT THIS FOR A NICE PICTURE?  THE ONE WAY AT THE BOTTOM OF MY  
BOOK. (THE ONE THAT
I HOPE DERRICK'S SYSTEM ENCODED SO YOU CAN SEE IT.)
It's the Toll House on the Perrysville Plank Road  at West View,  
later known as Perrysville Avenue or U. S. Route 19.
I like the picture because it shows why the trolleys were so  
popular ... they were a whole lot faster than a horse and
buggy on a muddy rutted road.

When the trolleys were first run up Observatory Hill, the road above  
Federal Street was still known as the Perrysville
Plank Road.   That was 1886.

Toll roads were more common in "olden times" than they are today.    
Pike Street through Canonsburg and Houston
simply is a holdover from its days as a turnpike from Washington to  
Pittsburgh.

They were probably more common in the east than they were farther west.

In Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, my home, every single road leading  
out of the city of Lancaster was a toll road
  at one time.   The traction company was able to obtain rights-of- 
ways rather easily simply by leasing the turnpike
companies and then building along the shoulder of their existing  
roads.  When the state decided the free the toll
roads in the teens and twenties, they forced to pay off Conestoga  
Traction Company for imagined future profits
from the turnpikes.  They may have been a more profitable asset than  
the trolleys!   Well, not quite.  (In the 1920s
and 1930s the public expected more than a dirt toll road and the  
costs were much higher.)

I have an 1898 atlas to Lancaster County.   It shows all the toll  
booths.   I counted over 100 of them on that atlas.
You could not sneak around a toll booth by coming out one road, go  
around to another road, and back because
all the toll roads but their booths at the same crossroads out of the  
city.

The last road made free was the Lancaster and New Holland Turnpike in  
1930.   However, every single one of
the highways extending out of the city of Lancaster preserves a  
simplified version of the earlier name.   I live about
feet off the Lititz Pike (the old Lancaster and Lititz Turnpike).   A  
mile to my west is the Fruitville Pike.   A mile to the
east is the Oregon Pike.  And so forth as you go around the city.

In the middle 1920s a man named Schwartz bought an old home on the  
Fruitville Pike south of Delp Road, about 3 miles
north of Lancaster.   His son Bill (my age) told me some great  
stories about his dad a year ago.   When he bought the
old farm house it was infested with bugs and Bill said the way to  
kill them was with kerosene.   So dad came out with
two five gallon cans of kerosene on the Manheim streetcar.   He got  
off at the village of Fruitville (about ten houses) and
then walked south a quarter mile with the two five gallon cans to his  
new home.   Another time, in a snow storm, he was
being gracious and plowing snow off the highway.   But the toll  
collector of the Lancaster and Fruitville Turnpike demanded
a toll from him.   They got into an argument and the old man told him  
he could plow his own snow off the highway.
(All the idiots are not living today ... there were some in the past  
too.)   It was sometime before the road became free in
October 1928.

And an old high school teacher of mine, best remembered for how bad  
he was as a teacher, did tell us once about
how you evaded the tolls on the Lancaster and New Holland Turnpike.    
He said if you went to visit friends in New
Holland, you simply stayed out until after eleven o'clock.   By then  
the toll collectors had gone to bed and you could
come back home free of charge.   (My sister on this e-mail will  
remember Casper Kreider.)

Some of the toll houses were actually erected in the streets.   I  
have a picture of one that sat in the right-of-way of what
is now the Lincoln Highway just west of the Pennsylvania Railroad  
bridge in Leaman Place, Pennsylvania.   Well,
some might call it Paradise and I guess it doesn't matter because  
neither are incorporated.   "It's as close as some of
us will ever get to paradise."   Naturally, when the state bought  
that road in 1918, that building disappeared.

But some of the toll houses remain.   One just opposite the end of  
Delp Road on the Lititz Pike appeared on the
traction company's property inventory in 1925.   Even though the  
state paid CTC $20,000 for its leasehold on the
highway in 1926, the trolley company still had some toll houses they  
could sell.   I wonder if the owners have a clue
why their building is ten feet off a state highway????

So much for reminiscing.

Got to get to bed so I can see the modules at the East Penn show in  
Oaks tomorrow.



Fred Schneider




Title: Perrysville Plank Road Toll House at West View
Date: unknown
Creator: Charles F. Roth
Description: In 1849 a group of businessmen organized a company to  
develop the Perrysville and Zelienople Turnpike or "Plank Road."  
Planked roads at that time had timber planking laid across low-lying  
stretches so horses and wagons could travel easily during rainy  
weather. The route of the Plank Road appears to have paralleled and  
in some places crisscrossed the Pittsburgh-Mercer Road (opened in  
1805). The route from Warrendale north followed Dutilh Road (old  
Perry Highway) to the present site of the Doyle Equipment Company.  
 From there the road forked off from the Pittsburgh-Mercer Road to  
merge into what is now Route 19 north to North Boundary Road. The  
businessmen soon discovered that operating a turnpike was more  
demanding than collecting tolls and raising and lowering tollgates.  
Maintenance costs, toll-keeper wages, and other expenses eventually  
forced their company into bankruptcy.
Subjects: Perrysville Plank Road (West View, Pa.)
Perrysville Plank Road Toll House (West View, Pa.)
Roads, Plank--Pennsylvania--West View.
Collection Number: MSP285.B012.F02.I01
Collection: Allegheny Conference on Community Development, Historical  
Society of Western Pennsylvania
Copyright: HSWP Use and Restrictions
Ordering Reproductions: Information; Allegheny Conference on  
Community Development (HSWP)