Smith Mill Road
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Nine Foot Road (Smith Mill Road)
1928. White Clay Creek State Park; intersects Thompson Station Rd. northwest of Paper Mill Rd.
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(Photograph by Matthew Aungst) -
(Photograph by Matthew Aungst)
The nine-foot-wide road of concrete, recently restored, is the last survivor of several funded by the state highway department during 1928–1933. Atop a dirt track of the 1870s, the George Lynch Company of Wilmington poured a continuous ribbon of cement, seven inches thick. Rubber-tired vehicles could use the concrete; metal-wheeled ones, the wide shoulder. At the north, it terminates into a never-paved, vehicle-free road, now the Tri-Valley Trail, which offers a stroll along an antebellum route through unspoiled countryside. A quarter-mile east, the trail crosses another early-nineteenth-century road, now largely overgrown. Not so long ago, all Delaware roads resembled these.
Writing Credits
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Data
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Location: Newark, DelawareRegional Overviews:Styles:Materials:
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Citation
W. Barksdale Maynard, "Nine Foot Road (Smith Mill Road)", [Newark, Delaware], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/DE-01-NK2.
Print Source
Buildings of Delaware, W. Barksdale Maynard. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008, 175-175.
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