

Lost Highways: Old roads in Vermont - Thevet
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2015/07/lost-highways.html

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kozak_
Unless I'm misunderstanding, the old gentleman is looking for roads that no
one uses and are unusable to add to an official Vermont map?

What is the practical aspect to this if the entire point of the Act was to
clean up the legal landscape from unused roads?

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CamperBob2
The subtext is somewhat, well, infuriating. Reading between the lines, it's
almost impossible to build anything new in Vermont if your property is crossed
by a road that hasn't been used as a road for a hundred years and can no
longer even be seen without advanced imaging technology.

Maybe I spent too much time as a kid watching _Star Trek_ and not enough time
watching _Little House on the Prairie_ , but this kind of misplaced reverence
for the past seems downright silly, not to mention obstructive.

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Blackthorn
Some people in Vermont find that to be Working As Intended. Luckily if you
want to build, there's a state next door that it's easier to do so in.

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CamperBob2
Yep, which is great if you knew about this policy when you were choosing where
to live.

My suspicion is that most homeowners had/have no idea.

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regehr
One of my favorite things is an old highway in Kansas that emerges from a
reservoir that was created in the 1960s and then drops back into the water a
short distance away. It's in an out-of-the-way location and we used to go sit
on the pavement and drink beer when I was in high school.

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Thevet
Related article in the New Yorker:
[http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/where-the-roads-
have-...](http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/where-the-roads-have-no-name)

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agumonkey
The linked 1841 Belgian atlas is surprisingly detailed
[http://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=fd9c2c3...](http://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=fd9c2c30ba3c40b7a240cb947f9ddcf9&extent=4.5853,50.4688,6.4572,51.5187)

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markbnj
I don't know how unusual Vermont is in this regard. Many of the states on the
East Coast have old roadways on their maps. Southern New Jersey's Pine Barrens
are a case in point, as is the Delaware Water Gap area in the state's
Northwest.

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bobochan
My in-laws live in western Massachusetts and I always wondered why the name of
their small residential street suddenly changes halfway down the road. The
story is that there was an old county road that used to intersect that street
years ago, and the law said that each segment of road intersected by a county
road had to have a unique name. The road is long gone, but the impact remains.

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theseatoms
Disclaimer: "ancient" = "surveyed in the 1790s"

Edit: For some reason, I was hoping for a catalog of American Indian trails.
Otherwise, pretty interesting article.

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astrodust
Same! Reminds me of the old adage: "Americans need to learn a hundred years is
not a long time just like Europeans need to learn a hundred miles is not a
long distance."

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ceejayoz
I have family in Switzerland who, IIRC, are living in a ~700 year old farm
house that doesn't qualify as historic because it's not old enough (too many
other similarly old farm houses for it to be considered rare enough to
protect).

Meanwhile, my parents considered an "historic" house in Ohio from around 1900.

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repiret
I once heard that while in the United States, 100 years is a long time, in
Europe, 100 miles is a long distance.

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ceejayoz
Maybe you heard it in the comment I was replying to?

