At the time it seemed like it was taking forever to get those new interstate highways built to connect the Upper Valley to what many people considered the rest of the world. Six-plus decades ago travel to Concord, Boston, Hartford, New York City or Montpelier and Burlington was an arduous undertaking over two-lane roads where on a good day one might average 45 miles per hour.

It would take about a dozen years for those new four-lane asphalt ribbons to be completed, and the segment-by-segment march was like a drawn-out tease. First came I-89 from Concord to Hopkinton and I-91 from the Massachusetts border to Brattleboro, then would come six- and seven-mile pieces getting closer and closer to Lebanon and White River Junction. Each successive opening would dump traffic onto an old two-lane road, triggering almost universal ‘hurry up and get those new roads done’ emotions among drivers.

It would be the same step-by-step crawl as the two interstates advanced steadily north from White River Junction toward the Canadian border, with similar impatience for getting the work done and the new roads opened up.

But looking back now, the completion of these massive public works projects in just a little more than a decade has to be considered an amazing achievement. But it certainly couldn’t be replicated today, either. The layout of those new corridors was easy — Washington stipulated that they connect major population centers and defense establishments, and the states were left to figure out the exact path they would follow.

Much of the real estate needed for rights-of-way could be acquired cheaply, as rural land in both states in the early 1960s was trading for as little as $10 an acre, and owners who either didn’t want to sell, or who thought they should receive a lot more money for the land to be taken, consistently were beaten down by the government agents in negotiations or in the courts. Individuals, neighborhoods, communities — for the most part they were either accepting or resigned toward the approaching construction juggernaut.

There simply wasn’t the kind of Nimbyism that bubbles up for construction projects of most any size today. So once the necessary land was acquired and the design and engineering were finished projects could be put out to bid and contracts awarded in just a few weeks. Most jobs went to big regional construction outfits like Perini and Palazzi that were scaled up and ready to go once their bids were accepted.

Post-World War II advances in construction methods and machinery enabled a new approach to roadbuilding. Instead of having to work around obstacles like hills, swamps and ledge outcrops, the ‘cut and fill’ system took over and allowed contractors to slice through terrain, moving dirt and stone with bulldozers, earth movers and huge dump trucks from higher grades to fill in ravines and wet areas. Modern pneumatic drills and advanced blasting strategies shaved down ledge obstructions quickly. And, yes, there wasn’t a great deal of regulation of wetlands and alteration of the landscape to slow down the advance of the road construction enterprise. That would come in the 1970s and greatly complicate, and often stall, the process of building new roads. New Hampshire’s last major four-lane highway construction undertaking, Route 101 from Manchester to Hampton in the 1980s, took years for design alone as the state had to work through complex wetland mitigation, environmental impact and other regulatory minefields, both state and federal.

Bridge construction was a major aspect of the construction of New Hampshire and Vermont interstate highways. And here again the pace of building and completing spans over rivers and streams, railroads and secondary highways was remarkably fast by today’s standards. The twin bridges on I-89 over the Connecticut River between West Lebanon and White River Junction took less than 18 months between award of contract and opening to traffic. The high-level I-91 bridge over the White River at Hartford featured steel workers from the Iroquois Nation who built it in less than 12 months.

The fast-paced road construction timetables of the 1960s are but memories today. Witness the widening of I-93 from Manchester to the Massachusetts border, now well into its second decade with plenty more work yet to be done. And our impatience for completion of the interstates more than half a century ago seems quaint today.

Steve Taylor, former New Hampshire agriculture commission and former Valley News editor, lives in Meriden.

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