Florida had few roads during the territorial period. Even its best roads, classified in 1839 by David Burr, Geographer to the U.S. House of Representatives, as "four-horse mail post coach roads," were mainly sandy gashes through the forest. Drivers of wheeled vehicles had to avoid stumps and to depend on ferries at all river crossings. Most travel was on foot or horseback.
Roads were improved and new roads constructed very gradually over the following seventy-five years. Construction and maintenance were strictly county responsibilities. Short and isolated stretches of improved roads were surfaced with brick, shell, limerock, or clay.
Rapid changes in the state's roads began in 1915 with the establishment of a state road department. Federal aid for roads over which mail would move was authorized in 1916. The state road department was directed in 1917 to establish an intercity network of state highways. A massive highway construction program began in the 1920s, and by 1938 state and federal funds had built 9,000 miles of roads. Many tourists and migrants to Florida now began to arrive by automobile.
In the late 1930s the state road department constructed the first "divided two-lane type" pavement outward from Tampa toward Clearwater. Changes accelerated with the 1956 Federal Highway Act providing for high-speed, limited-access interstate highways, and the initiation of construction on the Sunshine State Parkway.
