That was the "Staunton and James River Turnpike" which one of my distant neighbors thought too long for an address to put on an envelope. We ended up with "Plank Road", the first paving material used on the turnpike. Rain generally made it impassable for a wagon before that.
I was fortunate that the guy we bought our land from had books on the history of the road to give me.
Did you use the cable ferry (Hatton Ferry) just upstream from Scottsville? Pretty sure it's still operating.
The James is still the best route from Howardsville to Scottsville, usually canoe or innertube now. Howardsville is where the Rockfish River flows into the James. Rockfish Gap is where the turnpike went over the Blue Ridge, as do US 250 and I 64 today. We live at Israel's Gap, through the Ragged Mountains. The road at the Gap was re-routed a bit in the 1930's by a chain gang. Asphalt came along several decades later.
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Today's Featured Article - Self-Starting Tractor - McCormick 10-20 - by Francis J. Robinson. I remember it very clearly even though it was almost 50 years ago and I was only about seven years old. My Dad had purchased a new Ford-Ferguson tractor and basic set of implements when he started farming just about the beginning of W.W.II. It was considered a pretty nice outfit for their 70 acre central Indiana grain and livestock farm. Dad spent several years during the war testing aircraft engines at Allison Engineering in Indianapolis working seven days a week on a twelve hour night sh
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