Register's Nicolson paving plan journeys through the mud and mire of Reconstruction politics

To lay pipes along Dauphin Street east of Royal Street, workers had to remove the round
wood street pavers, which can be seen stacked along the edge of the sidewalk.
The city most likely used the Nicolson pavement method, which sometimes
used round pavers instead of the usual rectangular pavers.
William E. Wilson photo, 1894-1905, Historic Mobile Preservation Society

The Mobile Register wanted the Port City to jump start its stagnant economy after the Civil War by copying civic improvements of such vibrant commercial centers as Atlanta and Nashville.

One the Register’s proposals called for getting the city out of the mud by paving some of the streets in the business district. The newspaper’s editors, downtown property owners, and many merchants believed that first-class streets would make Mobile more competitive with interior rail centers.

The paving plan ran into linked technical, financial, and political problems that illustrate the issues many Southern cities faced in trying to pave their streets. The paving plan raised questions about:

• What paving material made the best street surface
• How to fairly pay for street improvements
• The role of newspapermen and city officials in promoting economic development and also in a position to benefit from the awarding of paving contracts

Mobile, like many American cities, found unpaved streets to be a constant bother. Before the war, some visitors complained that dust filled the air during dry spells while vehicles bogged down in the mud when it rained. An English visitor in 1857 hired a carriage to get him over the muddy streets from his hotel to a steamer on the Mobile River just a few blocks away.

As the largest city in the state and Alabama’s only seaport, Mobile’s businesses required a lot of drayage of goods over city streets. Horse-drawn wagons distributed goods unloaded from trains and ships along the city’s waterfront to warehouses and businesses around the town and to country stores in the region. Teamsters drove wagons loaded with cotton, textiles, lumber, food crops, liquor, and machinery to freight stations and docks for shipment around the world. Muddy streets could bring traffic to a standstill and damage valuable goods.

Cities didn’t have good choices for paving material that they could afford until the end of the century. Gravel sank beneath muddy streets. Granite was the preferred surface, but it was expensive. Reliable asphalt and cement didn’t become available until after 1890.

Mobile used ballast discarded from ships to pave some of the streets in the wholesale warehouse district near the wharves. These cobblestone pavements were slippery in Mobile’s frequent rains and dusty when dry. Horses and carriages traveling over stone pavers made an awful racket among the buildings on the narrow streets. The cobblestones also contributed to numerous cases of horse shin splints.

Crushed oyster shells served as a paving material for some roads leading out of town. Before the Civil War, wealthy citizens who took refuge from Mobile’s yellow fever epidemics in the western resort suburb of Spring Hill, paid to have what was then called Isabella Street paved with shell.

Renamed Shell Road, it began at Broad Street in Mobile and ended at Spring Hill College. The road had to be resurfaced with shells four times a year. Toll guards collected from 25 and 50 cents from travelers, depending on their carriages or wagons, to pay for the maintenance.

Four years later, road hands built a second shell road along Mobile Bay. To distinguish it from the original, the Shell Road was renamed Old Shell Road.

In the late 1860s, Nicolson pavement, consisting of treated wood blocks, became the craze among major cities in United States and abroad. Stone and granite were scarce and wood was abundant. Horse traffic made less noise on streets surfaced with wood. Advocates of wood pointed to its quietness, cheaper cost, and comparative ease of cleaning and repair.

Wood street pavers

Using the Nicolson system, workers placed one-inch-thick pine planks, that had been coated in boiling tar, on a graded roadbed. On the coated pine planks, the road workers then placed pine blocks in regular rows, grain end up. These blocks, about 10 inches long by 4 inches wide, also had been dipped into hot tar. A narrow strip of lath placed between each row kept the wood blocks from shifting. Workers applied a final layer of hot gravel and tar, and tamped it between the crevices. This created a smooth, level surface.

In its earliest applications, Nicolson pavement had problems. The soft pine tended to absorb water and began to rot. The moisture also caused the blocks to swell and heave. Heavy traffic pounded the blocks to shreds.

Despite the problems, the wood paving remained attractive because it was quieter and cheaper than other solutions, and paving companies made technical advances in the Nicolson system. Companies infused creosote under high pressure into the pavers rather than dipping them in tar. They replaced the plank foundation with a bed of cement. Workers fitted the blocks tightly together rather than spacing them. A steam roller smoothed the surface and final steps filled the joints with sand and covered the pavement with creosote oil. New Orleans used a method similar to this before 1868.

In April 1868, property owners on Royal Street petitioned the city of Mobile to have the Mobile Paving Company surface the one block between St. Michael and St. Francis streets with Nicolson pavement. The city had the authority to improve streets at the expense of adjacent land owners. The city allocated the cost to the landowners based on how many feet of the property fronted the street.

At this point, the street paving venture got tangled up in Reconstruction politics, and the business interests of the Mobile Register’s owner William D’Alton Mann and editor John Forsyth.

When one of the petitioners withdrew his signature just before his death, his executor sued the city seeking a refund of the paving tax to the estate. The executor argued that the city taxed the property owners before it had the authority to do so under the 1868 Reconstruction constitution. The Alabama Supreme Court disagreed and ruled the city also had the authority under the post-war 1866 constitution.

Whether the single block on Royal Street got paved in this initial effort isn’t clear from the court case. But in June 1870, the Mobile Register called on the city to spend $500,000 on Nicolson pavement for some of the major streets.

The only company in the city that could take on such a project was the Mobile Paving Company, incorporated in 1868. Mann invested $10,000 in the firm and served as president. In 1868, Mann also bought the Register for $40,000.

Editor Forsyth joined Mann as an officer in the paving company, probably having been bankrolled by the Register’s new owner. Other owners of the paving company included prominent Democrats such as Gideon M. Parker, and George A. Ketchum. That they were Democrats isn’t surprising since most politically active whites were.

But opposition to the paving measure didn’t split along racial or party lines. Wealthy merchant Moses Waring led the Mobile Board of Trade to oppose the venture. African American leaders also divided over the paving plan. Alderman Lawrence S. Berry endorsed the proposal, while Philip Joseph opposed it.

At the urging of the Register, the city had already committed itself to financing two railroad ventures and improving the harbor. Mann didn’t just champion railroads, he invested in building them, including one of those looking for backing from the city. He and Forsyth aggressively promoted this and other personal interests in the newspaper. They could reasonable argue, and did, that these ventures also benefited the economic development of the city.

Opponents of the paving measure worried that the city could not afford more debt. They pointed to the experience of Memphis. In 1866, city of Memphis contracted to pave 11 miles of streets with Nicolson pavement. The pavement soon began to deteriorate, leaving the city with a heavy debt and poor streets.

Critics of the Mobile proposal also questioned the fairness of taxing all citizens for improvements that would benefit only one part of the city. That criticism also struck at Forsyth, who had opposed protective tariffs that cost the South to the benefit of the North. It also underlined the charge that Forsyth and Mann now supported taxing others because they would personally benefit from the paving project.

The city set June 11 for a public vote on the paving venture. Both sides held rallies and money flowed freely to buy support or opposition not only among voters but also among public officials. Greasing the wheels of public debate with the essential oil of money was a commonly accepted practice at the time. But the custom added to the general perception of corruption during Reconstruction.

If not outspent, the supporters of paving venture were certainly outvoted, even though paving backers widely stuffed ballot boxes. The referendum failed by a vote of 3,960 to 1,370. More than 7 out of 10 voters said “no” to the project. A Register editorial complained that Mobile was being “held down and back in the race of progress.”

Exposed wood pavers on Franklin Street
north of St. Francis Street. 
Photo courtesy of Larry Bell

The failure of the paving venture proved temporary. Nicolson pavement eventually covered several miles of downtown streets. But most streets remained dirt. Even as late as 1915, the city had permanently paved only 38.5 miles of its 160 miles of streets. Another 35 miles were hardened streets. Nicolson wood blocks accounted for more than half of the paving materials used, followed by asphalt and vitrified brick.

Neither financing of paved streets nor railroads had the desired effect on the city’s economic growth. Mobile declined in rank among both American and Southern cities as its economy and population failed to keep up with the growth of other cities. Mobile dropped from being the fourth largest Southern city behind New Orleans, Charleston and Richmond in 1860 to being the fifth largest city in 1870 and eighth largest in 1880.

Mobile’s leaders saw that the South’s successful new cities especially had good railroads and roads. They believed that these facilities caused economic growth and aimed to get them for Mobile. But they got cause-and-effect backwards. It was the demands of economic growth that brought the infrastructure into existence. A dynamic marketplace provided what people needed and wanted. 

Sources

Wrenn, Lynette B. “’Get the City out of the Mud and Mire,’ Financing Street Improvements in Post-Civil War Memphis.” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 47, no. 1 (1988): 17-26. Accessed July 17, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/42626702. 

Harriet E. Amos, Cotton City: Urban Development in Antebellum Mobile. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1985), 140. 

“Irwin v. Mayor, &c. of Mobile,” Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Alabama During December Term, 1876, and Part of December Term, 1877, Vol. LVII (Montgomery: Joel White, 1879), 6-14. 

Michael W. Fitzgerald, Urban Emancipation: Popular Politics in Reconstruction Mobile, 1860-1890. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002), 155-156. 

Lonnie A. Burnett, The Pen Makes a Good Sword: John Forsyth of the Mobile Register. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), 166-168. 

Harper’s Weekly Journal of Civilization, New York, September 6, 1866. 

Dianne Timblin, “History on the Road, Cleveland’s Hessler Court,” Forest History Today, Spring 2008, 51-55. 

Nicolson Pavement, https://chicagology.com/prefire/prefire011 

Ryan J. Reed, “The Creosoted Wood Block: One Step in the Evolution of St. Louis Paving,” Landmarks Association of St. Louis, Inc. 

“The Nicolson Pavement, New Orleans Crescent, July 25, 1868 3:1 

“Mobile in a Muddle,” Eufaula Daily Times June 30, 1870, 1