03-03-08 | News

Ol?EUR??,,????'??? Dixie Highway Brick Still Standin?EUR??,,????'???

ABOVE & BELOW: There is still an 11-mile stretch of the Old Brick Road of the Dixie Highway left in Florida. Built in 1914, it is an example of the early highway practice of paving with vitrified bricks?EUR??,,????'??+clay bricks glazed at high temperatures to make them impervious to water and highly resistant to corrosion. This last segment of the Old Brick Road has about 2,376,000 vitrified bricks fabricated by the Graves Brick Co. The old road is on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.

 

The Dixie Highway was the first highway to link the rural American South to the urban North. Constructed from 1915 to 1926 it stretched from Sault Sainte Marie, Mich. to Miami Beach.

Florida used to have 337 miles of rural brick roads, part of the state highway system, plus an additional 389 miles of county and local brick roads.

Sixty-six miles of the Dixie Highway in Florida was brick and complete in 1916. Today, 11 miles of that brick road still exists between S.R. 204 and rural Espanola, Fla. The northern two miles of the road are in St. Johns County and the nine southern miles in Flagler County.

The road has a packed-shell foundation, a nine-foot wide brick roadbed, four-inch wide concrete curbs and three-foot wide shell shoulders. The Old Brick Road is still in good shape because that early twentieth century highway paving used vitrified brick, a production process whose high kiln temperatures fuse the clay grains and close the surface pores. That curing creates brick with a crushing strength of 8,000 to 10,000 psi.

It?EUR??,,????'???s believed the first rural brick road in the nation was built in 1893 on the Wooster Pike in Ohio.

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PCA Projects 43 Percent Growth in U.S. Cement Consumption by 2030

It is predicted the U.S. will need another 400,000 lane miles of highway by 2030 to accommodate some 43 million more drivers.

Perhaps inspired by the sport book odds makers in Vegas, the Portland Cement Association (PCA) during the World of Concrete trade show, January 21-25 at the Las Vegas Convention Center, predicted a 43 percent growth in U.S. cement consumption by 2030 to supply the housing, buildings and roads of a U.S. population projected to reach 363.5 million by that year. PCA believes annual cement consumption will hit 183 million metric tons, reflecting a 55 million metric ton increase compared to the past cyclical peak level in 2005.

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development says that apart from water, concrete is the most widely used material on Earth, which translates to each person on the planet using about three tons each year. About seven to 15 per cent of that concrete is made up of cement.