By Lea Kahn, Staff Writer
It is known as the Disabled American Veterans Highway, Lawrence Road, the Lincoln Highway, Main Street, the Trenton-Princeton Road and Lawrenceville Road as it passes through Lawrence Township but to most travelers, U.S. Route 206 is just U.S. Route 206.
Lawrence Township Historian Dennis Waters outlined the history of U.S. Route 206 from its earliest days as an Indian trail to the modern-day highway at the Lawrence Historical Society’s annual meeting Sunday afternoon.
U.S. Route 206 begins just over the Pennsylvania border in Milford, Pa., and rambles 130 miles south through cities, towns and the Pine Barrens to Hammonton, Mr. Waters said. But the focus of the discussion is on the seven-mile stretch of Route 206 that runs through Lawrence Township.
Native American Indian trails were the foundation of early Colonial roads, Mr. Waters said. The Indian trail that became U.S. Route 206 was not much more than a footpath that could accommodate travelers moving in single file, much as the Lenni Lenape Indians had moved for many centuries. Travelers were almost always accompanied by an Indian guide because the path was not well marked.
The current route of today’s U.S. Route 206 grew out of an order issued by Colonial authorities to the residents of Maidenhead Lawrence Township’s original name to lay out a road from the Province Line to the Assunpink Creek in 1697.
”This was the first official mention of the road in public records,” Mr. Waters said. “The road, such as it was, was completed in 1698. By 1761, it was sufficiently important that the Legislature named it as one of only three roads in the province that were never to have their routes tampered with.”
Mr. Waters also pointed out that U.S. Route 206 has the distinction of being one of the few roads used by four armies during the Revolutionary War the British, the Hessians, the Americans and the French.
The British, Hessian and American troops marched up and down U.S. Route 206 in January 1777 on their way to fight the Second Battle of Trenton and the Battle of Princeton, which turned the tide for the Americans.
Fast forward to 1781, and Count Rochambeau and his French expeditionary force of 5,000 soldiers joined Gen. George Washington’s troops on the way to Yorktown, Va., to try to trap Lord Cornwallis and his army, Mr. Waters said. The British surrendered at Yorktown.
After the Revolutionary War, Route 206 evolved into a major road between New York City and Philadelphia, he said. Gen. Washington passed through Lawrence on Route 206, en route to his first inauguration in New York in 1789.
”I think it is fair to say that for a period of about 50 years, anyone who traveled between New York and Philadelphia passed through Maidenhead along today’s U.S. Route 206. We may not have specific instances, but the odds are good that most of the Founding Fathers were among them,” Mr. Waters said.
But with the advent of the turnpike, or toll road, and then the railroad and the Delaware & Raritan Canal, Route 206 fell out of favor as the main north-south road between New York City and Philadelphia, Mr. Waters said.
The “turnpike,” by the way, was not the New Jersey Turnpike it was the Trenton-New Brunswick Straight Turnpike, better known as Brunswick Pike or U.S. Route 1.
Route 206 suffered from neglect, but starting in the late 1800s, “pressure began to build for governments to invest in good roads,” Mr. Waters said.
In 1891, the Legislature passed a law that provided for the state to pay one-third of the cost of road improvements. The balance was picked up by property owners who had frontage on the road and by the counties. The transformation of Route 206 from a dirt road to a macadam one through Lawrence was completed by 1896.
With the dawn of the automobile age in the early 1900s, an Indianapolis entrepreneur thought there should be one road that connected New York and San Francisco, he said. The Lincoln Highway, as the coast-to-coast road was named, included Route 206 as the first leg of the road.
”The Lincoln Highway as an entity ceased operation in 1927, a victim of its own success,” he said. But the Lincoln Highway spurred the federal government into action.
Actually, the state and federal government the state, which passed legislation providing for bond referendums to raise money to pave roads, and the federal government, which passed the Federal Highway Act of 1916. Both provided funding to pave Route 206 and other important roads in the state, Mr. Waters said.
The status of Route 206 as a major north-south road has flip-flopped many times, Mr. Waters said. It is not a major north-south road now, and the township would be happy to keep it that way, he said, noting that township officials “fought vigorously” when the state hinted it would like to widen the road to four lanes in the 1960s.
But Lawrence Township could not fend off the creation of an interchange on Route 206 from I-95, which occurred in the 1970s. The result is a significant increase in traffic on Route 206 north of the interchange, to the tune of about 16,000 to 17,000 cars per day, he said.
Township officials have worked hard to preserve the character of Route 206, Mr. Waters said. A segment of the road, from Franklin Corner Road north through Princeton and Kingston, has been declared the King’s Highway Historic District effectively preventing future road builders from tinkering with it, he said. It is listed on the state and national Registers of Historic Places.
The road south of Franklin Corner Road is ineligible for such protection because it has lost most of its historic character, Mr. Waters said, adding that while the 7-mile-long stretch of Route 206 through Lawrence “is not uniformly beautiful, it does manage to reflect something more essential about our town.”
”When you think about what makes a community, think about this. In those seven miles, we have our town hall, a fire station, two cemeteries, a university, a corporate research center, two nurseries, two secondary schools, one primary school, a rehabilitation hospital, four houses of worship, two golf courses and at least 11 names (for the road).”
”And we also have 400 years of remarkable history,” Mr. Waters said.
