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Acorduroy road orlog road is a type of road ortimber trackway made by placing logs, perpendicular to the direction of the road over a low or swampy area. This is an improvement from mud or dirt roads, which are impassable. However, they are still rough in the best of conditions, and the shifting logs can pose a hazard for horses.
Corduroy roads can also be built as a foundation for other surfacing. If the logs are buried in wet, acidic, anaerobic soils such aspeat ormuskeg, theydecay very slowly. A few corduroy road foundations that date back to the early 20th century still exist in North America. One example is theAlaska Highway betweenBurwash Landing andKoidern, Yukon, Canada, which was rebuilt in 1943, less than a year after the original route was graded on thin soil and vegetation overpermafrost, by using corduroy, then building a gravel road on top. During the 1980s, the gravel was covered with achip-seal. The late 1990s saw replacement of this road with modern road construction, including rerouting of the entire highway.
In World War II corduroyed roads were used by both German and Soviet forces on theEastern Front.[1]
In slang use, corduroy road can also refer to a road in ill repair, having manypotholes, ruts, or surface swellings. This should not be confused with awashboard road.
The earliest recorded use of a corduroy road in England was during the Norman attack on Saxon resistance leaderHereward the Wake who had taken refuge in the marshes on the Isle of Ely. Two contemporary sources say that the Normans built a corduroy road one mile long to try to reach him in 1071 but eventually succeeded in their attack using treachery.[citation needed]
Corduroy roads were used extensively in theAmerican Civil War between Shiloh and Corinth after theBattle of Shiloh,[2] and inSherman's march through the Carolinas.[3]
In the Pacific Northwest, roads built of spaced logs similar to widely spaced "army track"[4] were the mainstay of locallogging practices and were calledskid roads. Two of these, respectively on the outskirts of the mill towns ofSeattle andVancouver, which had become concentrations of bars andlogger's slums, were the origin of the more widespread meaning of "skid road" and its derivativeskid row, referring to a poor area.
Hull's Trace North Huron River Corduroy Segment is a section of corduroy road inBrownstown, Michigan that is on public display at theRiver Raisin National Battlefield Park.[5] This segment is the only known extant portion of Hull's Trace, a military road that was built at the beginning of theWar of 1812 fromUrbana, Ohio, toDetroit.[6]
By the early 1800s, a corduroy road had been built along what is now King Street inWaterloo, Ontario in Canada; its remains were unearthed under the roadway in 2016. The road was probably built byMennonite settlers between the late 1790s and 1816.[7][8] A historian explained that the road had been built for access to a mill but was also "one of the first roads cut through (the woods) so people could start settling the area".[9]
The puncheon orplank road uses hewn boards instead of logs, resulting in a smoother and safer surface.
The name "corduroy road" refers to the road's ridged appearance similar tocorduroy fabric.[10]
The short filmMilitary Roads (1943) is available for free viewing and download at theInternet Archive.