An International Study of American Roads

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An International Study of American Roads Produced: 1932

Description This moving image includes T.H. MacDonald, Chief, Bureau of Public Roads, who introduces the picture. Reel 1 shows Government buildings in Washington, D.C.; Mount Vernon and the Mt. Vernon Memorial Highway under construction; maps showing the route followed by the touring international delegates; buses leaving Washington, D.C., and passing through Miami, Florida, and St. Simons Island, Georgia; antebellum mansions in the South; and a Black boy dancing. Reel 2 shows views of North Carolina's Great Smoky Mountains; Virginia's Natural Bridge; Philadelphia's Independence Hall; Valley Forge; the Philadelphia-Camden toll bridge; the Holland Tunnel; the New York City skyline and crowds in the city; the recently completed Empire State Building; airplanes over the George Washington Bridge; boulevards in Westchester County; the Boston Post Road to New York City; Niagara Falls; Duluth, Minnesota, and iron mines nearby; a school children's pageant honoring the delegates; a war dance performed by Sac Indians In Iowa; Chicago's Lake Shore Drive; a University of Michigan football game in Ann Arbor; the Dodge Auto plant in Detroit; and the Detroit-Windsor tunnel. Reel 3 maps the interrelation between Federal and State roads using North Carolina roads as an example. Charts depict the growth of auto registrations, 1900-1930. The moving image also shows the hand construction of roads, types of road machinery, and a concrete road under construction. In reel 4, a road bed is prepared and a dirt road graded. A picture sequence shows a car mired in dirt road in 1918, a gravel road in 1920, a bituminous road in 1925, and a concrete highway in 1930. Includes panoramic views of bridges, highways, and traffic. Reel 5 shows types of vehicles using the roads, a motel, a congested highway outside a city, a horse race, a Greyhound bus in motion, and the loading of furniture into a van. Reel 6 shows the truck transport of goods from a railroad station, livestock in trucks, the loading of vegetables into a truck, solid-tired milk trucks, highways of various widths, banked curves and guard rails, over and underpasses, roads in Indiana, Florida, and Ohio, a motorcycle police patrol, a patrolman unsnarling a traffic jam, snowplows in action, the Statue of Liberty, and the U.S. Marine Corps band.

https://catalog.archives.gov/id/7364

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Internet Archive, in FedFlix: US government films

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National Archives

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