Alphabetized Roads

You may have noticed that the roads in Arthurdale are named for almost all of the letters of the alphabet, from “A” to “Z’. This was common in many planned communities which needed to name a group of new streets in the past and to avoid controversy or disputes. The roads in Arthurdale also may have taken their naming pattern from the streets in Washington, D.C. where many roads also take their names from the alphabet and numbers. 

Some have attributed Arthurdale’s adoption of this alphabetized pattern to Eleanor Roosevelt’s suggestion, but it’s unknown who actually made the decision. Six of the letters of the alphabet are not represented in Arthurdale’s grid, including “I,” “J,” “L,” “N,” “T,” “V." And the grid is not laid out in the order of the alphabet, either, though some roads are in proximity to the following letter in the alphabet.

Several roads in Arthurdale’s environs area also labeled as CR and SR along with a number. That is an abbreviation for county route or state route, respectively. The state Division of Highways (then the Department of Highways) in the throes of the Great Depression was given jurisdiction over all but certain streets and roads in municipalities and private roads in West Virginia. Few, if any county governments were able to fund maintaining and repairing roads then. The DOH is responsible for maintaining and repairing some 38,000 miles of county and state roads across the state today.

There are more than 15 miles of roads throughout Arthurdale’s environs. About a dozen miles of roads were carved out of the area in the 1930s during while Arthurdale was being built. These roads were initially “paved” with “red dog,” the reddish colored cast-off waste material from coal, which was fairly cheap and made a good surface material for dirt roads, in the 1930s. The roads throughout Arthurdale today are by and large paved with asphalt.  

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