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DARLINGTON INDIANA

From an early day the matter of providing good highways engaged the attention of property owners in Franklin Township but not until after the Civil War were they in anything like good condition.

The first roads were Indian trails, and old settlers say that the Crawfordsville-Thorntown pike through Darlington, followed the trail made by the Indians as they traveled from Vincennes to northern camps during their wars.

Throughout the township these trails were widened and others blazed between communities.  Rain and snow made them muddy and hard to travel so trees were cut down and laid across the roads in order that vehicles might not mire down.  Travelers bumped along over these roads, but bumps were preferable to mud.  One of the worst of these corduroy roads was southeast of town, through the Elston woods.  Main Street in Darlington was a corduroy road.  Not many years ago railroad section men working near the Main Street crossing unearthed an oak log three feet in diameter, which had been a part of this road.  Mud puddles at the corner of Main and Madison Streets and on West Main Street were familiar sights to the early citizens of Darlington.

These corduroy roads were followed by dirt roads which were graveled later.  Necessarily there was expense attached to making gravel roads and in order to meet it a specified sum was charged for the privilege of using them.  These were called toll roads and the amount charged depended on the distance traveled.   The toll gate most familiar to Darlington people is the one at the north east corner of town near Honey Creek bridge.  The house in which the gate keepers lived still stands.

The gravel road from Darlington to Thorntown was financed by property owners along the route who subscribed various sums for which they received certificates later redeemed by money collected as toll.

As late as 1882 there were yet fifty miles of toll roads in Montgomery county.  Soon afterward, however, the toll system was done away with and seventy-four miles of roads in the county were graveled at a cost of $1,312 a mile including bridges and culverts.  By 1909 the county had four hundred miles of graveled roads.

Taken from the book "140 Years of Darlington Community History Bicentennial Edition"