BUFFINGTON: The romance of dirt roads

There’s a certain mystique about dirt roads. They map an image of rural Americana in our minds, of a time in the past when things seemed simpler: Mom, apple pie and dirt roads lead us to our past. 

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This isn’t the first time I’ve lived on a dirt road. As a young child in Summerville, we lived on a dead-end dirt lane. Across the road lived a kid my age and we trapsed up and down that road on our bikes, exploring the woods and fields nearby. We weren't exactly Tom Sawyer, but it sometimes seems that way in hindsight.

Later, after we moved to Jefferson, mom and dad build their home on Jett Roberts Rd., which in the late 1960s was still a dirt road. Before the road was paved, friends and I would sometimes walk the dirt lane all the way up to Dry Pond to buy cigarettes from a country store that used to be there.

Like so many rural dirt roads, that one got paved and growth came and now traffic along the road is sometimes a nightmare.

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Dirt roads are deeply ingrained in popular culture today. A number of songs are odes to dirt roads, or feature a dirt road theme.

The oldest I could find was John Lennon’s 1974, “Old Dirt Road.” In the 1990s, Bob Dylan recorded “Dirt Road Blues” which starts with: “Gonna walk down that dirt road 'til someone will let me ride.”

Also in the 1990s, the band Sawyer Brown release a song and album called “The Dirt Road.” The song featured Earl Scruggs on banjo and had a refrain of: “I’ll take the dirt road, it’s all I know, I’ve been a’walking it for years, it takes me where I want to go…”

But it’s been in the 2000s — after so many dirt roads had been paved and no longer existed — that nostalgic songs about dirt roads have become a music icon, especially in country music: “That’s Why I Love Dirt Roads” by Granger Smith; “Red Dirt Road” by Brooks & Dunn; “Dirt Road Diary” by Luke Bryan; and “Dirt Roads Scholar” by Dean Brody (which is a clever play on Rhodes Scholar.)

But perhaps the most famous dirt road song is “Dirt Road Anthem” written by Jefferson’s Brantley Gilbert and country musician Colt Ford. They recorded the song both individually and together and it later hit the top of the charts on a Jason Alden album.

In a 2020 interview, Ford said Brantley had written much of the song and the rest they wrote together at Brantley’s house. It has some local references (Potts Farm) and is a celebration of country life. It was a number one hit for Alden in 2011 and remains popular today.

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But dirt roads weren’t always popular. In fact, communities that had a lot of dirt roads were considered backward and not very modern. I’ve used that comparison myself in articles about the lack of internet in our area, calling the current broadband systems “digital dirt roads.”

In Georgia, county boards of commissioners were founded as boards of “roads and bridges” in the late 1800s as a means to maintain dirt roads and later, to pave over dirt. In rural areas, landowners were at one time responsible for maintaining the road along their property, which in the early 1900s meant filling potholes and smoothing out rough surfaces.

As cars became more common, the pressure to pave dirt roads increased, especially in areas where mud made travel difficult. In Banks County, the roads that were first paved (outside of state or federal roads) were those that went to popular local churches.

Dirt roads remained common in most rural areas well into the 1960s and 1970s. Today, Jackson County only has about 100 miles of dirt roads left and Barrow County only around 35 miles.

While it has mystique, living on dirt roads also creates some problems. Dust, for one thing, covers cars and homes during the hot, dry days of summer. Potholes and washouts from heavy rains are also a problem.

Still, a lot of people in rural areas who live on dirt roads today don’t want those roads paved. One reason is that a paved road opens a corridor for development. A lot of county zoning rules require paved roads before development can take place; and in a lot of rural areas, people don’t want nearby subdivisions or any commercial projects. Dirt roads and a lack of sewer are guarantees that no high-density development can happen in an area.

Dirt roads can also be a political issue in a community. That’s part of what’s happened in Jackson County where the county school system bought a large tract of land in North Jackson along Brooks Rd. for a future school site.

But that property also abuts a long dirt road and county leaders don’t want to have to pave that narrow road to accommodate the kind of traffic schools would certainly bring. (County school system leaders recently said they don’t have plans to develop that property in the next five years and hinted that they’d prefer other sites for future school locations.)

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We recently attended a workshop in Southwest Virginia. The hosts for the program lived at the end of a 3.5 mile dirt/gravel road, a lane that ran between two steep mountain ridges. Deer, turkey and bear are common along the road (hunting is very popular in the area).

There were a number of homes along the road; some were weekend homes or seasonal getaways. A few were homesteads with a menagerie of farm animals in the front yard. Others were full-time residents who liked living in the isolated rural setting.

The area isn't too far away from West Virginia; drive thru a couple of tunnels on the 4-lane interstate nearby and you’re in WV with its steep mountains and deep hollows.

All of which reminded me of the iconic John Denver song, “Country Roads” whose lyrics are stuck in all our heads:

Country roads, take me home

To the place I belong

West Virginia, mountain mama

Take me home, country roads

He doesn’t say it in the song, but I suspect Denver’s country road is a dirt road, winding through the rural countryside, “Dark and dusty, painted on the sky.”

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It may be wistful nostalgia, but I like living on a dirt road even if it does spew dust on the old barn and the muscadine vines nearby. It reminds me of a time before interstates and the fast-pace of life that we have today where getting somewhere quickly is important.

Dirt roads represent something slower, maybe not gentler, but authentic and romantic with a little roughness around the edges.

As a Kip Moore song says, “No, I don't wanna go, Unless Heaven's got a dirt road.”

Mike Buffington is co-publisher of Mainstreet Newspapers. He can be reached at mike@mainstreetnews.com.