If you landed on this page, that almost certainly means you read our entire article on the Plank Road. Congratulations! That means you are a real History Trooper, willing to slog through such a long article to get to the sources. Very few people will ever read this page and we appreciate your visit here.
You can scroll to the end of this post for our primary sources. In the meantime we'd like to tell you a few things about our Plank Road article. How did it come about? Well, on any given day there are about 800-900 Yuma, Arizona, related postcards listed for sale on eBay. During the Holidays we went through over 900 such postcards thinking there would be numerous views of The Plank Road. Much to our surprise, there were only five primary views and a few duplicates. So, we then began searching other sources, including The Arizona Memory Project archives. That's where we found the captivating photo of the old Studebaker on the first plank road. Of course, we didn't know it was a Studebaker.
So we logged onto the Antique Automobile Club of America Forum and created a post in the "What Is It?" section. The members of the AACA Forum are top notch, dedicated and thoroughly knowledgeable antique auto enthusiasts. It didn't take long for several of the members to jump all over that Plank Road. One of the members positively identified the car as a 1913-1914 Studebaker while the others dug up all sorts of great materials on the Plank Road.
And so that when I decided to do a deep dive into Plank Road History Originally, I was simply going to create a Tweet using the photo of the Studebaker. Well, that fell by the wayside and then I spent the better part of 3 days working up the photo-article that brought you here.
That article became so lengthy that I decided to dismiss adding sources to the article itself. The article would have become hopelessly cluttered if I had done so. I figured I would create a separate post to discuss and list the sources.
In the meantime I decided to tell the story of the Plank Road in my own words and use minimal direct quotes from the sources. I arbitrarily assumed serious students of the Plank Road would do their own research and come to their own conclusion.
My four primary sources are listed below with specific links to them. Much other material came from many sources including: The Arizona Memory Project, The Burton Frasher archive at the Ponoma Library, Calisphere, eBay, and various Google searches. I also utilized the USGS topographical map archives, Google Earth and the Newspapers Dot Com archive. Because of the inherent natural of human travel routes, Plank Road history is forever joined at the hip with numerous other sidebar stories regarding regional transportation evolution from Native American foot travel to the modern dune buggy craze.
Rather than list each and every single source citation for the photos and graphics, I would like to leave it as a challenge for you to pursue compiling your own digital files of Plank Road photos and graphics. Why? Because the searches for such material are delightful and will lead you into unexpected discoveries. Because you will find material I missed. And mostly because the rewards of the journey often outweigh the results themselves!
There are four primary narratives utilized our Plank Road article.
The first is from:
The Journal of San Diego History, SAN DIEGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY QUARTERLY
Spring 1970, Volume 16, Number 2
sandiegohistory.org/journal/1970/april/plank/
The second is:
"PLANKS ACROSS THE DUNES" By Charles P. Kendall
The Journal of Arizona History
Vol. 21, No. 4 (Winter 1980), pp. 391-410
https://www.jstor.org/stable/42678309
The Third is:
"The Plank Road of Imperial Valley" by BLM California
https://ia601709.us.archive.org/18/items/plankroadofimper00unse/plankroadofimper00unse.pdf
And the fourth is:
"Remembering The Plank Road"
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/lifestyle/people/sdut-plank-road-imperial-dunes-centennial-2015feb20-story.html
And the fifth is:
The San Diego Automotive Museum's Plank Road narrative:
https://www.sdautomuseum.org/exhibit/plank-road
In closing, we HIGHLY recommend you delve into The Life & Times of Ed Fletcher. What an amazing guy! Without him, it's quite likely the Plank Road would have never come into existence when and where it did. Fletcher's entire personal history reads like something out of a Hollywood script. He once even "kidnapped" Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo! If you don't believe me see:
http://www.sandiegoyesterday.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/cabrillo_statue2.pdf
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