Back at the turn of the 19th to 20th Century, when people wanted to go places and do things, they took

the trolley or a passenger train. With the invention of the automobile, people became more mobile,
and demanded better roads. Until the better roads were built, the main route from Buffalo to New York
was through the Mohawk Valley following the Barge Canal to Albany, and cutting south to New York
along the Hudson. Other than that, the road system was a hodgepodge of unnamed, unsigned, country
dirt roads.

That all changed in 1908, when the NY State Legislature designated state routes, among which was
State Route 4, which incorporated existing county roads from Westfield NY to Suffern NY. Contracts
were let, Italians from New Jersey were hired, and by 1911, State Route 4 was complete. For Waverly
and Chemung, a new road was cut over Waverly Hill to Chemung in the summer of 1910.

In the accompanying photographs, one section = one mile. One needs to know that the Tioga/Chemung
county line is 3/4 of the way up Waverly Hill from the Waverly side. The sections were numbered from
west to east, which means State Route 4 had already been completed through Waverly in 1909. One can
see in the post card that Tioga County section 11 has already been completed, with Chemung County
section 1 just started. Therefore, this picture was taken in the summer of 1910.
By 1915, this road was macadamized from Suffern to Westfield.

Because of an article published in Motor Age April 8, 1918, State Route 4 became known nationally as
"The Liberty Highway." This article caused the road to become an instant hit with tourists and
truckdrivers alike. (This article is paraphrased everywhere, because it costs $50 to read it.)

As the story goes, in 1918, a White trucking executive based in Cleveland, a truckdriver himself, became
frustrated with the clogged Mohawk Valley route, and the Lincoln Highway (now I-80) route, because of
government trucks hauling war materials from the midwest to NY and Philadelphia. So he studied the
maps, and by trial and error, discovered that running his trucks from Suffern to Westfield and on to
Cleveland was much faster than the previously described routes. And since everybody read Motor Age,
the Liberty Highway became nationally famous overnight. It was a destination in itself, people traveled it
just to travel it, because of the beautiful scenery the entire length. Of course, all this meant money was
spent locally, which was one of the reasons for the economic development of the towns along this road
at that time.

For Chemung, it appears that the Pyramids Restaurant with its faux Western front was built around then
to accomodate travelers - between Elmira and Waverly, there were few eateries.

In 1924, the State Legislature again re-numbered the roads, with State Highway 4 becoming NY 17 (with
NJ following suit.) In 1933 and 1934, as a part of Roosevelt's WPA, Route 17 became a two lane cement
highway, with steel guard rails and wire rope replacing the wooden fencing.
After the end of WWll, with population and resulting automobile growth, Route 17 was four-laned, with
sections becoming known as the Quickway, with "The Liberty Highway" became a hazy, distant memory,
like the sepia postcards and the blue highways on the road maps.