I just visited the OLD US 377 at Denton Creek, north of Roanoke, and found that the pavement and bridge remmanants had been removed. A large diameter water line has been laid in the former right of way. This road had been abandoned since 1951 or 1952, so it sucks that they would destroy it. The bridges had been dynamited not long after the road's closure, but the debris was never cleaned up and trees had grown up in it.
This is a rather interesting section of lost highway, with two places where it was changed twice. At the south end, The orignial alignment passed through Roanoke on Oak St, rejoining the second alignment in the floodplain. North of Denton Creek, the first alignment bowed west around the big hill. There is very little evidence of this left today. The highway moved to the second alignment in 1940. Culvert date plaques prove this. The section that is still open to local traffic was resurfaced in appx 2006, covering the original pavement. A culvert on the still open section is much wider than the road, which is almost unheard of in that time period. The shoulders/ ditches on this section also appear to be graded to support a widening of this road that never happened. The abandoned section did not appear this way.
Google Aerial Photo of the Areahttp://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=33.035147,-97.200508&spn=0.03274,0.087547&t=h&z=14 (http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=33.035147,-97.200508&spn=0.03274,0.087547&t=h&z=14)
Google street view of the still-open section with wide culvert. http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=33.052253,-97.202375&spn=0,0.021887&z=16&layer=c&cbll=33.049966,-97.201686&panoid=iTFBoDka9fJobfZBGsOHVQ&cbp=12,181.71,,0,5 (http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=33.052253,-97.202375&spn=0,0.021887&z=16&layer=c&cbll=33.049966,-97.201686&panoid=iTFBoDka9fJobfZBGsOHVQ&cbp=12,181.71,,0,5)
Given the area, you have to guess that some development is going in that required them to remove the pavement (or did TxDOT do it?)
It appears that it was done for the sole purpose of laying the water line in the Right of Way. This area is a floodplain and cannot be developed.