Numbering coincidence misleadingly implies NE 12 created in 1915

[kurumi]

Valley News (White River Jct, Vermont) published a story titled Summer Journey: New England's Lost Highway in July 2015. Four paragraphs in is a startling assertion:

Like many of the region's numbered highways, Route 12 turns 100 years old this year. The first system of numbered highways in the Northeast was established in 1915 by the states of southern New England and New York. (The northern New England states had their own systems, but by 1922 all six New England states agreed to a common system of road marking.)

As in, we're all wrong, and Wisconsin (1918) was not the first place to number its highways.

That's not the case; but the Valley News didn't exactly pull this "fact" out of their backside. In the article is a scan of a map from Sargent's "Handbook of New England", a touring guide published in 1916. And there's Route 12, snaking north from Groton thru Putnam to Worcester and beyond.

And! Route 10 (NE 10?) follows the Connecticut River, just as it started doing in 1922. And "NE 3" goes from Danbury to Waterbury to Hartford and Willimantic. Wow.

But the more you look at the map, things start to fall apart. Most of the other route numbers don't match the NE system. The route numbers in the Handbook aren't signposted -- New England was only marking posts and poles with colored bands -- and were only assigned by the Handbook for its own reference. It just happened that a few of the numbers matched what the Automobile Club of America would adopt in 1922.

(Hathi Trust has the entire Handbook digitized; it's 800+ pages and available here.)

[froggie]

For Vermont's part, I've seen indications that the numbered state-aid routes (what became today's state highway system in 1927) may date as early as 1898, and some were numbered no later than 1913.  I have no idea if these numbers were actually posted in the field or not.

Taking a look at that 1916 map, NONE of the route numbers on that map coincide with Vermont's state aid numbers.