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A corduroy road or log road is a type of road or timber trackway made by placing logs, perpendicular to the direction of the road over a low or swampy area. This is an improvement from mud or dirt roads, which are impassable. However, they are still rough in the best of conditions, and the shifting logs can pose a hazard for horses.
Corduroy roads can also be built as a foundation for other surfacing. If the logs are buried in wet, acidic, anaerobic soils such as peat or muskeg, they Bog-wood. A few corduroy road foundations that date back to the early 20th century still exist in North America. One example is the Alaska Highway between Burwash Landing and Koidern, Yukon, Canada, which was rebuilt in 1943, less than a year after the original route was graded on thin soil and vegetation over permafrost, by using corduroy, then building a gravel road on top. During the 1980s, the gravel was covered with a chipseal. The late 1990s saw replacement of this road with modern road construction, including rerouting of the entire highway.
In World War II corduroyed roads were used by both German and Soviet forces on the Eastern Front. Military Improvisations During the Russian Campaign , Chap 5, Center of Military History, US Army
In slang use, corduroy road can also refer to a road in ill repair, having many , ruts, or surface swellings. This should not be confused with a Washboarding.
In the Pacific Northwest, roads built of spaced logs similar to widely spaced "army track" army track were the mainstay of local logging practices and were called Skidder roads. Two of these, respectively on the outskirts of the mill towns of Seattle and Vancouver, which had become concentrations of bars and logger's slums, were the origin of the more widespread meaning of "skid road" and its derivative skid row, referring to a poor area.
Hull's Trace North Huron River Corduroy Segment is a section of corduroy road in Brownstown, Michigan that is on public display at the River Raisin National Battlefield Park. This segment is the only known extant portion of Hull's Trace, a military road that was built at the beginning of the War of 1812 from Urbana, Ohio, to Detroit.
By the early 1800s, a corduroy road had been built along what is now King Street in Waterloo, Ontario in Canada; its remains were unearthed under the roadway in 2016. The road was probably built by Mennonite settlers between the late 1790s and 1816. A historian explained that the road had been built for access to a mill but was also "one of the first roads cut through (the woods) so people could start settling the area".
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