History
The project was first conceived in the 1930s, and was first planned by the Pulaski County Planning Board in their 1941 report. After the having many higher powers denying their plans construction was started by the city of Little Rock in the 1960s as the east–west Expressway or 8th Street Expressway and was not originally an Interstate or an Arkansas state highway. In the 1970s, U.S. Rep. Wilbur D. Mills (D-AR) was responsible for the route's addition to the Interstate system by rounding down the mileage allocations of all other states, then adding the rounding differences to Arkansas' total; this kept the total nationwide allocation within the original limit of 42,500 miles (68,400 km).
After it was added to the Interstate system, Little Rock initially renamed it for Mills; however, when the Arkansas State Highway Department (AHTD) formally brought it into the state highway system as required by Arkansas law, they removed the name, as their policy at the time prohibited the naming of state highways after individuals. The AHTD later changed its policy and re-adopted the Mills name early in the new millennium.
The highway connects burgeoning West Little Rock to the downtown core. It feeds into I-430, a north–south route which serves western Little Rock.
Read more about this topic: Interstate 630
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man’s judgement.”
—Francis Bacon (1561–1626)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“We aspire to be something more than stupid and timid chattels, pretending to read history and our Bibles, but desecrating every house and every day we breathe in.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)