History
US 117, established in 1932, was a renumber of SR 40 between Wilmington and Wilson; it also continued south of Wilmington into South Carolina. By 1939, US 17 replaced US 117 south of Wilmington. In the 1950s, bypasses were established in Burgaw and Goldsboro. In the early 1960s, US 117 bypassed Calypso to Mount Olive; which was later extended in 1988 to Brogden.
In 2006, US 117 was moved onto a new freeway between Goldsboro and Wilson, its northern terminus ending at I-95. However, because of the Surface Transportation Assistance Act specifying that trucks over 48 feet (15 m) in length can utilize only Interstate and specific routes approved by the state; larger trucks were not legally allowed to use the new route. As a result, NCDOT decided to get it approved as an interstate as oppose to the longer process of adding it on the STAA system. AASHTO conditionally agreed to this on September 28, 2007; which gave birth to Interstate 795 and moved US 117 back to its original route (briefly renumbered as US 117 Alternate), ending at US 301 near Wilson.
Read more about this topic: U.S. Route 117
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“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)
“Tell me of the height of the mountains of the moon, or of the diameter of space, and I may believe you, but of the secret history of the Almighty, and I shall pronounce thee mad.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)