Plank Road

Ah, new technologies. How quickly they come and go, and how often they are oversold. In the late 1840s, American investors rushed to finance plank roads, or 'corduory roads' as they were sometimes called. Opening the interior of the United States to agriculture required cutting down entire forests of trees, making logs and boards a plentiful supply of road-building material.
The first plank road was built from North Syracuse, New York, running north and south, to transport salt from nearby Onondaga Lake and other goods.

Then the railroads came, and money evaporated quicker than you could yell "Timber!"

Peter McCord - Beginning Of The Old Plack Road, c.1906, New York Public Library