North Carolina transportation officials are taking steps to remove the last vestiges of a highway named more than a century ago for Confederate president Jefferson Davis.

The N.C. Department of Transportation is removing signs and markers in the state-owned right of way, The News & Observer of Raleigh reports. The groundwork for the removal was laid this summer after the death of George Floyd led to a review of Confederate monuments and symbols.

The Daughters of the Confederacy conceived of the Jefferson Davis Highway in 1913, partly as an answer to the Lincoln Highway between New York and San Francisco dedicated that year. The group identified the highway’s route along existing roads, then promoted the name with signs, stone markers and state and local government resolutions.

The route they chose through North Carolina runs about 160 miles (about 258 kilometers) from the Virginia state line, follows U.S. 15 through Durham and Chapel Hill south to Sanford, then U.S. 1 to South Carolina near Rockingham.

Virginia officially adopted the name, but NCDOT officials say despite requests from the Daughters of the Confederacy in the 1920s and again in the late 1950s, North Carolina never did.

“So there is not an officially named Jefferson Davis Highway from the Board of Transportation out there anywhere, but there are some local designations that appear to have been put up within our right of way,” chairman Mike Fox told fellow board members in June.

This week, the board’s road naming committee, which Fox leads, signed off on NCDOT’s plans to remove several Jefferson Davis Highway signs in Granville County. Kevin Lacy, the department’s traffic engineer, said the signs are official highway signs, but it’s not clear how they got there.

Lacy said he will also write a letter to the state division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy asking it to work with local communities to remove several stone markers along the highway.

Efforts by The News & Observer to reach the United Daughters of the Confederacy were not successful. The organization lists an email address on its website but not a phone number.

While wanting signs and markers gone, NCDOT is not trying to rename a section of U.S. 1 in Lee County that is actually called Jefferson Davis Highway. The Daughters of the Confederacy asked the county to so designate the road in 1959, and Lee commissioners agreed, according to a copy of the resolution provided by the county.

Lacy suggested that, because the county named the road, NCDOT should let the county handle any changes, which would affect the addresses of numerous residents and business owners. But Lee County officials say if the highway is to be rechristened it should be up to NCDOT or the General Assembly. No one has asked Lee County commissioners to rename the road, said spokeswoman Jamie Brown, and the county isn’t considering it.

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