A toll road (also tollway, turnpike, toll highway, or express toll route) is a privately or publicly built road for which the driver is required to pay a fee, or toll. Fees were traditionally collected by hand at toll booth, toll house, toll plaza, toll station, toll bar or toll gate, but nowadays more tolls are implementing some form of automatic or electronic toll collection.

In addition to toll roads, toll bridges and toll tunnels are also used by public authorities for revenue generation to repay for long-term debt issued to finance the toll facility, or to reinvest in capacity expansion or used to pay for operations and maintenance of the facility, or simply as general tax funds. Also road congestion pricing schemes have been implemented in a limited number of urban areas as a transportation demand management tool to reduce traffic congestion and air pollution.

Tolls are mentioned in Greek mythology where Charon the ferryman charged a toll to carry the dead across the rivers Acheron and Styx to Hades. If the soul paid a toll, Charon ferried it across the river. If not, it wandered between death and life for eternity.

Samuel "Sam" Houston (March 2, 1793–July 26, 1863), was a nineteenth-century American statesman, politician, and soldier. He was born in Timber Ridge in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, of Scots-Irish descent. Houston became a key figure in the history of Texas and was elected as the first and third President of the Republic of Texas, U.S. Senator for Texas after it joined the United States, and finally as a governor of the state. He refused to swear loyalty to the Confederacy when Texas seceded from the Union in 1861 with the outbreak of the American Civil War, and was removed from office. To avoid bloodshed, he refused an offer of a Union army to put down the Confederate rebellion. Instead, he retired to Huntsville, Texas, where he died before the end of the Civil War.

His earlier life included migration to Tennessee from Virginia, time spent with the Cherokee Nation (into which he later was adopted as a citizen and took a wife), military service in the War of 1812, and successful participation in Tennessee politics. Houston is the only person in U.S. history to have been the governor of two different states (although other men had served as governors of more than one American territory).