SORRY ABOUT THAT, JOHN!
Even since I was a kid - and that adds up to a good many summers, plus winters - I
have been unfair to a Scotsman by the name of John McAdam.
U.S. Route 11, when I was growing up in Southwestern Virginia was totally unpaved
from the outskirts of Salem, Virginia, in the Roanoke area, to Fort Chiswell, in the Wytheville
area. It was mud when rains came, and the rest of the time it was graveled and dusty.
Many years of accumulated horse shoe nails and other sharp gadgetry of that day which
fell from pounding hoofs and from swaying Knoxville wagons in transit were in the
roadbed. When we had rains those hidden hazards to progress, we knew, infested the
mud and it was almost a sure thing that, when our Dad drove the Model T FORD from
Radford to Roanoke - a good three-hour trip - we could expect to have at least one flat
tire. The tires of automobiles and trucks regularly picked up hidden nails from the gooey
mud when ruts deepened. If someone had saved all of those nails he could have made a
good shipment of scrap metal to send to Japan to help them get ready for World War II.
But, back to John McAdam.
I always sang his praises loudly and for years being uninformed as to what was,
exactly, meant by the term “macadamized” roads which I was told he invented. U. S.
Route 11 - the famed Valley Pike which served as the pathway to the opening west, was
finally paved in our area.
As I understand it, John McAdam didn’t just dash the idea for improving roads off
one hot afternoon in his native Scotland. Historians such as Arthur Herman, say he
journeyed some “thirty thousand miles” throughout Scotland, England and Wales. That’s
a lot of bone-bending, butt-bruising’ miles and especially so when one considers the
conditions which existed in the l790’s. McAdam ,apparently, saw enough by that time to
convince him that something had to be done to improve road systems. The woefully
inadequate roads of all sections of the lands visited were in bad shape where they existed
at all. The well kept secret, he decided once he was back in his relatively roadless
Scotland to rest up a while, was that the roadbed had to be elevated a bit to
encourage as much drainage as possible the actual road surface and he then applied
fairly large crushed rock with a layer of finer gravel on top of the silt and mud which
seeped upward between the larger stones. The more horses and wagons that traveled
over the stone and gravel, the more they drove the materials into the raised, drained
surface. That is what was meant, strictly speaking, by the term a
“Macadamized” road. The addition of tar, then asphalt came years later and you can
see the name changing as well. The English - logically enough - called the tarred,
macadamized road “tarmac”. The term is still used in England meaning any paved
surface particularly airport runways and associated paved areas. Americans, then when
asphalt was mixed with the gravel covering and pressed down firmly, came to call it an
“asphalt” road.
John McAdam can be said to have invented our modern roads and it was typical
of the Scots to improve things constantly so the transition to “paved” was a natural
progression. But don’t blame John McAdam for making our present day...ultra-laned,
super-highway systems what they have come to be and threaten to become.
We may have over-used John McAdam’s basic ides more than just a bit.
Sorry about that, John.
A.L.M. May 30, 2002 [c621wds]
