ROCKS IN THE ROAD
Our present day highway system � in spite of many shortcomings you might bring up - is nothing short of a massive miracle.
People give me a stage look when I mention that I remember quite well when all of historic U.S. Route 11, the �Lee Highway�, the �Valley Pike� of early American expansion westward was unpaved. A few wiseacre skeptics have asked me if I saw them sink the �Maine� in Havana Harbor, as well.
I'm old, but not quite that ancient.
During the decade of the 1920 we traveled on dirt roads. Some of them where covered with layers of crushed rock. Very often the rock was dumped on the path in the form of large boulders which were, then, beaten into small piece ;even embedded in the base of mud, to form the road bed. The notorious prison inmate �chain gangs� were used to do this work to a large extent at that time for road building. A new type of highway construction was being introduced at that time invented by a man named John McAdam. His plan called for the construction of a road bed raised a few inches above the terrain level. This level bed was, then, covered with layers of rock. His �Macamized� road had not covered. Traffic alone packed it down and unevenly so quite often. His process was quickly improved upon by adding tar to a covering mixture of small stone and pressed into place by rollers. The English devised a term for the new process. They call it �Tarmac�- a perfectly logical combination of terms still in use today, but that expression did not gain ready acceptance in the United States where we know it as an �asphalt� road.
That's what Route 11 and many American roads became in the 1930's and during the following years. There were, paved sections which usually ended at the town limits forming the small ones among the thousands of miles of twisted maze of arteries and veins reaching to and from every corner of our complex country today.
In rural areas local landowners maintained the public roads which passed through or near their property I remember such work parties among local farmers well into the days of the Great Depression. The practice was done to death by the W.P.A., the C.C.C., the N.R.A, the AFL/CIO and other alphabetical groups of the Roosevelt Era.
A.L.M. December 16, 2003 [c-411wds]
