A ROAD IN SPOTTSYLVANIA COUNTY, VA., AS IT LOOKED IN 1910 TYPICAL OF THE ORDINARY COUNTRY ROAD AFTER A HEAVY RAIN, CUT INTO RUTS AND SINKS hauling over this road was 20 cents per 100 pounds for outgoing shipments and 35 cents per 100 pounds for incoming freight. These rates were equivalent respectively to 57 cents and $1 per ton per mile. The farmers in this region induced the county to build a new road from the fruit bench land to another shipping point on the North Bank Railroad, with a maximum grade of 8 per cent. and an average grade of less than 6 per cent. The new road is almost exactly four miles long, and reduces the hauling cost for both outgoing and incoming shipments by more than half. It is a dirt road and cost about $1,500. With watermelons selling in Portland, Ore., at $1 per 100 pounds in carload lots, it is not difficult to compute the benefits resulting from such road improvement. The road will nearly pay for itself on the shipment of two good crops of melons. These are definite but local instances of the value of road building. We may some day have a national road traffic census as France and other European countries have. France began counting travel in 1844; and in 1913 there will be a new census, the eleventh. The French census of 1903 showed that at ten cents a mile the THE SAME ROAD IN SPOTTSYLVANIA COUNTY, AS IT LOOKS TO-DAY PHOTOGRAPHED AFTER A RAIN, SHOWING THE PRESERVING EFFECT OF PROPER DRAINAGE average annual charge for hauling on about 30,000 miles was $4,625 per mile. On the roads out of Milan, Italy, in 1909 the annual traffic charge at 5.8 cents a ton per mile was $18,000 per mile on 250 miles of radial trunk roads. What is the annual cost of hauling in our own country? The Interstate Commerce Commission publishes carefully compiled statistics of all our railroad operations annually. In 1910 their figures 1910 their figures showed that nearly a billion tons of freight were received and handled by our railroads. A large part of this immense tonnage passed over our highways, prob ably at least 250 million tons. Of highways there are in all 2,200,000 miles with less than 200,000 miles improved. We can only estimate the bill for hauling, but it is apparently a little less than $800 a mile on the 20 per cent. of our roads which do most of the work. The total would then be $352,000,000. A saving of 10 per cent. of this sum in hauling would therefore justify an outlay of $704,000,000 with interest at 5 per cent. State-wide benefits from good roads are visible already. Mr. Harold Parker, for ten years a member of the Highway Commission of Massachusetts, declared at a THE EFFECT OF ROADS ON COUNTRY SCHOOLS meeting in Newark last February that there was not one abandoned farm on a state road in his state. From New York comes Bulletin 31 of the Department of Agriculture in January of this year. It It lists 1,002 farms offered for sale. The report shows the acreage, soil, fruit trees, stock, etc., and gives the distance to the shipping points and market towns and the kind of roads to them. The average value of all farms located on earth roads is $35 an acre and the average value of the farms on macadam or other improved roads is $51 an acre. Economic farm surveys have already developed valuable data which can be applied to the study of our roads. Six is the average number of main radial roads from shipping points and small cities, and these roads extend from 8 to 20 miles. Every radial road that serves 200 square miles as a market road carries annually at least 30,000 tons a distance of eight miles. Thus it performs a service worth $48,000. A saving of five cents per ton per mile by improving such roads is an exceptionally small saving, but it would mean for every mile of radial market road a total reduction of $1,000 in the annual cost of hauling. THE BUSINESS OF TOURING And we have said nothing yet of the automobile. We probably have now more than six hundred thousand motor vehicles in this country. Mr. George C. Diehl, Chairman of the Good Roads Board of the American Automobile Association, estimates the cost of tire wear at two cents a mile. This means that every year each mile of road takes a toll of $550 from the tires of the machines which use it. Automobilists are already paying annually nearly five million dollars in license fees and they are willing to do this and everything else in their power to secure road improvement. If they could reduce the cost of tire damage one half it would doubtless pay the automobilists even if it were necessary to double their annual fees. But the benefits to the automobilists from improved roads extend directly to the land owners and the country districts. The impetus that has been given country This table shows the expenditures on a 1,000-mile tour in New England between the middle of June and the first of October. Touring goes on all over the country. From the Denver Chamber of Commerce we learn that 6,000 automobilists visited Colorado in 1910 and spent more than two million seven hundred thousand dollars in that state. No one now can set an upper limit to the use of the automobile in its various forms. During the last year the commercial truck has come into increasing use. Probably nearly fifty thousand will be operating by the new year. The possibilities of service by this new vehicle are tremendous. An interesting case occurred in the now famous Deschutes Valley in Oregon. During the summer of 1910, when the Hill and Harriman forces were rushing their surveys and construction gangs into the heart of the Oregon plateau, the homeseekers gathered by the hundreds and thousands. It was a three days' journey from The Dalles for the freight wagons to the new land. J. L. Laurendine, of Portland, Ore., and his partner purchased an automobile truck, shipped it to The Dalles, and began hauling freight. They could do in one day more than three freight wagons could do in a week. Their profits were incredible. But the advantage of the automobile truck was too obvious to the grim freight drivers on the dusty roads. In less than ten days it became too dangerous to operate the automobile truck and Mr. Laurendine and his partner removed to other fields. There seems to be little doubt that the automobile truck will go wherever the roads permit it. It certainly will be economy to handle bulky material such as coal, lumber, and baled hay in large quantities from the larger market centres. One of the very recent types of road is well adapted to this new traffic. It is the concrete road which is coming into general use in the southern part of Michigan. Highway committees from many parts of the country go to Detroit constantly to see County Commissioner Hines of Wayne County and to visit his roads. So impressed are the people of Wayne County with the value of this new and massive form of road that during the present season they have entirely removed an old 9-foot concrete road on the highway from Detroit to Redford and are busily engaged in replacing it with a new 16-foot roadway of solid concrete seven inches thick. The possibilities of this new highway for heavy motor traffic and commercial truck transportation are immense. Who can say that the people of Wayne County have not taken the first step in the direction of ultimate economy in service and maintenance for the highways of the twentieth century? THE DEVIL AND TOM WALKER A "WHITE FOLKS' NIGGER" WHO HAS REGENERATED A WHOLE COUNTY IN TIDEWATER VIRGINIA FROM SLOTH AND CRIME TO T INDUSTRY AND ENLIGHTENMENT BY J. W. CHURCH AND CARLYLE ELLIS COM WALKER'S looks hardly fulfil one's idea of a fireproof devil-baiter. Squat, thicklipped, and kinky-haired, he would more likely be characterized by a Southern planter as a good example of a "white folks' nigger," which is a pretty high compliment from the Southern angle. But when any man, of any color, can, by thirty years of steadfast, indefatigable effort, regenerate an entire Southern county; drive drunkenness and crime beyond its borders; replace 95 replace 95 per cent. of its hovels and log cabins with substantial two-story dwellings, and make successful, land-owning farmers of five thousand Negroes with a state-wide reputation for crime and shiftlessness, that man has the devil on the run. Gloucester County, Va., one of the oldest of the cavalier settlements of the Old Dominion, was, before the Civil War, given over almost entirely to the great landed estates of the gentry of tide water Virginia. Here, in their splendid Colonial homes, lived the Pages, the Dabneys, the Taliaferros, the Tabbs, and a score of others whose names are writ large in Virginia's early history. No railroad has ever penetrated the county, the only entrance being by the small steamer from Baltimore and Norfolk, making the landing on Mobjack Bay, thence winding up the short backwater "rivers," the York, the Severn, and the Ware. Gloucester Courthouse, a quaint, century-old county seat, is the largest, in fact the only, village in the county. About its tiny courthouse square cluster a few houses and stores, the homes of its population of one hundred and fifty. The rest of the twelve thousand inhabitants of the county can boast only of a crossroads store, grist mill, or blacksmith shop to mark their neighborhood. The Civil War saw the complete ruin of prosperity in Gloucester County. Estates were deserted or sold by families |