Kentucky's Frontier Highway: Historical Landscapes along the Maysville Road

26. Fairview toward Mason County

251 26 Fairview toward Mason County Mile 0.0 Fairview marks the point where the Maysville Road traverses the center of Fleming County’s western “panhandle,” which stretches from Blue Licks Battlefield State Resort Park to the south to the vicinity of Johnson Creek to the north. In 1947 the road at Fairview was bituminous packed macadam, a road surface of sufficient quality to be rated as “paved road” by the State Highway Department.1 The use of bituminous or asphaltic materials in road paving marks a transition in highway construction from basic broken-rock macadam-type road surfacing commonly used in the nineteenth century to the modern hard-surface asphalt or concrete road. Natural bitumen materials were first used in street construction in Paris, France, in 1854 but proved too expensive to have wider practical application. America’s first sheet-asphalt street was laid in front of the Newark, New Jersey, city hall in 1870, yet the material, especially in sheet or pavement form, remained expensive and had limited application outside central cities.2 As asphalt became more readily available, road builders used it in combination with sand and stone to produce several different road surfaces. Rock asphalt is limestone or sandstone that contains a small amount of naturally occurring asphalt. When broken or crushed, the stone can be laid into an “asphalt road.” Asphalt mastic used asphalt refined from bituminous rocks, which was melted and mixed with sand to make pavements. Asphaltic concrete was a mixture of broken stone bound together with asphaltic cement, a product that included a solvent to increase its plasticity and adhesiveness.3 It is likely that the 1947 road surface here was a transitional surface, a broken-stone macadam base covered with a thin layer of finely crushed-stone binder material that, in turn, was covered by an asphalt sheet. Just to the north, across the county boundary in Mason County, the 1947 road surface changed to water-bound macadam that had been surface-treated with a thin layer of asphalt, one of the most common road forms in the eastern United States during the early automobile era. Though the term macadam conjures images of the hand-broken stone roads built by turnpike contractors in the mid-nineteenth century, this road was probably made of machine-broken or machine-crushed stone laid on a carefully leveled and ditched surface to form a stout base. Large, steam-powered rollers compacted the stone into a crowned profile that sloped from the road’s centerline TTI 596 324 324 324 161 161 367 419 68 68 62 62 Mason County–North Fork Licking River Road Corridor FLEMING CO MASON CO FLEMING CO MASON CO Shannon Mayslick miles 0 1 1 /4 1 /2 3 /4 MC–NFLR road corridor Orphaned road Light/Medium duty road Maysville 68 O h i o R MASON CO FLEMING CO Map area Mays Lick Blue Licks Lee s Creek Fork F l a t Absalom C r e e k NORTH LICKING F O R K R I V E R Fairview toward Mason County  253 to the ditches on either side to assure rainwater drainage from the surface. The road surface was finished with a binder of stone screenings that varied in size from dust to three-quarter-inch diameter. The screenings were spread on the packed broken-stone surface and rolled in with the steamroller. A common street sprinkler then watered the road surface, washing the fine stone dust and chips into any remaining voids between the larger stones. When dried, the finished road surface became a nearly solid pavement, largely impervious to water, and performing somewhat like concrete. A thin slurry of asphalt atop the stone surface would reduce dust and help hold the screenings in place against traffic and heavy rain.4 The water-bound macadam road, while relatively economical to build and maintain, could not withstand modern truck traffic and was eventually superseded by heavy asphalt and reinforced-concrete pavement construction. When the term gravel was used in Kentucky road construction, it usually referred to broken stone, limestone primarily. North of the Ohio River and across the glaciated Midwest and New England, gravel refers to a mixture of small stones, largely of metamorphic origins, from pea-size or smaller to half-dollar-size or slightly larger. The continental glacial advances across the northern states during the Pleistocene era— the Wisconsin (10,000 b...